What exactly is it that I'm supposed to do?

Sure, I use SSL when it is available, I use AdBlock et al., I stay off of the social networking sites, but c'mon: What exactly is it that I'm supposed to do? If the government wants to snoop on me then it will. There's really nothing I can do about it.

"Encrypt all your email!" Mmhmm. Yeah, okay, sure. That will work out great when I want to send a message to my technologically normal friends and family. Web-based encrypted mail is a farce anyway - you're still relying on a Java applet, or some JavaScript, and you're trusting that it isn't leaking your keystrokes.

"Use SSL!" Great idea. Let's all use SSL. Except the NSA has the resources, reportedly, to break TLS / SSL. So... Back to zero once more.

"Use Tor!" Sure. Okay. Aside from the fact that it is slow, there have been plenty of articles here about how it's possible to track individual users on Tor - using the resources of a university computer lab. What do you think the government can do?

Basically, we're boned. These technologies are great against your neighbor next door or the 1337x0r h4x0r in the next country, but when it comes to the resources at the government's disposal, there's really very little you can do on the Internet, if anything at all, that can be kept private.

You say that the IMF and ECB gave loans to Greece at rates that are not sustainable.

I say that Greece accepted loans offered to them at rates that are not sustainable - and they should have known better.

I'm not rooting for the whip master. I'm rooting for being responsible and reaping the consequences of failing to be responsible.

I'm also rooting for this example of extreme, heavy handed socialism to fail in a spectacular fashion so that it can be used as a warning to my country, which is also surviving on massive deficit spending. It's bad. It shouldn't be done. Do you want to collapse like Greece? No? Okay, then stop, set up a real budget (not the "we balanced the budget because we borrowed money" bullshit), and be responsible.

And it would make sense for them to do it, too. The Republicans always promote themselves as the "small government party that wants to get government out of your life," so the legalization of marijuana and backing of non-traditional marriage should fall right in line with that.

So, you know, put up or shut up. Do they believe in the freedom to live one's life as one wishes, or do they not?

So with that information in hand, if one were to be conspiratorial about it (don your tin foil hats people), one might worry that the political left might want to encourage poor economic policy and dependence on the government in order to capture the vote for a long time to come.

No, no, no, settle down, geeze, I'm not saying that there is some great grand conspiracy, but I have no doubt that there are in fact some people who think that way.

The media did a great job of smearing Romney, and he himself didn't do a great job of handling it. I'm not surprised that some districts had zero votes for Romney, and I'm not surprised that he lost. The guy was too passive to stand a chance against the very aggressive Obama campaign.

What should raise eyebrows, however, are the voting districts that had more votes than registered voters.

I would rather consider someone's ability to be president by looking at their experience, accomplishments, policy, and vision for the future.

People who are swayed by a "Travelocity Gnome" smear campaign probably shouldn't be voting, and people who advocate such a thing come off as children.

A second vote for MobaXTerm. I moved to it from Putty. It has tabs and the X11 stuff built in, don't have to configure a thing - it just works. Love it.

Away from my mother, because the courts mandated she never be in contact with me again for life, and I'm happy about it.

"knowing the business" or "being the best in what you do" would save one's derriere

Except that it won't, except in very special circumstances.

Let's be honest here: Most IT jobs - being a sysadmin, writing software, setting up a network - are not complicated. Most systems don't need much other than some some packages and configuration handled by something like Puppet. Most software doesn't do anything remarkable - it just shuffles data from point A to point B and displays a few things to an end user. Etc., etc.

A vast majority of IT jobs only require mediocre skill and knowledge. Most H1-B folks I know have rarely been mediocre, but they ARE cheap and management doesn't know the difference anyway. All they know is eventually their widget does the new X they've been asking for. So what if the code is a terrible mess and deployment is a gigantic pain? The management doesn't see or care.

Knowing the business? That's what project managers and other management-y types are for (or so they think). You and I know that a software engineer who is well versed in a certain business will design better systems, for example, but I've not once seen a manager that believes this way.

Management sees IT staff as nearly a commodity with people easily interchangeable. They're not entirely wrong - not entirely - but they think they're not wrong at all.

Remember: It isn't what YOU think that is important when a company is doing the hiring. What is important is what THEY think and how cheap they can get you and how much they can work you before you burn out.

Yeah, it's pretty amazing. It reminds me of so many "Web 3.0 Hipster Startups" that bastardize a word and make some kind of vague hand-wavey promise by using a buzzowrd or two and adding "in the cloud".

Ugh. The modern tech industry makes me want to puke. Maybe I'm getting too old for this...

Remove steps 2 and 3 and you're getting close to reality!

Can we also get rid of the fucking obnoxious TLDs? I learned that .today is a valid TLD. It's bullshit. There's so many TLDs that ICANN should just throw in the towel and say "Okay people, register whatever the hell you want." Either that or go back to a small set of TLDs that actually mean something as God intended.