I didn't even realize that White House Down was supposed to be politically charged. With terrorists, you only have 2 flavors - foreign and domestic. This one is domestic - and they didn't really dwell on any political philosophy except the President = peace (yawn) and potentially nuking the Middle East = bad (duh).

The main problem with the movie is that a rerun of 24 usually had more dramatic tension. But the visuals were good and really, things blew up. What more do you want in a summer movie?

Many employers use web blocking software and a couple of the alternatives listed below are not accessible. I can adapt to just using my desktop at home and phone but browsing via Reader on breaks at work let me keep up with Hack a Day and other stupidly blocked sites. (Because the word hack upsets the net nanny.) And cloud services are blocked, too, so I can't sync to Dropbox or Box, either. Hopefully by the time the dust settles, there will be better alternatives but I'm not impressed with the choices at the moment.

I use My Yahoo as a newspaper replacement but their rss feeds are limited to 10 items. (I don't know if adding your own has that limitation.) Many of my Reader feeds push out that in a few hours. And there's no way to skim a weeks worth (or more) of info to get up to speed on a new subscription. No way to star or flag content to keep. This could be an opportunity for Yahoo to woo some of the GReader users if they offered a proper RSS reader embedded.

I would pay for iGoogle and Reader. Once they are gone, I may just quit using Gmail and let it go to spam. I already have a Hotmail/Outlook account from school (and it isn't all that bad - surprisingly) and a paid Yahoo account. If they are putting all their focus on G+, good luck with that. Until my 70 year old mother can/will use it, I'm stuck checking Facebook every day.

Second this sound advice!

I am an older tech support worker and agree that it would be hard to get past HR if I were applying today, even with experience. Even though I've worked as a programmer (mid-range/mainframe) and still do scripting, I always feel inadequate next to the kid who whips up a lifesaving script in a few minutes. So don't do it. Odds are you won't be happy. Luckily I like working with engineers just out of college (or even still in, as the case may be) and I do like keeping up with trends in IT. But I'm very aware that if I were suddenly unemployed, it would be really hard to get an interview, much less a job.

In certain industries, knowledge of the field can get you past the age-ist hiring managers but realistically, I'd go with the recommendations to build on what you know already. Even if you don't find a niche in industrial electrical work, is there any way you could do part-time electrical work or residential contracting? Maybe you could team up with someone younger to train and share the physical labor? An honest, knowledgeable electrical contractor is going to be more in demand than any entry level IT person.

The online documentation says that her unit has wifi and bluetooth optional. If they are available aftermarket as usb or dongles or whatever (not ordered with the unit), they might be better than the phone thing if you are using it at home. Can she use Google Voice with a bluetooth headset? Then use any cheap carrier with minimal fees for backup?

You don't say how many texts she would send in a month, which matters a lot. I have Pure Talk USA for my husband's cell phone, which rarely gets used - the base $10 a month plan - but the minutes roll over, which is great. You can get just the sim card from them. I personally am using the Walmart Straight Talk unlimited everything monthly and have had no problems. (I wanted access to data while out and about.) Both services use the AT&T network. So we spend under $60 for two plans - which is less than I used to pay on contract for just one.

For the last 5 years or so, you really had to work to buy a Nokia phone in the US. I have an N79, E72, N8 and an N900. I could sell them for close to what I paid for them even today. Well, except for the E72, which AT&T had, so there are a lot of them. I didn't mind Symbian too much but the lack of memory in the phone was short-sighted. OTOH, the battery life, the camera quality - they were ahead of their time for so long they took it for granted. Can't do that anymore in any industry.

However, the customer service was uniformly awful. Waiting for months or years as Nokia rolled out firmware updates? No thanks. That's why I look at the XDA-Dev forums for a supported phone when I need to buy a new one. (Last one was a Sony Xperia, now using a Samsung Captivate Glide, one of the few keyboards left.)

My Xperia Ray (which I love - try finding a small Android phone with decent camera otherwise) updated to ICS with no problems. But ICS broke the screenshot capability on the long power button press. Now it's nearly impossible to take a screenshot with the case on - you have to press 2 buttons simultaneously. This irritates me on a weekly basis.

Could it be that professional developers don't want to come home and program? Most people, male or female, want a change of pace after working all day. Not everyone can live and breathe software without a break. So, insulting professional developers is just kind of distracting because you actually made a good point and it reminded me of something I didn't say when I posted anonymously earlier.

Open Source projects are usually started by someone with a passionate interest in a problem, or maybe just an itch to scratch. Others joining the projects again have some kind of personal interest in it - either to get requested features implemented, share patches, or even evangelize if the software made that much of a difference to them. (The few times I might have been tempted to try my hand at OSS, the software was written in a different language and not one I wanted to learn. Doesn't mean I don't love my OSS, though.)

So, you're right in that these are 2 different questions. Women in IT/STEM in general isn't a useful place to start when discussing OSS participation. Maybe women don't participate in OSS as much because they don't use it as much as men do, who knows?

What might be better to study is how to motivate people to actually finish or maintain code that they throw out in Sourceforge or Google Code.

De-lurking because I couldn't resist this one... and because I am employed by one of the companies mentioned above. Contrary to what AC says, most avionics companies have had some pretty major cuts following 9/11 so nobody can skate by on past accomplishments. Any engineers of the kind described above are now living on unemployment or pensions from early retirement.

FWIW, the code I see on a daily basis is highly modularized (who can afford to reinvent the wheel?) but even if it weren't, I wouldn't want to fly in an airplane that has OO code in it just for the sake of being OO. You want the software in those black boxes to be safe and rock solid.

If safety bores you, the flying public should thank you for moving on. Sheesh.