I'll take those rednecks over some of the "civilized" people.

If you're a user of an open source project, how do you tell if the technical debt is increasing or decreasing?

North Carolina claims "first in flight", and has that phrase on the license plates, and South Carolina does not. Please don't confuse North Carolina with South Carolina.

Talk to the participants beforehand. Ask about their pain points. Put up a survey with a few ideas for a presentation, then do the one with the most votes. See what the audience wants to hear. Show them stuff that will make their jobs easier.

Use a common license manager like FlexNet (FlexLM) from Macrovision. Another alternative is Sentinel. Most of the big commercial packages use it. You can license the software per computer, per seat, concurrent or time-limited. It's your choice.

You overlooked a third option: The company sees that you aren't over-worked enough and want to work more, so they just make you work more hours per week.

I wonder how long before people start investing in awnings, nets, kites, balloons and other devices that can hide what's happening on the ground?

I don't like mark-to-market. Even these billionaires need income. I would guess that their income comes from dividends. Let's just tax the dividends at the normal income tax rate. The different dividend tax rate is a large part of why billionaires pay less in taxes.

Does this mean that there is no cost to infringing on an open source license? If that's true, then there is no penalty to breaking an OSS license. This worries me.

Yes, but some or all of those are already being monitored by the government. I wonder if this is a ploy to get more government access to Twitter's database.

What can I do with my own laptop and wifi router to make my own situation better?

On my CV, I list things that I have less than 2 years experience, but I put skill level qualifiers like "Novice" ,"Intermediate", and "Expert"

Yes, I have seen versions numbers for platforms on CV's. I have them on my CV and I look for them in applicant CV's. I'm a Linux admin who manages two student interns (Jr. Admins). I do the screening of my interns as well as helping to screen full-time co-workers. When reading CV's, I give a higher weight to those with version numbers. I'm not too worried about minor numbers (i.e. RHEL5.4 vs. RHEL5). I'm not too worried about older versions. Version numbers act as a shibboleth to weed out the posers from those who have actually worked with a technology.

When interviewing a potential Linux admin, I always ask what version and flavour of Linux that they have experience with. If they can't give something credible, then I don't rate them as having that skill.