I have an encrypted drive on my laptop which has the same basic problem you describe. For this situation there is an easy workaround, just pop a live CD (I use a Puppy Linux live CD) into the drive and set the bios to boot from CD. It boots a little slower, but there is no login issue.

Another option is to put a live CD image on a USB stick and bury the stick somewhere in the laptop innards, then have it boot from that (essentially a small second HD hack, since most laptops don't have extra HD bays).

Mercurial's SVN re-education page does a good job of describing the advantages.

This is the same problem I've had with Linux also. For some reason the devs find it impossible to create a standard subsystem and then stick with it. There is this incessant drive to refactor the APIs, thereby breaking large numbers of what would otherwise be working apps. Ubuntu is notorious for shoehorning in some half-baked bleeding-edge code as part of their standard release (PulseAudio being a recent example).

Personally I got tired of "upgrading" an Ubuntu release only to have it left in a half-broken state. A couple years ago I switched to Arch linux using their rolling-release model, and that seems to have helped quite a bit. Another possible workaround I've used in the past is to build up a set of apps I need by static compiling them and dumping them in a /usr/local tree (that prevents a certain degree of "upgrade" breakage), but it's a hassle to maintain.

I do agree with other commenters that games represent a large part of the justification of keeping a Windows box, and I can't wait for the day Steam finally makes it to Linux.

Embedded systems places mainly.

This is good advice. Demonstrating competence in embedded designs is an easy way for an EE to get into CS. Microcontroller kits are abundant and cheap and can be made into demo projects for interviews. All kinds of areas too - RTOS, robotics, web-connected stand alone devices (can do things like connecting it to a cellphone app to make things even more impressive).

People get passed over for jobs they are qualified for just because hr departments throw out all the applicants who don't have a degree, even in an unrelated field. It makes it so that these people do essentially 'have to' go to college to get jobs, even though they'll get all the training they need on the job.

Aside from a manufacturing or manual labor type of job I don't know what job you are thinking of that you would get "all the training they need on the job". I can think of a lot of fields that I wouldn't want a DIY or on-the-job trained person to be working in - structural engineer, dentist, surgeon, even lawyer.

In our field (EE chip design) we don't hire people that need on-the-job training - the people we hire will eventually end up as our coworkers, not our trainees. When we interview people we always look for degrees (generally MS or better, but occasionally BS). If someone doesn't know the field (coming from an unrelated background), and can't even show a BS degree, then they aren't going to cut it as a coworker because they won't know what the hell they are doing.

A degree is more than a rubber stamped piece of paper, it shows an ability to apply yourself to a given task for a length of time and actually accomplish that task. It's a pretty low bar really, especially for a BS degree, since the whole education is guided and taught to you by someone else (advanced degrees generally involve a thesis, which shows some ability to guide oneself and accomplish a project).

Personally (as a person working on a PhD in science) I don't think a lot of people need to be going to college. I grew up in a car town, and a lot of my friends knew they were going to be doing manufacturing, but they went to college anyway.

This I don't get, unless they got useless degrees, or are simply incapable of moving to a place with better job opportunities. The town I grew up in didn't even have a college, and I was always dismayed at the absolute apathy and disinterest in the people there to improve their lives. Finally getting to a university I found to be a refreshing experience, as most people there are motivated to do something better with their lives (as contrasted with say the aforementioned town's high school where most people couldn't wait to leave and get back to their minimum wage jobs, apparently oblivious to the fact that their career path would go absolutely nowhere).

It also occurs to me the people who wrote TFA need to hook up with business leaders who claim that they need more H1Bs because there are not enough qualified applicants from here in the US.

The Activision I remember is the one that released MW2:Mercs in an unplayable bug-ridden state in order to meet the holiday release. Indeed, the game was so bad at initial release you could not complete the single-player storyline. It only took them a year to finally finish patching the game.

I was so annoyed by that experience I did not purchase another Activision game for many years afterward (I do have games that fall under their purview now simply because of their corporate acquisitions - but seeing their name stamped on a box makes me think twice on game purchases even today).

I don't know why they didn't label the arrow keys on the 50G. I went through college on a 48SX, so I knew about some of the arrow key functionality, but I think only veterans of the 48 know such things. Likewise they failed to ship a full manual with the thing - I didn't even know until a couple years ago that there existed an advanced user guide on the 50G (normal guide, advanced guide - also CAS documentation). There is a ridiculous amount of hidden capability in the 50G, but they don't ship manuals for it, so nobody knows about it. And for anyone who has the 50G dropping keys on them, set the KEYTIME, another great documentation failure by HP.

As far as the swap, I'm not certain if what you call true x-y swap exists on the 50G, but if it does exist in the catalog you can probably map a soft or hard key to it. I would have to check the manual on how to do that, but I have done it before. I had to map a soft key to get back the '->Q' function that was a hard key on my 48SX (left-shift EVAL - converts a fractional number to a ratio of two integers, ex. .9225 ->Q gives 369/400).

I've used x48 on Solaris and HPUX on many occasions, however I've found it to be somewhat unstable on recent linux releases (I suspect it's the GUI code, not the emulator itself). In any event I've found a more portable solution (aside from my actual HP50G). Emu48 skinned and running the roms for a HP50G makes for a very nice Win32 desktop calc (all the necessary bits are here, here, here, and refer to this first).

Simply placed on a USB drive the Emu48 install becomes portable. With a PortableApps install, and with a small bit of config editing on the PA side, the Emu48 directory can be dropped into the PortableApps directory and will integrate into the PA menu. Configured like that, you get portable, nice startup/shutdown, and it retains its memory between machines.

What is the benefit of "using the same phone at home"?

Well for starters your average cell these days is many times better than your average cordless. It has your current contact list built in, you only need to charge and maintain one device, and your home/cell number is the same.

I have a coworker who does almost exactly what I described when he is at home (he also picked up on the magicjack news and was thinking of getting it when it becomes available). He has a prepaid cell which he uses as normal away from home. At home he uses skype for outgoing calls with the caller-ID set to his cell number (so return calls will go to the cell). The skype setup he has is a computer + USB handset, so the magicjack would eliminate the need for that.

If you have a cell phone, then you typically have a contract. If you have the resources for a broadband connection, then you have the resources for a mobile phone contract.

This is where the error is. It USED to be the case that everyone with a cell was under contract, but since the introduction of pay-as-you-go (prepaid) cell phones, you can buy minutes and hold them forever. This device allows you to save those minutes for when you are away from the home, while otherwise using the same phone at home for little cost.

Yeah the unions made lives so much better that now the residents of Detroit get to live in post-apocalyptic heaven. The UAW is like a freaking cancerous leech on society.