I'll shop locally, and I'll shop online. Depends on what for. I like to go to bookstores and buy books. I try and stick to the independents when I do so - but I also buy some of my more obscure books, new releases, or e-books online from Amazon. The same holds true for most other purchases. Mostly I use Amazon (or a similar vendor) to buy things that I would otherwise get at a big box retailer. That works pretty well.

The exception is clothing - there isn't much I get from brick & mortar retailers in general. I buy my sportcoats from Jos. A Bank in a nearby strip mall, otherwise I get shirts mainly from LL Bean online and everything else I use for clothes I pretty much order from Duluth Trading. They both have stores, but since I live in Massachusetts rather than Minnesota or Maine, it's a pain to go to them (yes, LL Bean has other stores, but they don't have nearly as much selection).

I'm lucky that we have a downtown with a very good and diverse shopping district, and we can get a lot of the things we want from local merchants at reasonable prices. Yes, I can get better prices online much of the time, but I still like to hand over money for my goods when feasible.

I was a frequent poster, submitter, and reader back in the day. I used the journals before moving to these newfangled things called blogs. I still post, though not that often anymore - no longer being a desk jockey the spare time isn't around to participate like it used to be. But even with all the changes, Slashdot is still the place I go for my all-in-one-place scan of tech news, still the most interesting place to go and get perspective on the story, and still one of the most informative communities out there.

I hope I'm still reading the site daily in 15 more years.

Our son is going into 5th grade. He's attending a public school that has a 190-day school year with an extended 8-3 day, and they go to school until late July, only getting 5-6 weeks of summer vacation. In compensation for the long July in school, they get a vacation week in late October and another one in the beginning of June that other kids don't get.

For the most part, he loves it. And when he and his schoolmates get back to school, there seems to be less time getting kids back up to speed than there is at the conventional schools here in town. Overall results trend better here as well, and we've got a lot of overall issues in the system here outside of our school. Within reason, I think an extended day/extended year model is ideal for most learning situations, but not necessarily universal. I don't think school should be fully year-round, there should be some sort of summer break. But the 2+ month summer vacation is a relic of this country's agricultural roots, and it certainly could go away without causing a problem.

Glad I got 4 packages of them through Woot last year, then. My 10-year old son is smart enough to not eat them, and also capable of making cool things and shapes with them. I'm pretty sure they won't be fatal.

A lot of today's internal server support jobs will go away. But there will still be network infrastructure to support (somebody has to manage the switches, firewalls, and access points), there's still going to be desktop support (PEBKAC errors, hardware, and malware), and there will likely be at least some local resources that need to be managed. We won't have a lot of people managing Exchange servers or Active Directory anymore. Or actually we still will - they'll just be working for the cloud providers instead of the client company.

Besides that, this will open up opportunities for outsource support firms (disclaimer: I own a small one). Companies will still need specialized support resources on occasion, just likely not enough to employ a lot of them as staff. They will get that expertise as-needed to supplement what they have in-house.

Like it or not, carriers bring no value-add to the table. All they do now is provide pipes. They were able to charge outrageous fees for text messaging before because there were pretty much no alternatives for instant connections - despite the actual cost of SMS being virtually nil.

Now that we have BBM, iMessage, Facebook Messenger, etc., there's a host of alternatives that work just fine and only use minuscule squirts of data to connect. The future is integrated apps like Apple's Messages - it uses SMS, but switches to IMessage if it's available. And eventually it (and the like) will connect via whatever the first/best message alternative it has - only falling back to SMS if all else fails.

Dumb pipes it is.

And nothing of value was lost.

Then again, I'm not one who sees any particular use to bitcoin other than interesting math.

1 pair brown dress shoes, 1 pair black dress shoes. I don't use those much. Work boots. LL Bean boots. Running shoes. Regular sneakers. 2 pairs Keen shoes - one of which is a sandal. That's pretty much the standard stuff.

Besides that, though, a pair of dark green Crocs, a couple of old US-made pairs of Chucks, and a few specialty shoes for occasional sports use - my old rugby cleats for softball, a pair of bike shoes, bowling shoes, my old motorcycle boots, and a pair of Merrells that I use as slippers nowadays. Might be some other stuff in the closet I haven't gotten around to throwing out. I don't count the boots that attach to my fishing waders.

Geez. Now I feel like Imelda freaking Marcos.

I'm not saying everything's OK (and unlike what one of the ACs thinks, I'm not a Republican either - I'm actually a Democrat and even an elected office holder - though a minor one). But the nature of manufacturing has changed drastically in the last few decades. Manufacturing used to be a place of great added value. Building things like homes, cars, industrial equipment, aircraft, and even many consumer electronics items was a place for skilled labor and the value of a domestic workforce was high.

Nowadays, those jobs building iPhones, PCs, and flat screen TVs are highly automated and the only real labor intensive part of the job is fitting things in place and tightening screws. Even though they're retail jobs (and not great), there's several thousand people working at the stores - and those are far better jobs than the Foxconn workers have. And overall Apple has about 50,000 employees.

It's not so much that it would add a tremendous extra price to iPhones to make them here - it's that the supply chain and people aren't available here to do it, even if they wanted to. You try and find a factory complex in the US that can draw a quarter-million employees with thousands of engineers to supervise them. We just don't have enough people for that.

We can still build things that provide good jobs and employ plenty of people. We just can't do that sort of manufacturing here. But it's not a huge loss - we can do better.

Apple makes gobs of money by owning the high-value part of the product - the design, engineering, and final sales. There's virtually no profit in actually manufacturing the product. So as a result, companies have emerged like Foxconn (the biggest) that specialize in the manufacturing process. And they make money by doing a _lot_ of manufacturing, for a lot of different vendors. They set up shop in mainland China for easy access to workers - and for most of those workers the crappy pay they get is better than they could earn elsewhere.

And because of that, a whole supply chain rose around those companies to keep them freshly supplied with components. There's an entire infrastructure in and around China specialized in low-cost electronics manufacturing. That's not the only place Foxconn makes stuff (they have factories in Eastern Europe, Brazil, and India - all places where they can get relatively cheap access to an educated workforce). And also, Foxconn doesn't just make products for Apple - nor are they Apple's only manufacturing vendor.

Also worth noting again is that the manufacturing is a low-margin business. Based on their 2010 numbers, they had about $59 billion in sales. Sounds like a lot, but less than 2/3 of Apple's numbers alone. Again, in profit they did $2.2 billion - but that's a low percentage of sales, and that's after supporting nearly a million employees.

The only other thing I'd mention here is that there are companies manufacturing products in higher-wage places, and there are products better-suited to manufacturing here in the US. Precision electronics, low-volume, high-price items, and goods where the manufacturing cost is lower than the shipping costs from overseas would be - these are all good candidates for onshore manufacturing. iPhones, PCs, gaming consoles - those are gone, and they're not coming back. But the jobs they create are crappy ones anyways. And they'll always be chasing the lowest cost somewhere in the world.

I think Winer's story extends out to a myriad of professions (mainly technical ones, but plenty of others). If an observer doesn't understand the work you do, they think it can't be too hard. Most folks overestimate their own abilities. I run a small IT company - we've got a few employees of varying skill sets but all pretty good at solving network issues. But I still regularly see clients complain about how long a task takes, or how a five-minute fix couldn't have been that hard. Car repairmen still get bitched at by people about a $200 bill to replace a tiny part.

There are good programmers, there are great programmers, and there are assuredly mediocre programmers. But that's what they do - and they are guaranteed to know more about it than virtually any layperson. Just because your car runs does not mean you know how to build a car. If your lawyer gets you off the hook for a crime you didn't commit, does that mean you could be a lawyer?

It takes very little skill to stock shelves in a grocery store. But a person who is doing that for a living definitely is better at that task than we are. More people need to understand this basic fact.

Of course, then people would be convinced that they were better at understanding facts.

I think as a practical matter, any spying done on devices outside of RIM would have to be at the cellular carrier level - and that wouldn't require the handset makers to cooperate at all. Blackberries all get routed through RIM's servers, but pretty much every other smartphone is just an Internet node.

In the same vein, I'd think that if it's on wifi there wouldn't be anything special that a backdoor would get. Maybe I'm just not paranoid enough.

The old "digital delivery service" WAM!NET used to stick a rubber chicken in their non-sealed (but still not supposed to be opened normally) box. In the box was a small 19" rack with the router, communications gear (an SGI box), and a rubber chicken.

They didn't mind you seeing it, it was a little joke on their part. Sometimes their techs would tell me to go in the box.

They sold turnkey communications services to ad agencies, print shops, and media companies for file transfer. Back in the days when a T-1 was a couple of thousand per month. They installed their box and all the gear, stuck it on your network, created user accounts, and hooked it up to the T-1 they'd order. And then you'd be billed by the transfer.

They also gave out hundreds of pairs of purple Chuck Taylors at the Seybold conference in Boston where they debuted. Still have mine.

Having a reverse DNS is a good practice, and anyone with a mail server should be doing it. That said, a lot of small businesses don't have reverse DNS set up, don't know what you mean when you tell them to do it, or have ISPs that are a pain to deal with. I'd mark up the spam score on a message without reverse DNS on the sending server (and I do on my own server) but I wouldn't block it entirely unless it sets off a lot more flags than just that one.

I use Kerio Connect on my server - I add 2 points for lack of reverse DNS. 3.5 points drops you into the junk folder, 5 blocks you completely. Doing that I get pretty much no false blocks, a false positive every few days, and about 3-5 spams that make it to the junk folder per day. I block a few hundred.