This is correct. Essentially we have the equivalent of hydraulic despotism going on. These companies have created a choke point in a resource critical to 21st century life, and artificially limited it to make money off the populace.

I for one, welcome our Data Despot Overlords.

As a middle aged coder with many years of experience under his belt, I can make the following generalizations based on my experiences:

The first five years after college are the hardest, many people only want to hire coders with experience. If this is where you are now, stick to it if you love it and things will work out. If you are a 'casual coder' who got into the field because you think that its easy money, quit now.

As the years pass, I am finding no end of people who want to hire senior coders that can work 'full stack' and can manage projects and small teams independently. The money is quite good, and the work almost comes to find you. You have to be willing to work to keep up with tech and keep your skills sharp. The only managers that are making twice what I make are going to be c-level, so I if you want to jump ship to management for better money you had better be really good at it. I can promise you these people are not doing half the work I do though. Pay is usually equitable to responsibility, and they have their fair share of that.

I find this to be rather Ironic, as RR wasn't that great of a republican leader. If people are going to idolize a former conservative president, why aim low? Ike was the last great conservative. Reagan with a numb witted twit in comparison. If you look at the republican presidents since Ike, it has been a steady slide into the gutter.

Why bother? Do you really think that if the federal government wanted to scoop you up, they couldn't? The NSA has spent billions on their Internet Big Brother project, and has every message your IP address has sent or received cataloged. Don't delude yourself into thinking that posting AC does anything but keep your karma from being hammered when you are posting dickish comments.

Yes I can, actually. And they will. The question is, how many billions of people are going to die before this happens. Climate change is occurring, this is a hard fact. Most times in nature, change doesn't precipitate gradual linear effects, but rather a tipping point where things happen very rapidly. Sooner or later, we are going to cross an environmental tipping point, and you will see some sudden massive flooding or crop failure and a lot of people will die.Hopefully, not too many, but I suspect that it is going to be a lot. You might even see some wars of extermination fought over critical resources, such as potable water supplies.

The simple fact is, people cannot continue their current behavior. The way you live with a planetary population of 1 billion isn't the same when you have a planetary population of 10 billion. Either we will come to some global consensus about how we will fix this problem, or vast numbers of people will die and the population will be reduced to the point where change isn't needed. Nature will 'find its level' in any event.

I think you are on to something here....non-lethal and entertaining. Helps keeps the president safe and is good fun in the process.

Perhaps the moat is something to build inside the White-house fence, but then fill it with balls, and you have the national ball pit. We could mount automatic sentry turrets on the fence that are armed with Nerf ammo, with the idea that anyone trying to jump the fence will get hit with a barrage of Nerf darts as a warning.

On the flip side, which is more likely to follow orders to execute unarmed civilians who have been lined up along a wall: 1. A carefully programmed and thoroughly tested robot. 2. An 18 year old soldier, who has a conscious and is unwilling to murder people even if he has been ordered to. I am pretty sure that any killer robots need to be WAY better than humans before you even think about handing them a gun. You had better think out the repercussions of building such a machine before you even try.

It is interesting that they have to auction off bit coins as property; if it was considered currency, it would probably just get deposited to a federal bank account. It will be an interesting auction, as it should go for 20 million - expected reasonable exchange rate fluctuation - the 'This is going to cost me time and money to purchase' hassle cost.

Basically it will be a bunch of people playing chicken to see who will be willing to take the least profit margin for winning.

Ok sorry, you just lost all your credibility for this post, because you don't seem to have done any prerequisite reading on this subject before pushing the submit button, The people that are triggering this debate are being incredibly abusive and awful to women, simply because they dared to express an opinion online that doesn't align with the troll's opinion. If that doesn't meet the criteria for being a misogynist, what does? Do you have to start stabbing women before you are worthy of the title?

This discussion isn't about calling someone an asshole because they have an opinion that differs from you. The sort of behavior that is being discussed is really extreme, and is being displayed by a small but highly vocal minority of people. These are really toxic people, and not run of the mill jerks you find all over the place.

I would hope that a company with a half a billion dollars in spending money would have more sense than than to put down stakes in a region that might well be underwater in 20 years. Anyone moving TO south Florida at this point is mentally deficient, or a climate change denier who is really drinking the kool-aid.

So enough verbal foreplay already, you had me at 'Liberal Democrat'. Are you going post your address so I can mail you pictures of my cock and we can get this lemon party started, or you another one of these shy,'I'm not actually a closeted self-hating teabagger' types?

For the record I am a power top.

actually $8.43, but don't ask how I know this.

Sorry, could you repeat that? I nodded of during your tangential gibbering about political labeling. You should sell it to people with sleep disorders, you could make a killing.

I see someone who starts sentences with 'I see...' way too much. I see someone who wants to replace Mr Luther King Jr's speech writers. I see someone who claims to have a worldview that includes a plurality of political interests, and still attributes negative generalizations to 'Liberal Democrats'. In short, I see a pompous ass who loves the sound of his own voice.

I reiterate that you are a slobbering mouth breather, and now I append the honorific of 'grammar Nazi'. While you have diagrammed your sentence with such skill that freshman English teachers everywhere are getting erections, you overlook that fact that using correct grammar doesn't mean that you have expressed yourself in any clear or elegant fashion.

If your statement was written by someone who had the intellectual capacity of at least a third grader, it my be thus:

"I have the greatest understanding for anyone who wishes to excise from their lives, such views and the people possessing them."

Mind you, your poor sentence structure is the least of your faults. I would point out the generalizations you attribute to 'Liberal Democrats' sound wholly out of character for a people who are normally generalized as socially progressive, and sound more like the statements that might be made by an astroturfing tea party member who secretly follows KKK propaganda.

But by all means, continue attributing your bizarre interpretation of Affirmative action to others, it doesn't sound strange at all. Additional insulting boilerplate I couldn't be bothered with here.

I would support organizing to keep out most Indian programmers, because many of the Indian programmer I have meet are poorly trained coders that produce sub-standard code. But then I don't really care about nationality or race, I just am annoyed by bad coders. Construction unions have differing categories of skill sets that enables you to work on certain types of jobs. Such a system would be good for IT to keep idiots from building database solutions on top of Excell spreadsheets.