If you consider a CCIE a "cable guy", then you probably don't have a clue what a CCIE is.

We are talking about someone with a PhD here, which basically proves he can persevere. That is the most fundamental requirement of anyone who endeavors to obtain a CCIE.

The CCIE would guarantee years of job security at a very high wage. The PhD... not so much. I was just thinking he may actually want to pay off those student loans before age 65.

This is coming from someone who has been in IT for 20 years, very successfully, and has never taken any computer courses...

Get a freaking skill!!! The OP admits that the subject of the PhD is not applicable to really anything in the world. You might as well have spent 6 years of your life under a rock, because you are now the utmost expert at that tiny, inapplicable area.

Want cash and job security up the wahoo? Go pick up a CCNA book, and $500 of used Cisco gear on eBay. Get CCNA and a network admin job at a small, growing company who can't afford to pay you more than $50,000. Proceed to get your CCNP. Invest another $10,000 and two years and get CCIE. Go to "whatever the hell company you want" and make $120k+ and never worry about unemployment again.

How is this horse shit actually modded up?

If you want to know what is killing Deaf culture, look no further than everyone who can hear and refuses to make any accommodations for us Deaf. So we run in droves to get CI (I just got mine 6 weeks ago) so that we don't become isolated and unemployable!

The standard list of ways we "oppress" hearing people with our "special needs":

1. Captions are so annoying. Who cares if we can't understand movies/tv/youtube/netflix as long as YOU don't have to be annoyed
2. People that know I'm Deaf still call me on the phone. are... you... fucking... stupid?
3. People that know I'm Deaf will walk over to my desk and talk to me, in an office where everyone is on company IM server all day long. are... you... that... stupid?
4. I'm going to guess that 95% of americans know the phrase No Habla Ingles. Maybe 10% know the sign for Deaf
5. I talk fine, but if I answer someone verbally, they assume I can hear them speak even though I said I'm Deaf. is it really possible to be this stupid???

I take mild offense to the OP insinuating that Napster "fell". It didn't fall, it was torn down by the claws of the RIAA who didn't have the foresight to even recognize this would be the future of media distribution.

We do expressly forbid personal use. Of course we don't really care, but you have to say it.

I use zScaler Cloud for my work proxy, and I choose to have them decrypt all traffic using their CA cert that we have to install on all user laptops. This is critical because they are using heuristics to detect activity types (e.g. don't rely on a "list" of anonymizers, detect that anonymizing is being done and block it). Even if they are sitting at home, the proxy is decrypting all their activity. And the analytics are amazing.

The big difference is between this and the OP, though, is that my company owns these laptops. I display banners and let it be known that you have zero expectation of privacy. Hell, I use my personal iPad for personal browsing at work so as not to be tracked.

Ignorance indeed. Funny that people automatically assume that Creationism and Science cannot coexist.

I'm a Creationist, and I am also a published author in Quantum Physics. Go chew on that for a bit...

"Sabotage". Get a clue.

Seriously. I've got two words for Radio Shack:

Monoprice and Digikey.

I went in there to buy some lame battery (CR123 or whatever) and ended up buying like a 30 pack online for cheaper than their ONE battery. Same deal with cables, electrical components, etc.

Oh gee, you started selling Arduino? At the size of Radio Shack, why the fuck can't they get within every $10 of the price of the board online? FAIL...

Similar story, very different outcome.

Guy took a bunch of shit from my car, I found him, gave all his info to the cops, and he's serving an 8-year term. The cop seemed amazed at the amount of personal info I gave him on this guy... I'm like "dude, any 20-year unix hacker can be a scary fuck on the Interwebs"

First, I don't see why Ayn is expected to not create fantastical characters in a work of fiction. Nobody would read it if it were just a mirror image of society.

Next, the book was not meant to be just a story that entertains. She felt very strongly about certain ideals since she transitioned from Communism to Capitalism, and she writes at the very edge of the continuum. You read it, you analyze it, you adopt the ideals that make sense to you and reject those that don't. Not sure why this concept is so foreign nowadays. I don't share her atheism, but I certainly share her ideals on capitalism.

I found the book very entertaining and highly thought-provoking. It's the only book I have read since university where I have taken copious notes whilst reading it.

I completely agree. I'm in a SaaS startup for 5 years now. My boss can easily tell when I am not producing work, and I can easily tell when my subordinates are not producing work.

As for the 1 month thing, that's just silly. If you cannot tell within 1 month if someone is worth keeping, the problem is you.

I smell Gen-Y entitlement...

I do this also and have found it a very valuable thing. Also helps when updating the resume.

I just retired my office wireless (three WRT54GL units) and replaced with a pfSense firewall and three Aruba Instant 105's

For the pfSense, I used two Intel wired cards instead of the crappy onboards.

I couldn't be happier. granted, the Arubas are probably a bit pricey for a house (depends on who you are)

They are cheap, they support content recognition, are globally disperse, and they have good notification.

We wrote a simple page that does a DB query and returns "OK" if everything succeeds. Point SiteUptime to that sub-URL and monitor the content for "OK"