Commuting to NYC (Manhattan) is cheap. They have trains running to NJ, CT, and NY (north of the city); you can get monthly passes and it's pretty cheap, certainly much cheaper than gas + car maintenance + insurance. Of course, the trick is living near a train station, or having someone who can drive you to one. The stations have parking lots/garages, but these have reserved spaces and are quite pricey, so if you don't live close enough to walk/bike (and biking in this area isn't really safe, plus the weather sucks for part of the year), and you don't have someone who can drive you, that's going to change the equation greatly. You can also take a bus to the train station, but that adds a lot of time usually because the two don't coordinate well. You can also take buses directly to Manhattan from many places, but these are slower than trains and much less comfortable.

The thing that really affects what you need for salary, commuting to NYC, is housing costs. While obviously not as astronomical as Manhattan, the areas around it are still very expensive, at least on par with Silicon Valley prices from what I've seen, at least if you're renting. On top of that, property taxes are the highest in the country. Expect to pay over $10k/year on a $400k house (which is a pretty modest house, maybe 1500sf). We have school superintendents in every municipality who all need to get $250k, and every little high school needs a brand-new football field with artificial turf, and cops and firefighters all need to be able to retire at 55 with a full pension, so that money's gotta come from somewhere.

I lived in a mid-70s house; the workmanship was crap. If you want quality workmanship, you need to get something pre-war.

- Moving is good. Staying the same place, career-wise, is generally considered to be bad.

That depends on who you talk to. Here in the Northeast, it seems to be a huge negative on your resume if you haven't stayed in your previous jobs for 5+ years.

Also, the quality of work seems to suck in contracting; you mainly just work at crappy defense contractors or large companies like Qualcomm doing BS busywork. The really interesting jobs all seem to be permanent-only. Again, this may be a regional thing.

AFAICT, the "equal pay for women" thing is basically a BS political issue; they already DO get equal pay. The reason women make 77 cents to every dollar a man earns (or whatever the ratio is, I think that's close to the latest soundbite) is because women take lower-paying jobs than men, on average. This article is about tech people making 6 figures; how many female software developers have you met? A few perhaps, but they're a tiny minority. How many male schoolteachers have you met? While teaching is obviously important to society, K-12 teachers aren't paid 6 figures. Women can't expect equal pay for unequal jobs, and any laws to address this "problem" are going to be ineffectual since, just like any other discrimination, it's really hard to prove in court. Most people don't openly advertise their salaries, except for government employees (who have known pay grades).

No, it's not (unless you can prove they really were conspiring). Low-level managers aren't much different from engineers; they just parrot the orders from middle and upper management, and provide day-to-day guidance. They don't make strategic decisions. They frequently don't even get paid any more; they just hope to advance to middle management (or higher) where they eventually will get paid more. They're not responsible for making criminal decisions; they're just doing their jobs and hoping not to get terminated in this shitty economy.

The managers at or near the top are the ones who make decisions like this, or like the GM ignition-switch fiasco. They're the ones who need to go to prison. They get paid the most, and they make all the decisions, so they need to suffer when their deicisions result in loss of life or are otherwise grossly negligent.

The Tesla is not mind-numbingly depressing to drive, while the leaf is. The Tesla does not inspire people to laugh at you when you drive by, while the leaf does. Expanding the driving range for the leaf is a great start, now make a car that is enjoyable to drive and doesn't look like a child's toy.

Disney has done a horrible amount of damage to society, I think, with its ridiculous portrayals of relationships and courtship and what peoples' expectations should be.

I had some bad experiences in college too, with dating, since all I had as a guide was Hollywood movies and TV. (I was raised by a single mother who never dated.) I wised up pretty quickly and learned how not to be a creep, but it sure took a long time to actually get from there to having any successful relationships.

But their "JUST an OpenBSD implementation"s seem to be imminently portable to other platforms with minimal work. See OpenSSH as perhaps the shining example of this. If I were porting code to a new platform, I'd rather start with something from the OpenBSD guys than just about anyone else. That's why I donated to the project this morning.

Where did the parent advocate having the government monitor code check-ins or ensure software quality? All he advocated was having criminal penalties for insecure software, which actually sounds like a good idea to me, provided people are able to pass the blame to their bosses and thus avoid all liability (if you fear for your job because your boss ordered you to do something insecure, then your boss should go to jail, not you. If your boss was just passing orders from his boss, his boss should go to jail, not him.).

I'm sure there are all sorts of mitigating circumstances that will be cited, etc. but I've just never had the urge to harass female colleagues. Usually, I'm too busy doing work at work to even think about it.

Me neither, but I also would like to add that I haven't exactly had a lot of opportunities to harass female colleagues. For instance, where I'm currently employed, there's only two female "colleagues" I could harass if I wanted to. One is the office secretary (who isn't much to look at), who I almost never talk to, and the other is the janitor (who's even less to look at), who I say "hi" to when she empties my trash can.

I kinda wonder if some men in this profession, growing up with almost no women around in school and later in work, develop poor attitudes about women largely because there just aren't any around. When you spend your entire adult life almost completely isolated from the opposite sex, how are you supposed to develop good social skills for dealing with them? Yes, some men have female relatives, some might be social enough to actually date outside of work and have female friends or lovers, but this profession is rather infamous for having a lot of men who aren't very social.

You're forgetting Redbox. Plus, there's Amazon's own video-on-demand service.

There's nothing stupid about abandoning local video stores. What kind of moron would pay $5 to rent a movie, plus ridiculous late fees? With Netflix at $8/month for all-you-can-view online, or maybe double that for online + 1 DVD checkout, it's a no-brainer. Or you can go to Redbox.

Tell me, what motivating factors could grandma have for wanting to update the firmware in her router?