Well, the big disconnect also comes about because government leaders learned LONG ago that any time you offer to do something new, you start talking about tax increases to pay for it. People get to the point where they accept that's "just how it is", so the debate, each time, turns into one of asking if it's worth paying that much MORE out of your paychecks for whatever proposed improvement or benefit is on the table.

In *reality*, government sits on so many resources, we should probably be at the point where the right question to ask is one of redistribution of their existing budget.

As just one example, up here in the DC area right now, there's a big debate raging because the National Park Service wants to start charging a fee to use the C&O canal "towpath". Basically, this is a 70+ mile long stretch of land that runs along the side of the Potomac River that people use for biking, hiking, jogging, etc. Nobody's even really sure how the heck they'd enforce charging a fee to use it -- but the park services people are all gung-ho to do it anyway. The claim is that with Federal budget cuts, they just don't have the funds to maintain the towpath without enacting fees.

But woah! Wait a minute here! If you look over at the Bureau of Land Management, those folks own a HUGE chunk of the entire West Coast of the U.S. right now, claiming it's land they need to care for and manage. How much of a budget do THEY have?! How about letting a little more of THAT land go back to nature, un-managed, and give that money saved to the National Park Service? That's a much more logical move, IMO, than expecting people to pay to bicycle or hike along a dirt path.

There is a radio controlled flight club for the DC area, which operates out of Gaithersburg (really not that far a drive from DC proper).

http://www.dc-rc.org/

The fact is, we have no need for building this tall. If the Arab world didn't have more money from oil than they know what to do with, they'd never spend the money on such a project in the first place.

Many of our current skyscrapers have problems with unoccupied rooms/floors, as it is. You can try to recoup money on tourism - but that only makes so much sense. The higher the building, the more you've got invested in heating and cooling, electricity, maintenance, etc. etc. -- just to get the same tourist dollars the "other guy" used to get with his tall building that USED to be the "tallest one" before you beat him.

Carbon fiber technology is worth pursuing, so sure - this has some engineering and scientific interest. But realistically, no ... We've got plenty of space on this planet for people without resorting to these measures.

I happen to be one of the people who admires many of Jobs' business decisions and ideas. But he was also known to "overshoot" reality at times, with expectations that went beyond what was reasonable.

I think he was desperately looking for solutions for a "post PC" world, where people would give up traditional computers, in exchange for a superior device. (After all, in the sci-fi "Star Trek" universe, nobody was carrying around a laptop computer, right? The computer was just built in to the environment so you could speak commands to it.)

I really like my iPad, especially since I started taking the train to and from work each day in a 1 hour long commute. It's the ideal device to read the news on, check email, waste time on Facebook, play a casual game or two on, etc. But it's really just a convenience item in the modern world. It's never been anything much more than a big version of Apple's smartphone, without the cellular voice call features.

The word "drone" itself conjures up all sorts of fear in the general public, so of course they're going to milk this situation for all it's worth.

Let's be realistic though... You could probably drive a small radio controlled car up to the front entrance of the White House too, with some payload like a bomb on it -- and that's been possible for long before the toy drones/helicopters were available on the mass market.

There's probably not anything you can or should do about this stuff beyond the systems they've got in place. (A bunch of human beings paid to try to protect the president and the grounds.) New FAA restrictions? That will mean nothing to someone bent on mis-using a drone to cause destruction at the White House!

Let's face it. The White House has been FULL of drones for a long time!

I've used a *lot* of different mice out there, and I keep settling on Logitech's MX series as one of my favorites.
I used to have their MX1000 laser mouse, and then the MX Revolution .... and now the Performance Mouse MX.

My only complaint about these mice is that the black rubber "grippy" areas on the sides where you rest your fingers wears off after a while in spots, making the mouse look pretty ragged/beat-up at that point, even if it's still functional otherwise.

I also preferred the MX Revolution's charging cradle to the current design where you just plug a micro-USB cable into the front of the mouse to recharge it. (I find the micro USB cable to be a bit difficult to get inserted just right, and I have a feeling it will be one of the things that breaks first on this mouse.)

What I'd really like to see, though, is a bluetooth version of one of these. If you're a Mac user (especially of a notebook like the Air which doesn't have a lot of ports), a bluetooth mouse makes much more sense than wasting a USB port with a wireless receiver dongle. But there's VERY little available in the way of quality bluetooth mice. HP makes a couple of Z series BT mice, but the more expensive ($60 or so) one that tries to look like an Apple product (complete with gesture support on the flat top surface) fails to impress. Other than it's promised long battery life, it was nothing but negatives when I tried it. Gesture support is jerky and overly sensitive, unlike Apple's own Magic Mouse -- and the buttons start acting up where they stick when pressed or fail to register when pressed. The cheaper black Z series BT mouse from HP actually feels more comfortable in my hand and works better as a standard mouse (no fancy gesture support or slim line buttons that don't work right). BUT, drop it on the floor even once and expect it to blow up into pieces all over the floor.

I think you're looking at this from the wrong angle, myself.

Someone deciding to make some extra money on the side driving for Uber doesn't need a "commercial license" from the DMV! What they probably DO need is a special car insurance policy or rider that covers the situation.

Just like if I upgrade my car with a fancy, multi-thousand dollar stereo system -- I can't expect my auto insurance to cover its replacement cost if it's stolen. They're going to say, "Sorry buddy. We insured you based on the standard equipment we know comes with the particular make and model of vehicle you insured with us." They WILL however, let me pay extra to itemize what's in it and get that covered as additional coverage.

The auto insurance company who starts marketing a reasonably priced insurance rider specifically for folks doing "ride sharing" will find it very profitable and popular.

Wow! Really?!

That's just one more argument against living in California then.

IMO, the *real* reason for commercial licenses was the concept that commercial drivers are driving much larger vehicles that require special training/skills to operate safely on the roadways. (Your average licensed driver can't just hop into an 18-wheeler and operate it. They'd likely not even be able to figure out the transmission with as many gear as it has!) And the ability to properly back one up into a loading dock isn't something that comes without training either.

A vehicle anyone buys at a regular car dealership and uses as a "daily driver" for things like commuting or trips to the grocery store should NOT require a commercial license.

The states ALL want tax revenue, but there are ways to go about it that make relative degrees of common sense to citizens. When they start making unreasonable, illogical demands, it's time to get that changed or consider moving to a more reasonable place.

As someone who was born and raised in St. Louis, MO -- I can tell you it really depends. In the last decade or so, my opinion is that it's time to get out of St. Louis if you're trying to make a living there doing I.T.

It has several "big players" who hire for tech positions and pay well, but the problem is what's available outside of those options. Enterprise Leasing, for example, has their corporate HQ in St. Louis and employs a lot of I.T. workers. (Some of my best friends worked for them for years.) You've also got options like Boeing, Energizer or the A.B. brewery.

But take a closer look and you can see a trend of Boeing scaling things back over the years in St. Louis. (Ever since they bought out McDonnell Douglas, they've been shrinking the size of that campus.) A.B. hasn't been the same ever since they sold out to InBev, either. And the once well regarded A.G. Edwards Company is now Wells Fargo Advisors, a company not exactly known for being a "great place to work" in I.T.

Don't forget the auto makers who used to have plants in St. Louis and are now gone.

The cost of living is reasonable (especially housing prices), but crime is pretty bad these days (just look at the insanity ever since the Ferugson riots), and the once amazing riverfront area is pretty much gone too.

These days, you find the occasional good I.T. position open in STL working for the Federal Reserve or maybe a contract with the Post Office. As in all cities, I.T. jobs are available with the school districts and hospitals too -- but you won't hear a whole lot of stories of high job satisfaction with many of those. I guess there are some openings at Emerson Corp. too, but that puts your workplace right in the middle of where all the Ferguson fallout lies.

After living there for around 40 years, I had enough ... saw the writing on the wall, and got out. Working in the DC area now, I was initially unhappy with the cost of living making my salary increase an actual pay cut. But you learn how to live cheaper out here, in trade for a longer commute - and eventually settle into something that's effective. (Or don't, and accept the higher cost of living as an acceptable trade for being in the heart of the DC night life, etc.) By using public transportation, I literally went from putting over 1,000 miles per month on my vehicle to only putting 2,000 on it in 5 months. That requires a change in habits but makes it cheaper to live here than it first seemed.

Malware Bytes? Yes.... Great product that really is pretty effective (especially if you can boot into "safe mode" in Windows first) at cleaning up malware.

But Windows Defender? Absolutely not. It got ranked absolute worst at detecting malware in a head to head test last year vs. something like 40 other products on the market! And just from personal experience trying to keep PCs clean in an office setting with a lot of mobile workers? It didn't even trigger on some heavily infected machines.

Personally, we use eSet NOD32, and while I won't claim it's "best" - I just feel it seems to do a reasonably good job without dragging down system performance. It's not free but not that expensive either.

I could be wrong, but I thought I once read that the original Lucas script for Episode 4 (or was it Empire Strikes Back?) was pretty much ghost-written and revamped by someone else, in order to make for a better movie?

In any case, I've always thought George did an amazing job imagining all of the ships, creatures and planets that appear in the movies -- but that doesn't necessarily make him a great script writer. Disney, IMO, would be wise to keep him as more of a consultant on any Star Wars movie project. Take his input on the bigger picture stuff, but don't let him worry about the exact lines each character speaks.

The IRS suffering a temporary shutdown would be cause for celebration.

I'm not talking about libertarian utopias here at all. Rather, I'm saying a failure of that magnitude (a government incapable of even keeping its agency going which collects its FUNDS) would be a huge wake-up call that the current system is broken.

Discussions that might come from such a shutdown would include, "Maybe it's about time we simplify the tax code, so all of this infrastructure isn't necessary to collect taxes?"

But that's a good point too. I.T. seems to be in a strange place when it comes to where it fits in a budget for some companies. Some people want to call I.T. an expense (necessary cost of operations), while others view it as a "profit center" and constantly expect justifications from I.T. management as to how much money it saved the company in a given quarter.

The last couple places I worked insisted on an accounting scheme where I.T. had its hours charged back to cost centers of other divisions of the company, based on how much time we assisted those people. I guess it's fine, if it makes the number crunchers happy with the results? But it never made a lot of logical sense to me since so much of I.T. involved system or network-wide changes or upgrades affecting everybody. And you got into office politics with such things as wanting an office to upgrade to a faster internet connection. Their manager might say no because he didn't want the extra cost billed to his division/department. But not upgrading meant slower VPN access for any remote workers connecting to the router in that office and performance lag for anyone on the WAN who needed to load/save content from servers at his location. So his refusal to upgrade affected others negatively who he wasn't even directly responsible for.

One thing I've really noticed in the last decade or so is the massive amount of consolidation, mergers, acquisitions, etc.
Every time I turn around, it seems like some company is being bought out by another one. And with so many opting to recycle old company brand names, it's difficult to tell sometimes just who really makes a product or provides a service.

(We've all heard of Polaroid, RCA and Westinghouse -- but they're not the companies they used to be.)

Quite often when these mergers or acquisitions happen, the company originating the process really only wants to add the other business's patent portfolio, or its proprietary product -- not its labor pool. The employees typically come along for the ride, initially though -- with some kind of (often underhanded) plan to eliminate them over time. Perhaps it would be better for everyone involved if they were up front and honest about such plans, except the truth is? If they were, people would start throwing fits and revolting against these buyouts and mergers instead of viewing them as "just part of doing business".

(EG. If you want to own a technology that a competitor created, it's easy to pay off the head of the company who owns the rights to it and let them "resign". Everyone assumes it's because that individual is simply angry that he/she lost so much control over the original business plan and is going to walk away on principle. In reality? He/she just sold out and threw their staff under the bus.)

In the end though -- hey, it's the modern way business is done. They're worried about maximum efficiency, which means having a labor pool that costs the company the minimum in training costs, salaries, etc. while doing as much useful work as possible. Loyalty is pretty much out the window because keeping people around, just because they've "been with us a long time" turns out to be less efficient than hiring fresh people who are motivated to "prove themselves".