Repeating for emphasis. I can never understand why a company willing to pay well in to the six figures for an employee won't budge if that prospect wants an office instead of a cube. The difference costs the company maybe $3k/year more. If I told you it'd take $3k more to get me to a signature, I'd always get it. But an office? Four windows and a door? Oh no, you can't have that.

Except where I'm working now. They get it.

Hear hear! The best musicians spend huge amounts of personal time playing. It's what they enjoy. The best programmers are the same way. And the sysadmin who doesn't run a home network generally doesn't do a good job running your network either.

"I am a fast learner with or without formal training, and I have a burning desire to learn more.."

It's near the top of my resume and in 20 years it has opened the door everywhere I'd actually want to work.

That is so true. When the contact is for some job half way across the country at half my salary, more often than not it's Indian name. Folks calling about local work that has at least a remote chance of being interesting seem to have much more varied backgrounds.

The U.S. intentionally makes multiple-citizenship a hassle. It wasn't that long ago that they made multiple citizenship nearly impossible.

You've implicitly said why you don't want your kids to be exclusively U.S. citizens. Why sign them up for extra hassle?

If the rules are the cause of failure (pretty much a given inside government) then you change them. It's the definition of leadership.

As for the email rules, they're impossible. Literally impossible. No politics on government computers. No governance on personal computers. But nearly all activity at the secretary level is politics. And none if it is far from governance.

You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. I applaud Hillary for recognizing that up front and making the sensible choice to use an email system that works well.

If the computer is shocking you, it's time to throw it away. If voltage is leaking to the chassis there's a serious fault somewhere that creates a risk of fire and a risk of bodily harm. You'll know this is the case because it will keep on shocking you, not just once and done.

If you are shocking the computer, it's because you aren't grounded and are building up a static charge. Three things help with this:

1) Wear a grounding wrist strap when you work on the computer.
2) Avoid clothing that encourages static build up, e.g. wool.
3) Increase the relative humidity in the room with a humidifier. The TIA 942 data center standard recommends 40%-55%.

Picking a nit:

1. Installing a new CA certificate does not modify the network stack. Adding and removing CA certificates is an ordinary operation.

2. All root certificates are self-signed. If your certificate is signed by something else, it's not a root certificate.

This is a long con where the end result is going to be a reality TV show.

Firefox abandoned its roots. It started as a "light weight" version of netscape. It is now by far the most bloated application living on my PC.

Don't get discouraged. The telcos have a habit of outsmarting themselves.

When the FCC first mandated CLECs, the telcos bellyached about how unfair it was that a CLEC could wire up an office building cherry-picking the high-margin clients while the LEC was stuck serving all the low-margin customers it was required to serve by law. This could surely be fixed by requiring the originating carrier to pay the terminating carrier a cent a minute for the call. After all, if the LEC wasn't cherry-picking then it'd all balance out and nobody would pay anybody anything.

Thought themselves right clever. Then the Internet came along and ISPs bought phone lines that did nothing but terminate calls 24 hours a day. Some clever CLECs realized they could provide phone lines to ISPs for free and milk the phone company. Those cents per minute really add up.

Point is, when the rulemaking is done and the tariffs are filed, there will be opportunity. It's impossible to know where it'll be today, but it'll be there.

Until you actually -can- lease last mile L1 or L2 infrastructure at a sane rate there's little point considering the question.

If you're looking for some meat, read about DSL competition back at the turn of the century. To compete you realistically had to lease space in the telco's facility and then buy expensive SONET service for backhaul, also from the telco who was the only vendor in the telco's facility. And you had to be in every telco facility that served at least one of your customers which except for the smallest towns meant dozens or even more. Small ISP's could not directly compete.

Instead, middlemen like Covad stepped up and built an infrastructure. Small ISPs could buy lines through Covad that came back as virtual circuits on a frame relay or ATM circuit at a convenient location for the ISP.

Your products started at 2 to 3 times the cost of the telco's product, but you could build niche products (IP addresses, routing, etc.) that the telco couldn't or wouldn't replicate.

That article isn't slanted at all. Not at all. It goes on to complain that traitor Bradley Manning's wikipedia page wasn't promptly moved to reflect her (sic) new name. Because obviously Wikipedia should reference folks by their current names not the ones under which they gained sufficient notoriety to be referenced on Wikipedia in the first place.

Clearly the article presents a fair and balanced view of the arbcom's horrible terrible no good very bad decision.

I 'spose if the Sun is going to explode next year we should probably act faster but in general that's right: we shouldn't enact policy whose cost has a dozen zeros behind it until the science has been generating reliable predictions for decades.

Hear hear!