First off median household income is $51,939. Household income is a better measure of what a household can afford in housing. On top of that, someone with median income is not buying a median price home. Since a large portion of the lower income population rents, the median home buyer makes more than median income.

Will they be blocking Tor for the cheaper service? It's cheaper to opt out with a VPN service than pay AT&T. And how will they capture my search terms on the cheap plan if I use https://www.google.com/ ? Do they have some agreement with Google to pass off search terms from an encrypted session?

It seems like something that would be easy to block, for those that know and care, and those that neither know, nor care, won't care.

There can be more than one villian ;-)

Obviously in the USA, as your wording is distinctly American, distinguishing India (which is Asian) from Asian. Also, have you heard them as vocal in the plight of the punished and downtrodden males? Usually such wording is not given by a minority, as they know how offensive it is to themselves and others. The most self-entitled group in the US is the white males, especially those born in the top 50%.

Are you seriously arguing that lawyers are humans with feelings as regards their profession? You're too funny :-) Based on far more references than I could ever cite they long ago sacrificed their humanity in the name of war on terror / drugs / civil forfeiture / etc. The computers might at least get some of the obvious cases right like the Bill of Rights if we're being more serious or this case that the humans missed if we're looking for obvious mistakes: http://theweek.com/speedreads/...

The middle class going away doesn't mean the American Dream is gone. The American Dream will actually become even better for the few who reach it. But the number who reach it will be less of course.

The 1% isn't the only group making gains in today's economy. The top 5-10% contains the VPs, directors, doctors, lawyers, senior engineers, etc. who are making out like bandits (although admittedly not as well as the 1%). The upper middle class barely existed 30 years ago, which is why you don't find many 50 year old McMansions. The deterioration of the middle class has gone both ways, with most people falling to the working class and a select few moving into the upper middle class.

Even if/when most jobs are gone, the top 20% who are still worth employing will be doing very well.

Extradition and "border" matters when you commit a crime while somewhere, then flee. They don't apply when you rob someone in Brazil, then flee to Madagascar, so Ireland tries to extradite you to have you face charges for speeding. What he's accused of isn't a crime where he is. And he didn't do the crime in the US. So there is no activation of the US extradition treaties. This should be recognized in court, and the case dismissed. But John Key is more interested in getting on the Security Council than following NZ or international law, so Kim is being prosecuted past the fullest extent of the law.

His name is Kim Dotcom (legally). If you feel the need to put his surname it quotes, you should at least be able to get it right. It makes you look like an idiot when you both put his name in quotes, and don't give it correctly. When you are that ignorant of the names of the people involved, it only makes you look like the douche bag.

The war was fought decades ago, a winner was declared and for some reason the Unix/Linux neckbeards still sit around railing about how they'll take that hill someday..

The desktop is increasingly unimportant, or mostly an adjunct to where people do their primary computing which is portables. Give up on the desktop and accept that you have a niche, hold onto that niche and nurture it instead of constantly beating your heads against the desktop, it's not going to happen. Even Apple kind of half-asses their desktops now and focuses on their phones, and they have a development budget bigger than some countries.

Although you're correct about traps vs. interrupts, the reason I use the term "trap" is because the word "interrupt" is a much broader term. Most of the time, when we talk about interrupts, we're talking about some hardware device telling the CPU that it needs attention, rather than an application doing so. Thus, if you ask what an interrupt is, you'll probably get a very different answer from most programmers.

I'd expect anybody who has taken a basic OS course to have at least heard of traps and understand the basic concept at a high level—an application executes an instruction whose purpose is to tell the operating system to jump into the kernel and do something special. Anything beyond that is gravy. But if they stare at you looking confused, offer, "or you might also know it as an interrupt instruction".

As for JE... yes, you could ostensibly write code without ever checking to see if two values are equal, but it would likely involve very contrived, inefficient code (e.g. subtract the value, branch if zero, add it back). And if you don't recognize that jump or branch instructions typically start with J or B, and that EQ likely means "equal", chances are very good that you've never written a single line of assembly language for any major CPU architecture—not ARM, not MIPS, not i386/x86-64, not PPC, not even 6502.

But it is. Amazing what you can to with a pair of diagonal cutters on a power cord. Or even a pin through it. The latter makes for some nasty entertainment. Sparks fly, circuit breakers blow. And it only takes a few seconds to do.

We're in the "war" age. The last 120 years have seen huge advances in the ability to wage war. That is what has driven world economies, and continues to do so. Look where the internet came from - DARPA. Integrated and Large-scale integrated circuits came about from military research. Space travel came from ICBMs, which came after the A4 (aka the V2) proved it was practical.

Without that stimulus, we would not have advanced anywhere near as fast.

It also serves to provide employment for a lot of people.

Yes, there are exceptions to every rule. In fact, the ones I suggested are full of exceptions. They're not really meant to exclude people, but rather to counter the systemic bias that I've seen from lots of companies who tend to mostly hire new college grads from bigger schools, and then wonder why so many of them can't code their way out of a paper bag. :-)

And of course, as in any other field, the longer you've been out in the workforce, the less effect your college experience has on your abilities, or at least one would hope that this is the case. Otherwise, that person isn't learning, and will eventually hit a roadblock where he or she can't progress to a new job because nobody is hiring people to do what that person has always done.

There will be work in the service sector for a very long time. As the gap between the upper middle class and working class grows, it will become more common for people to afford maids, nannies, lawn care guys, etc. My household income is in the upper 5% and I currently have a maid who comes in every other week and someone who takes care of my yard. Still don't have enough for a nanny (while still saving for retirement that is), but that is what I currently have planned for my next $20k bump in salary. 20 years from now someone in my current economic bracket will probably be able to easily afford a maid to come to his house a few times a day and take care of laundry, dishes, cooking, etc. instead of just cleaning floors and bathrooms a couple times a month.

If I had my guess the middle class as we know it today will not be here 30-40 years from now. It will be replaced by an increasingly large upper middle class and a much larger working class. The working class will survive on a combination of governmental redistribution of wealth and abundant resources from ever increasing worker productivity.