You left out

Education. Assuming you have a 4 year degree plus a few classes post grad, or a masters, or PhD, you can get a good job teaching at a community college or similar. Great hours, decent pay, decent benefits, and you can pass on your years of industry experience to the new blood.

On the flip side, near instant gratification of "getting it to work" is good for education - keeps students interested and involved if they have quick successs.

Of course, once it is "just working" *then* you can start getting your students to think about edge cases, logical errrors, validating user input, etc.

No angst here about it - I make beer money every so often just by backing up a users actual data files they care about, browser profiles, mail client storage, wipe windows and reinstall, all updates, etc. and then put their data back. If you wanted to dedicate yourself to running a business with yourself and maybe a couple of part time PFY employees, you could make a very good living fixing these issues that are the result of what you consider poor design, and the stupid decisions users have made.

Similar is Big Blue Button (a google summer of code project) - whiteboard functionality, upload files and do the "john madden football commentator thing" to them, voice and cam sharing, ability to mute, etc. And can be set up to record meetings/conferences/etc. Tested it a while back stand-along on a linode that would be $10/mo now (it was a $20/mo plan then), and it was enough to support 15 users at once as long as they all weren't connected via the same wireless link to the LAN to get out to the World

"Here's 1.2 mil. We want you to tell us that it is possible that global warming is being caused by the sun"

A few months of well funded but blindly done research - ie, you know the answer to the question, what can we do to prove it? - and wallah! A paper. That is then submitted to a supposedly peer-reviewed journal, where of course no such review takes place (there have been several stories about that on /.).

So... are we shocked that the NRG Industry went shopping for the answer they wanted to hear? Are we shocked that a person who either needs to be top in their field or at least bringing in grants accepted a grant to do research? Are we shocked that a peer-reviewed journal is in fact not very often reviewd by the peers?

There needs to be a copyleft licence that restricts distribution on the same medium as non-free software, without it we will lose the IoT as well.

That point is addressed in the Free Software Definition and any license containing said clause would not be considered Free.

Some of the games for the Odyssey2 console -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnavox_Odyssey%C2%B2 - had some (extremely) limited programmability to them. I remember making my own maps on the pac man clone, and programming in their flavor of basic which was different from the basic I knew from the TRS-80 series and hand no real way to save your programs

I've never had an issue with a laptop that I've selected running Linux sine the later 2.2 kernels.

Either when buying new for work I've just bought the Dell business line and made sure the wireless was supported (just pick the Intel offering) and no issues.

For personal use I've either been given stuff - again, Dells for the most part - or bought cheap at a pawn shop. Before taking or buying, I just boot with a LiveCD and make sure it all works. Knoppix became available when? Do you remember the NT Hardware Compatability List? And how you could use the NT 4.0 CD to make 2 disks that would interrogate the hardware and tell you what was supported and what wasn't? I've seen poorly maintained lists of various hardware support, but they were never really useful for me. The LiveCD trick though *anyone* can do, and I'd recommend doing as a hardware function test on a used machine even if you are planning to run Windows on it.

But there are things that need to be communicated between separate entities, and while it may not be War Games incarnate, I can see how malicious disruption of some things like scheduled bank transfers, etc. could cause some panic and mayhem. Think of it as the newest layer of SIGINT

When I wrote the above, with tongue firmly in cheek, I was thinking more along the lines of the libc5 vs glibc issues we had 15 years ago, or dependencies on other old libraries

Or a *real* 3rd party choice... or pigs fly, pretty sure I know which of the two I'm more likely to see in my lifetime.

"Nope, sorry, we needed the disk space and bandwidth for $other_thing, it was deleted over a year ago. Developer machines and such were all replaced twice since the last checkout/build and we're not even sure we can get it to compile for $os anymore due to outdated libs and such.

Here's a coupon good for free shipping for any downloadable content for $suckiest_game_ever that you purchase in the next 42 minutes. Now go away."

And then the employee usually has to pay *more* direct from his/her check, both taxes and things like insurance

My 2 years of High School Latin ("At one time the land of Gaul was divided into 3 parts...") helped me with a medical terminology course simply because I was used to using non-english word roots, prefixes, and suffixes.

Not sure on the music, but IIRC about 25 years ago math majors at the University of Florida were exempt from the then-new language requirements.