That has to be the dumbest thing I've read on here all morning. Seriously. Well, after the judge getting pissed that a juror wanted to be better informed and *gasp* used the interwebs to do so.

Someone please help me here, are people really so dumb? They're having to be taught how to use Facebook? Hell, an *un*trained monkey could use it! Oh, wait...these are probably people who proudly trumpet "I'm so not technical!" when faced with a modem that needs to be reset or "the internet is broken". How do these people drive cars or work ATM machines? How have they not died in household accidents? And these are *POLICE*!?

I am displeased with my need to respond to you, but here goes: Are you high? Really? Afraid to move back to the US? What kind of habits, lifestyle, and hobbies do you have that would put you in the path of police to get arrested and have all these horrible terrible things happen to you? What kind of social group do you move in to put yourself into the path of police to have your rights so horribly terribly violated? Good god, man, move to Russia if you really want to be afraid of sh*t. Or Belarus. Or Somalia. Or Greece. Or Columbia.

Especially since we're deliberately tanking our space program. We have to hope the rest of the world doesn't.

I dare you, I double dog dare you!

That is very true. Unless you are working for a highly visible technology company or high-profile corporation, most companies simply want you to keep the mess you've got going, no matter if it meas bandaids and soldering irons. Over the course of my 20 years career at four different companies, and from talking with colleagues, it is much the same story - the steering committee says, we initially invested hundreds of thousands of dollars, but we sure as hell aren't overhauling and starting over. The best boss I ever had did what I now refer to as guerrilla network administration. We had an aging infrastructure supporting hundreds of banks that we wanted to migrate off Wintel based systems, because they were end of lifing and we were sick of holding it together with bandaids and baling wire. It kept breaking, we sysadmins were sick of sitting through post-mortem meetings, and we were sick of upper management's refusal to acknowledge that it wasn't that the sysadmins sucked, it was that we didn't have a magic wand to keep the old nag on its feet to pull the plow. We repeatedly added a new plan into the budget to change out the system, and just as repeatedly got turned down because of cost. One day we had what was a near catastrophic hardware failure on one of those systems and we had to wait three days to get the parts on it because no one supported it any more. My boss told us to let it sit, and we did, chewing Tums the whole time because it's not like he was the one who would get fired over it. When upper management asked why we were still down after 24 hours, he took a PO in to them and said that when they signed off on new and functional systems, the problem would be fixed. When they balked, he asked them was the cost of a new system really so exorbitant compared to the manhours and effort it took to nurse a sick system well beyond its years. They signed, we had it changed out in two months, and we went another four years without so much as a hiccup. If he hadn't moved out of state I would have followed that man anywhere.

but this is just bullshit.

Very well reasoned and thought out, but here is an excellent example of when idealism collides with realism. You are very right - but how often in this world does the way we want it to be actually dovetail with how it is?

...that maybe, just maybe, Obama did this because when he finally got to the throne he learned the reasons this made it out there in the first place? That maybe, just maybe, there might be something, or some reason, that the mighty Slashdotters don't know? That when he sat down with everyone, he sat back and said "Oh, gee whiz, I hadn't realized that was why Bush & Co. did that. now I get it. Hmm. Maybe I shouldn't screw with it."

I didn't finish my degree and I have a high level, well paying IT job, but I've also been in the industry for 15 years. "Back in the day", when computers were more for geeks and hobbyists, it was much easier to learn and work and you were hired because you had the knowledge and the experience. Keeping up certifications and not letting my skills get rusty have kept me secure. Starting out fresh, though? Right now, most of us IT folk are a dime a dozen, and even if you have a degree in underwater basket weaving, it's going to win out over no degree.