I'll accept removal of my land line when the seas freeze over!

1. Cell phones don't work in our house (aluminum siding == Faraday Cage).
2. We would have to pay by the minute for every call we get, including spam calls.
3. Cell phones need a good battery to work - low battery == unable to call 911 for emergencies.

I can count on one hand the number of times in my life (66 years) when I couldn't make a phone call with a normal land line. I can count on at least 3 hands the number of times I couldn't make a call in the past week or two on my cell phone (thanks AT&T)...

So, if these boneheads at the providing phone comapnys do the following, I may change my position.

1. Guarantee universal cell access EVERYWHERE! (Right...)
2. Don't charge time for incoming calls, EVER.
3. Provide a backup emergency power supply (portable) so we can use our phones for emergency calls when the phone battery is dead.
4. Guarantee that #1 is available 24x365 with a SLA of 6+ sigma (99.9999+) percent of the time.

Until then, screw those money grubbing b'tards!

Just to be sure, don't forget to check your statement terminators (such as a semi-colon). Getting one of those wrong sent a previous probe into the sun... :-(

"Throw your storage devices into a black hole and preserve your information forever." No backups necessary? So, how do you retrieve that file you lost that says you are the inheritor of a serious fortune? :-)

We know what BS means. MS == More of the Same. PhD == More of the Same, just Piled Higher and Deeper! GA Tech is an accredited (and good) university. They won't let you into a Masters program without a BA or BS of some sore, and that means from an accredited institution. I would suggest that you do what my daughter is doing, and take as many courses (night or correspondance courses if necessary) from your local state college as you can (or can afford) until you get your BA/BS degree. Then, you will have your "credentials", value notwithstanding. Me, I am a non-degreed engineer, and a full member of the IEEE because of experience and recommendations from colleagues who have PhD's in the CS field (and have been university professors), and in one case is the current President of the IEEE-USA, Doctor Gary Blank. I have pretty much always been able to get a job that I applied for, but 30 years of experience, publications, and patents to my name have helped cross that divide. So, you can join the IEEE as an Associate Member (BS not needed - just adequate experience), get some recommendations from colleagues who are members and have serious credentials, and you also can become a full member. Since the IEEE ONLY accepts for full membership those with at least a BS, or experience and recommendations from members in good standing, this is a major leg up, so to speak.

Agree. They'll just put him in prison with a bunk mate that is a total psychopath and let him torture/murder Snowden - plausible deniability!

This is why such services that let users store data in their "cloud" should enable user-specific encryption keys - the user's public key encrypts the data, and ONLY the user's private key can decrypt it. Then if "authorities" want access to the data, they would have to ask each and every user for their key. Sure, as in I'm convinced I would do that!

Classic guerrilla theater! Kewl!

You might be lucky to get a position in a research institute and/or university, but without at least a masters degree that will be very difficult. My advice? Apply for a graduate program in your chosen field. With a doctorate, or at the least a masters degree, your chances are much higher to achieve your goals, though success is never guaranteed! :-) Good luck!

If you have old copies time-stamped by the operating system that pre-date the versions of the usurper, then have your attorney threaten them with theft of copyright. They can put your name back as originating author, and themselves as enhancers/updaters, but failure to do so should be accompanied by legal sanction. FWIW, always have a good attorney as a personal friend. I do, and it has served me well in such cases. I do his tech support pro-bono. He does my legal work pro-bono as well. A good quid-pro-quo situation.

I think that Oracle has just killed their golden goose! Gee, I wonder just how long before some one else addresses this issue? 10...9...8...

There are two faults here. One is yours in that you left your equipment connected to the network such that external access was allowed. The other is the supplier/vendor of the equipment who performed a modification of the equipment without your explicit approval. IMO, the supplier is fully responsible/liable for ALL of your costs and/or losses caused by this action on their part. I think an attorney would agree, unless there is a clause in your support or purchase/license agreements that allows for this, in which case, caveat emptor! As for a network connection timeout, this is not really feasible. However, proper configuration of your network firewalls (I assume you have such?) should mitigate this sort of unauthorized access. If the equipment doesn't need local network access for management/monitoring purposes, then simply disconnect it. If it does, then the firewall rules have to be adequate to block remote access without your permission and intervention.

If you read my message, this level of math is NOT required for most programming jobs (though formal logic is helpful). However, for a job as software engineer or computer scientist, then I stick with my opinions about that! Engineer/Scientist == math...

How neat is this!? :-) Physics at its best. My late father, an astro-geo-physicist (and director of the National Science Foundation), would have been delighted to see this work!

On a modern OS, such as Windows or Linux (preferable), you can use a virtual machine to run older DOS and such operating systems, passing the RS-232 ports of the host though to the virtual machine. Works great for me, and I use that for dealing with similar embedded systems all the time. FWIW, my preferred host OS is a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6, Scientific Linux (SL). CentOS is another such clone, and widely used in industry. I use SL because I personally know the maintainers of SL at Fermi National Laboratory in Illinois (my wife is a staff scientist/physicist there), so if I have an issue, I can contact them directly. My preferred virtual machine manager tool is currently VirtualBox (open source, from Oracle/Sun), but KVM will also work very well for this. That said, I prefer the GUI and configuration tools provided by VirtualBox.

If you want a degree in either software engineering or computer science, then the math is part of the (pardon the pun) equation! I do performance engineering (actual job title is Senior Systems Engineer) for a tier-one Fortune 50 company. Without the math (3rd order differential equations at the least), I could not do my job. No, I don't need that on a daily basis, but I DO need it from time to time, such as when developing predictive analytics algorithms to properly analyze system performance and time-to-failure (Kalman filters anyone?). FWIW, my previous job was developing risk analysis (real-time) software for the options trading industry - keeping the portfolios of traders and market makers properly balanced, using (primarily) the Black-Scholes risk algorithms - again, 3rd order differential equations. :-) So, want a position that is just something more than being a code monkey? Then math is your best friend!