Your post is very well written and thoughtful. Your introspection and social consciousness are strong indicators that you will find the right path.

I tend to believe that arrogance is a maturation stage in the development process of individuals with a pronounced strength. Like any other stage of development, some take longer than others to grow out of it. Those who persist the longest require an awfully exceptional strength, or far more likely, a growing ecosystem of isolation and denial.

I think humility, in a sense, distinguishes truly bright individuals from those who are merely clever. The acquisition of knowledge is useful, but true understanding requires comprehension of scope and context. Understanding the outer limits of a thing necessarily leads to humility: the expansive nature of most heady subjects is such that no individual can master the whole. Thus, the path to humility is a holistic one, where the path to arrogance requires a myopic view of the world.

My expectation is that an SSD used by a desktop computer is most likely to indicate issues when it is being heavily used. In that sense, an imaging process is a good event.

I have ordered approximately 500 Intel SSD's over the past 18 months (320 series and the 520 series primarily). To date, we have had exactly one fail to my knowledge. It was a 320 series 160 GB with known firmware issue. We have around 80 of that type and size, and the drive that failed did so on first image. We RMA'ed the drive and got a replacement.

I think Vint is correct technically: it certainly doesn't make sense to have tools or technologies become "rights". Yet, I think he is missing the substantive debate that has been ongoing for decades: are human rights solely "negative rights" (e.g. freedom from censorship, etc) or are they also "positive rights" (e.g. freedom to access education).

Now, the whole thing can be restated in terms of what freedom of speech really means and entails. Is it only freedom from oppression, or does it assert some positive rights as well? If it does, then it could follow that the right to free speech means the right to access information, which the internet certainly provides with equanimity.

The core problem for the US government, and whichever of the many branches that is taking responsibility for this or that part of the government's cyber infrastructure, is a lack of pervasive talent among the staff. In order to attract talented staff, it is essential to have a very transparent mission and vision for an organization. Is the US government really committed to securing the infrastructure?

I think your premise is incorrect: evaluating teachers is actually very difficult to do. I think that one way to sum up the challenge is that teacher's don't have a "boss" in the way of most other professions. Consider, for example, in higher ed where a faculty member may have something that amounts to a dotted line to an administrative dean. That dean may have 50 or more faculty under them, with no intervening layers of management. This is obviously untenable by design. One could go on and talk about the dynamics of student evals, department chairs, and student learning outcomes. For the sake of brevity, I'll just say that evaluating a profession that is as much an art as a science is rather difficult. I'm hopeful MET comes up with a good model.

I think it would be most helpful if you covered the entire field of computer science and the IT profession in general. As you said, a lot of kids have a distorted perception of what it may mean to be in the field, and it is important to flesh those things out a bit. Also, talk about your passion for what you do: perhaps the technical challenges you face, the joy of working with technology, etc. You could cover all these things in about 10 minutes, and open for another 10 for questions.

Incidentally, I did recently pay for a subscription to the Economist. It is a reasonable rate for quality, and I get both a print and digital version. The digital version is DRM-free, shall we say, and I can access it anywhere and in anyway that I want.

I have struggled mightily to resist paying the high rate and absurd model (pay more for access on the ipad? Seriously?) that the Times charges. I've tried to find other news sources that compare in depth, editorial insight, and quality independent reporting. Everything I've used to date has been half as good at best. I haven't caved yet, but I can see it coming on the horizon...

Any organization as large as the US military is going to make mistakes and have breaches. Hopefully, they are identifying breaches on a regular basis, because such events are likely frequent occurrences. What is most troubling about this is that this is a fairly significant breach of a critical strategic asset. After all, the greatest vulnerability of automated war machines is the ability of the enemy to compromise those machines. This sort of event is bound to happen, prevention isn't going to work every time, but how the military responds to events like this is an important indicator of overall capabilities.

At the end of the day, at some point, those in power need to recognize that IT security is both a pervasive issue throughout the organization and a critical military asset for future operations. We couldn't fight wars of the past with IT, but wars of the future will certainly have an IT component. A distinct branch of service is needed.

I always find that the best way to give advice is to repeat back what people say. You said: "This would make a massive difference to my life." Is that true? If so, then the decision is obvious. In that vein, I would interpret your loyalty question as an emotional one: you are attached to where you work, you have put a lot of time and effort into your work. You are very proud of what you have accomplished and what you know. Those are all good things, but going back to the massive difference in your life, it sounds like it is time to move on. That's a good thing.

I think this is a bit extreme.

Of all the resumes I read (incidentally probably several hundred over the last few months) it is about 1:3 when you see individuals who have spent their entire career around similar type fields. The majority of folks that I see have pretty varied experience. Now, if we look a couple of generations back, I think you are right: people who retired in the 1990s were more likely to stay in one field/company/industry for the whole of their lives. For the past 15 years, I've seen the opposite. In fact, what I see a lot is folks who jump from one type of job to another with such frequency that I tend to worry about how much actual experience has been accumulated.

Very sad to read this news. Michael was a visionary with a strong drive and passion. He wasn't always a fan of the latest technology, but digitizing books was always his top priority. I hope the project continues forward with renewed vigor, it is an incredibly important effort. Consider that without something like Project Gutenberg, digital libraries in the 21st century may not be free, open, and public.

A fair sentiment, but if $2 trillion dollars amounts to a quibble, how could the US debt situation overall be a "meltdown"? Sure, the US debt is a significant problem, as is the lack of economic growth. Both of those problems can and do co-exist. Similarly, our ratings agencies are past their prime and highly problematic. It is hard to deny that our ratings agencies provided the means to the 2008 collapse, and it would not be without irony that these same agencies are creating a problem anew.

The slashdot commenting system is an excellent example of a model towards this solution.

Users will always self-select to what interests them: we can't, and shouldn't, stop that. But taking the example of political news, what we can do with a reasoned comment system like /. is create some semblance of debate -- imperfect and problematic -- but far superior to what we currently see on news websites. The NY Times has done a decent job of this actually. Not a system as good as /., where users have a bit more investment in sticking around and not trolling since modding is done by the community and sticks with you, as opposed to the invisible hand system of the NY Times.