To geeks it sounds like an uninformed attack on linux's security, but I think what the author means to say is "these are not proprietary custom-designed systems, but are based on a common Earthly operating system and thus may have known vulnerabilities."

Yep. He didn't even just conveniently "forget" the password after he was fired, but apparently set this all up well in advance to intentionally disrupt their business. Dumb move.

I don't have a problem with this. The company may have been dumb to put this much power in one person's hands, and perhaps they got what they had coming in someone's eyes, but it doesn't excuse this behavior. If I had the only key to the server room and got fired but didn't turn in the key, I would expect retribution of some form, especially if the office had a steel door that took weeks to break down.

Yeah, because a small scientific orbiter in Martian orbit would be a great way to spy on people on Earth.

"And there is indeed an exemption for certain government employees (I just know of Congress and its staff having a specific exemption)."

Congress does not have an Obamacare waiver. In fact, Congressmen and their staffs are now *required* to purchase health insurance from the new health care exchanges and have lost their existing government health plans. This is a bizarre misconception I hear all the time from the right, so I'm guessing it's coming from talk radio but I have no idea. Yes, the government is subsizing part of their coverage just as most other employers do, but I will repeat: Congress is REQUIRED to purchase health care provided by the ACA.

What the hell kind of phone is still shipping with 2.3? *Maybe* a very, very low-end prepaid Android phone?

High unemployment? What part of the country? Folks have to be willing to go where the jobs are. I moved to the DC area after grad school and don't know a single unemployed, moderately-qualified EE. Despite all the sequester madness we're still seeing older employees leave faster than we can replace them.

What part of the world? Was it more of a "EE = computer programming" degree? It just depends on the school. So many of the folks I know who graduated recently with legit EE's from good schools in the Southeastern US are working for power companies, for GE, Siemens, or some of them for the large semiconductor companies like TI/National. It was the rare exception that went into software development because that's not what we were taught as EE's. Many of them had multiple offers on the table, which leads me to believe that there is a "quality-gap" between the EE's churned out from most schools versus schools that have solid reputations and long-term co-op programs (like a Georgia Tech, for example).

Ha... are you saying AvGas is not taxed? The stuff is $6/gal if you're lucky. You can buy it for your old car if you really want to, but you're paying significant taxes to help support the aviation system in the process.

Sure they were. People may not have been using floppies to backup their hard drives anymore, but in 1998 a floppy was absolutely the standard way to transfer and store small files. It was totally normal still to type up a school paper and save it only to "your floppy" and put it in a stack of other floppies, and it was the only way to transfer a file to someone and know they'd be able to access it. Plenty of people didn't have internet, and nobody had CD-R's yet. Even USB 1 was fast enough to get the job done with the (then 16MB-ish) thumb drives that were about to become ubiquitous because they were certainly faster than floppies.

At least the airlines have to advertise the full cost of a ticket (minus luggage which is legitimately an optional expense). If I go to United.com and their ad or search engine says I can fly to SF for $292 then it's going to be $292, with a base fare of maybe $240 plus fees and taxes. The phone bills are so much more frustrating because the advertised rate might be $39/mo but then you have no clue what will be added on top of that, and then they can add even more down the road.

It's not a shot at Apple but he means having a dedicated "guest" machine also implies that it wasn't sanitized between guests, so while you're creating a machine whose security you don't care about, you're also exposing the next guest to an unknown and perhaps compromised state.

I'm red/green colorblind and cannot see the red laser pointers at all unless I'm looking at the exact spot where the beam is. I can't follow it around the screen at all. The green ones, on the other hand, I can see just fine. I suspect I'm not the only one who much prefers green for this reason.

It's reasonable to assume that a year ago they simply didn't have retina displays in the 7.9" size with sufficient yields and low enough prices yet. Are you suggesting that the better alternative was to wait a year and then release the mini? Why is an upgraded apple model always treated as though they're ripping off customers by forcing them to upgrade? Yes, many "fanboys" do, but that's their choice. I don't hear anybody complaining that Dell released a new PC with a 3.6GHz processor, so now I have to upgrade last year's model and Dell should have just waited until this year to sell computers....

Outside of a community of techies, I'll bet they're absolutely right that there's no demand for it. I have Verizon FiOS right now, and pay $75 for basic TV and 25Mbps internet. I could upgrade to 50Mbps for maybe $10 a month more, but I just don't see why. I do stream a lot of Netflix, rent TV shows from iTunes, and watch MLB.tv during the summer. I've even been known to DL the occasional multi-GB torrent. I'm sure that puts me in the top 10% of bandwidth users in the USA, if not the top 1%. The extra $10/mo would not be an issue. But... why? I just don't see that it would be useful or even noticeable.

I get the whole "640k should be enough for anyone" argument here, but I don't see it coming imminently. What REALISTIC application is there for Gigabit internet for the average consumer that would drive a telco to install it at the present?