Well, the going rates for software engineers in Monmouth Junction, NJ are a lot higher than this:

ORION SYSTEMS INTEGRATORS, INC PROGRAMMER ANALYST
$60,000
2011-05-09

No, they mean bisected.

That's a procedure by which you do a binary search to find which patch caused a problem.

Programming is HARD! Let's go shopping!

In my new house, ADSL was the only option, despite it being in St Louis a couple miles from my old house which had UVerse's top tier. Fiber-to-the-neighborhood apparently hasn't made it to this neighborhood.

How convenient, then, that telcos got about $3300 per person in subsidies.

You should read the book, not just the article above. Competition only works when there are enough competitors. Otherwise monopolies, duopolies, and cartels can form where the companies split up territories and agree not to compete.

David Cay Johnston gives examples from water companies, electric companies, railroads, trash hauling, and telecom where privatization results in price increases massively outstripping inflation.

Seems to be very dependent on the font renderer. It looks great on OS X, but it definitely looks worse on Windows XP in Eclipse. (On my XP, the E and the digits are different heights. On OS X, they are the same height.)

Hopefully some day my company will upgrade us.

Expensive hardware has been dead for a while. That's why Apple had such disappointing preorders of the new iPhone and has been lagging behind Samsung in tablet sell-through.

Or, maybe not.

Well, behaving within the law means the guy turned off his broadband completely. Needing to defend your home broadband against members of your family is crazy.

The Creative Commons License that it was under gives you the right to do exactly that. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

If, as you say, the teachers are not correlated with student results, we'd might as well have cheaper teachers and get the same results.

I've gone paperless, so I have tax returns, medical info, SSNs, etc on my laptop. Full Disk Encryption means I don't have to worry about it.

With FDE, you have to decrypt it every time you use the computer, so you're not going to forget the password. If you're worried about that, put the password on a piece of paper in a safe deposit box or some other type of storage at home.

FWIW, I ran Linux full-time from 1994 through 2008. What finally did it for me was power management and the hassle it took to get laptops to work well under Linux. Linux worked well if you picked up a 1-2 year old laptop, because by then you could find support for most of the hardware, but you were in for a world of hurt if you wanted anything new.

Anecdotally, I know a bunch of people who switched to Mac for the same reason. Get a MacBook, and you had a laptop that could suspend and resume reliably... And you had your shell underneath.

TCP/IP isn't really following the OSI layer model, as convenient as that model is for discussion purposes.

If you want to understand how assymetric speeds slow down TCP/IP, here's a paper: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.22.5293

Verizon did it when they were trying to roll out FiOS, but now Verizon has stopped moving into new areas. AT&T has also stopped expanding Uverse into new areas. Instead, they're focusing on wireless where they can charge much more for less data.