CCIE is worth it if you have a passion for routers and networking. The rest (including the other Cisco certs) are trash.

Your career is stalled because you're not interested in programming and don't have an easy knack for management. You've reached the pinnacle of general systems administration and no certifications will change that. There will be more raises as you refine your expertise but you're no longer on a fast growth curve.

If I'm wrong, go get your MBA or MSCS and your career will un-stall.

Felon = committed a felony, distinctly worse than "several prior misdemeanor convictions". Did you? If not, you probably shouldn't describe yourself as a felon.

What were the crimes? If it's something to do with dishonesty (e.g. theft) then yeah, you can pretty much kiss a career in IT goodbye. It would be incredibly irresponsible to grant someone with a record of criminal dishonestly unsupervised access to valuable, private data. And what jobs in IT don't require unsupervised access to valuable, private data?

If it's something else (temper, drugs) then you just have to persist. Try the retail end of IT (work at a computer or electronics store) and maintain a spotless record. Give it a couple years and then use the good reference to work your way back up.

"student in his twenties" is by far the most common time for schizophrenia and a number of other mental illnesses to first manifest. If you notice a rapid and unexpected change in your cognitive abilities in that time frame, visiting with a doctor is just good sense.

And by the way, you seem a little paranoid about doctors. ;)

If your attention span is suffering that dramatically, there might be something medical going on.

Here you go, this is the ticket. At 4 it's all about the fantasy play. Buy her some computer games that indulge the fantasy -- dress the character, animate the character, etc. Things that match the fantasy but also conceptually prepare the player for more technical endeavors.

She'll either be interested or she won't. If she's not interested, you can't force it. If she is, maybe the play segues into something more technical and maybe it doesn't.

You can set the stage but get used to the idea that your child will write her own script. You did when you were the child.

Hawking should stick to what he actually knows.

There's no reason to fear a smart machine. What you should fear is an autonomous but stupid machine. Something with the power to do harm but without the free will to choose not to follow its instructions.

Besides, humans are the great adapters. AI won't replace us; we'll become it.

Wear leveling is only part of the picture. Whenever the SSD erases a block (for wear leveling OR because one sector in the block has been rewritten) it empties any sectors in that block which have been trimmed. The next write to an empty sector requires no erase and copy, thus it's far faster.

Without trim, a visible sector, once used, is never again empty. This means that every write requires a block copy and erase.

I haven't heard of any SSD remapping sectors as opposed to remapping full blocks. Not saying it's impossible, just that I don't think it's generally done. In principle you could journal sectors to a non-user visible area and then do your copy/erase activity when the drive is reasonably idle. But the description of the Sandforce controllers I read suggests it doesn't have the necessary hardware for that.

Seriously? I'd love to hear how you imagine that works.

Without TRIM, the SSD eventually considers all user-visible sectors to be in use. As a result, a sector is never just empty ready to be written. Even with reserved space, it still has to copy the entire much larger erase block in order to insert one sector.

Now I understand why Sony is on the verge of bankruptcy. Late to the party with underwhelming products.

Seems to me he considered the "tradition" option and labeled it "option 1: grow crappy crops that don't work out." Your disagreement is noted but you shouldn't accuse him of failing to consider your point of view.

What makes you think such a system is problematic? Does it hold any confidential information? What harm would come to either you or them if your password was breached? They did tell you not to use a password you use anywhere else, right?

Security has to be right-sized to the circumstance. In the system you describe, the point is to keep out casual intrusion, not close the vault doors. It's frankly dubious that they require any login at all.

Puerto Rico will become a state any time a majority of its citizens want to. Just like Hawaii and Alaska did.

So instead of 3,950,000 slaves gradually reducing to 0 over the course of 60ish years, actual history saw 620,000 dead, entire cities in ruins, and a century of violent hatred that has left most slaves' great great grandchildren still living in poverty as a semi-permanent underclass. All of it overseen by an out of control federal government bloated and twisted beyond recognition.

That was SO much better because, you know, freedom.

The lost opportunities were staggering. We were planning to buy Cuba from Spain for $130m around the time the war broke out. Couldn't afford it after. They eventually had an independence war instead. How different might the 20th century have been were Cuba the 51st state.

Actually, "acquiring more" slaves from Africa became illegal in the U.S. in 1808 via the "Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves." That act was passed by both northern and southern congressman, not even two full decades after ratifcation of the Constitution. We started on the gentle path to the end of slavery more than three decades before the civil war.

Suppose, just for a moment, that the abolitionist movement of the 1850's had been led by pragmatists instead of idealists. Imagine an alternate history where they demanded, not the immediate abolishment of slavery but a "born free" act where any child born in the U.S. was a free citizen regardless of parentage.

Gradual change. No immediate threat to the southern economy. No pressing need for secession. Yes, the last vestiges of slavery would have lasted into the first two decades of the 20th century but there might have been no destructive war. And no vicious hatred in the south persisting across generations and taken out on the only victims available.

Without the racism born of southern civil war hatred for the north, black participation in the world wars might have been seen as a good thing rather than a bad one, leaving large numbers of blacks college educated under the G.I. Bill afterward. Which could well have led to civil rights a decade early and both more gently and more completely.

And Abe Lincoln wouldn't have needed to reinterpret the Constitution to permit the vastly increased federal and executive power we so often decry in this very forum.

The idealists of the 1850s took a trend that was growing inevitable and instead of letting it play out backed their opponents into a corner, yielding an immediate, grisly, and needless war.

And yes, I despise H1B. As you say, it's an indentured labor program. There should be no work in the U.S. without the opportunity for citizenship and never, never a case where an employer holds the key to an individual's ability to remain in the country. I'm in favor of permitting talented technicians to immigrate. Even those with Indian degrees. ;-) But the H1B program does it in a way that's unethical.

For a few U.S. southern slave owners, the solution was to earn enough off the slaves that they could afford to free them in their wills. Were they wrong? Would the slaves have been better off owned by someone with no intention of freeing them as the otherwise owner held up his nose and refused to participate? Would the slaves have been better off in Africa, dead of one savagery or another?

Idealism leads to conflict and eventually war and death. Productive change happens when moral pragmatists get to work.