1) Managers with some degree of technical knowledge are almost always better for tech workers than managers that don't really have any technical knowledge.
2) One of the very best managers I ever worked for was a woman. The two worst managers I ever had were women. Women tech managers will either be fantastic or horrible beyond belief. The bad ones were orders of magnitude worse than the worst male managers I've ever had.
3) When a bunch of co-workers start leaving a job or the very best ones in your department start to leave, it's probably time for you to consider leaving too.
4) I've had jobs that were really great that became bad or started bad and became really good. Conditions change. Be prepared for it to happen. And if they change for the worse, it may be your signal to find a new job.
5) Try to get along with co-workers because as you change jobs in your tech career, you'll often find yourself working again with people from a previous job and you don't want to have those people have a grudge against you when you start a new job.
6) Don't be a hothead. Stay cool. I had a pretty negative opinion of a manager in a sister office over some things some co-workers told me when they worked under him in the past. My attitude got so negative that I remember once almost blowing up at him over something trivial, but I kept my cool. That guy got promoted and became my manager's manager and he went to bat for me with his management to get me a promotion at a time when it was really difficult to get promoted. You can misjudge people and if I had blown up at the guy, he'd have never gotten me the promotion. I really learned a valuable lesson on that one.
7) My dad told me years ago not to ever kick people when they were down because circumstances change and people who are down today may wield great power in your organization later and they will definitely remember who was good to them when they were at the low point of their career.

Thanks for pointing out that Roberts and Scalia were the 2 dissenters, which means that Thomas didn't vote with Scalia. I ask in all seriousness - is the first time ever that they haven't voted the same on a case?

Maybe the only good film ever directed by some guy who worked on Star Wars and has a tie to Lucas. I guess it gets a weak "yea" but this guy is not a good director. I had an unusual chance a few years ago to have a personal conversation with an actor or actress (I'm unwilling to name who I talked to) who appeared in "Prisoner Of The Sun" which finally got released last year and was directed by Christian. I specifically asked about that film and the person who acted in it said that they had doubts that it would ever see the light of day and they didn't think it was probably going to be very good if it did. Based on the IMDB rating, it looks like that person was right. I can say that the person I talked to did not have any negative comments about Christian himself, they just didn't really have a good feeling about that movie. Not sure given the track record that I'm going to invest 30 minutes in watching this one.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.

I took a look at the actual indictment. Well, at least the first few pages. Remember how people still insist to this day that Bill Clinton wasn't impeached (he was - impeaching does not mean convicting) or that he was impeached for "cheating on his wife"? Years later, the lies spun by his spin doctors still hold fast in many minds. Clinton was impeached for committing perjury in a civil trial. Now the event he committed perjury about was cheating on Hilary, but he was impeached for lying about it while under oath, not for the actual act of cheating on her. Similarly, this indictment isn't really and truly about beating lie detector tests. The government's contention is that Williams had a business whose purpose was to enable people ineligible for certain government jobs to get those jobs through lying and deception. This is defrauding the US government because salaries would be paid to those ineligible people. The government also contends that he enriched himself (through fees he charged) by encouraging people to lie to and deceive the federal government into hiring ineligible people for jobs. The first 6 or so pages I looked at don't actually mention anything about lie detector tests.

Thank you for this explanation. I was really struggling to understand why Verizon would want to pay so much for the dial up business but clearly they want everything else and are just taking the dial up business as part of a complete package, not specifically trying to get that.

Well, Bush asked for this kind of authority too, so do note that this not particular to Obama. The real reason the president wants this is to prevent individuals from tagging on bill busting riders where the president would have to veto his the agreement to stop some unacceptable after the negotiation condition from taking place which is exactly what the person wants who tagged the rider onto the bill. I never hear about other countries having this kind of problem. Can you imagine if you agreed to buy a house at a certain price and then you show up for closing and the owner says "Surprise! I never told you this before, but you have to buy me a new BMW to get the house." Nobody would go for that. But doing similar things in legislation is completely OK apparently. If you don't understand why all presidents regardless of party affiliation can't trust Congress to just leave the agreements alone before voting on them, then you don't understand why this is necessary.

I'm not a lawyer, but as an informed layman I can only point out that in some/many/most cases, juries and not judges determine damage awards. Based on the juries I've served on, I can tell you that a rather large amount of people on a jury don't know anything about technology and thus tend to see this kind of thing in real black and white terms where they overvalue the "damage" that the defendant does. I've never served on a jury where this strategy would have made any difference in the damage awards, but they may be gambling that just giving up may stop the lawsuit in that the music companies may find it cheaper to reach a quick settlement where the founders/owners agree never to do this again than to try to get blood from a stone and squeeze money out of the defendants. Given that it was likely going to be a slam dunk in court to prove that Grooveshark violated copyright law and failed to pay legally required licensing fees, giving up and apologizing is probably the best choice out of a bunch of not very good choices. I've seen people and companies fight in court when it's been ridiculously easy to prove that they were in the wrong and the results of that have often been financially disastrous to the defendants.

It's a valid question but I can speculate on reasons why they may not do that.
1) Incompetence.
2) Corruption. Specifically I mean that the people who investigate this can often be bribed in nations with major economic problems to look the other way.
3) The current president can always fall back on the old tried and try cry of "Britain stole the Islas Malvinas from us! We must get them back!" to distract citizens from paying attention to the economy.
4) Blaming the USA for everything is another always successful policy to distract the population.

But unfortunately, haters gonna hate, so many here are already spinning this as "POS Apple iPad crashed cause it suxors!" instead of the much more accurate "POS software update went bad and crashed the hardware".

I understand your point, but in the case of individuals, most non-techies are often too embarrassed to ask a technical person for help in such situations, so they just pay and hope for the best. In the case of businesses, I can tell you as someone who works in IT for a Fortune 500 company and has to deal with IT staff in much smaller companies on a regular basis, smaller companies often don't have the best IT people. A lot of times I see that small companies just hire whoever they can get for the bottom tier wages they pay because they don't respect the job and they would outsource it to India if they really could do so. The IT staff of such companies are just barely competent enough to deal with most ordinary situations that come up and anything out of the ordinary like this gets way out of their comfort and knowledge zone. Maybe they have backups, but to actually verify those backups? Keep hashes? Probably not on both of those.

I've been thinking about this for a long time, especially after the rash of hostages killed by ISIS. At this point, nobody can really claim to not know the danger. I know nothing about Lo Porto but Weinstein clearly knew the dangers. So we did he stay there? I think there are several reasons why westerners put themselves in deliberate danger in places like Pakistan, Syria, etc.

1) Some people are simply mentally ill. After the first Japanese hostage was killed by ISIS, it came out that he was mentally ill. Not mentally ill enough to need to be locked away, but clearly incapable of making rational decisions regarding his own safety. People like this are simply always going to gravitate towards dangerous places because the internet makes sure that they know where the really dangerous places are.
2) Some people believe that they are special and the bad guys won't go after them because they are "helping". Most of the hostages fall into this category. Weinstein was like this. Alan Henning fell into this category and possibly the first one as well. Reports are that Henning believed to the very end that the fact that he was there to help would save his life. Sometimes these people get away with being in a dangerous location once and they think that they are simply lucky and won't ever be harmed. Henning went into Syria several times and was left alone. The second Japanese hostage executed by ISIS went to help the first one and he went because he'd been to the area before and thought he was special and the bad guys would leave him alone.
3) Some people are so overcome with their desire to help others that they can't rationally assess the danger and while they know if they are captured it's going to end very badly for them, they believe that they will simply beat the odds. Remember many years ago when Americans and Europeans volunteered to be human shields for Saddam Hussein? They were like this. A few months ago it got announced that a young American female hostage was supposedly killed in a bombing raid against ISIS. She had operated in the area previously and had to know the danger, but she believed that because nobody had yet bothered her that she could work there at no risk. She died as a result of being wrong about that.

There's some overlap between those vague 3 reasons I gave for people ignoring the real danger to be in places like Pakistan and Syria and so on, but I don't know how we can ever stop people from willingly becoming victims of their own bad decisions about personal risk.

In the USA, the answer is "no". Unfortunately, some years ago the classical music label Naxos got greedy and put out a CD in the USA of a 1930s classical work, specifically Pablo Casal's recordings of the complete Bach cello suites. In Europe this recording had clearly entered the public domain, but not in the USA. In fact, there was no question that it was still under US copyright at the time Naxos put it out. Not only was it under copyright, but the US copyright owner (Capitol Records) had their own copy in print and sued Naxos for copyright violation. It was really idiotic for Naxos to try to get away this in the US market and they lost the case. But a worst case scenario happened in the case. The court that heard it (in my opinion) basically made up the law and came to the conclusion that every recording every made or sold in the USA, even as far back as Edison's first attempts in the late 1800s, was still under copyright in the USA because they basically claimed that "common law copyright" protected them until the US law covered them. Naxos couldn't really appeal this because they had no way to argue that what they did was legal, so this horrible court decision that all US sound recordings are still under copyright became US law. Short of convincing Congress to pass a law on the subject, we're basically screwed now as there's nothing ever recorded or sold in the USA that is in the public domain at this time. Do note that this crazy legal finding doesn't apply to books, movies or anything else.

While I don't personally agree with this, I get that businesses and musicians and such want copyright to last for a really really long time. There's a way to meet their desires and satisfy the public's desire for things to actually enter the public domain. If these copyrights are so valuable that 50 years is simply too short, then rather than give extensions away for free, make the copyright holder fill out a form, just like they used to have to do, and pay big money for an extension. Offer 20 year extensions, but make the rate they charge go up exponentially with each renewal. Perhaps the first renewal costs $100,000. The 2nd renewal costs $10 million dollars. The 3rd renewal costs $1 billion and so on. I'm pretty sure that even Disney isn't going to pay $1 billion to keep Steamboat Willie out of the public domain or even if they do pay it for that one, there would be plenty of other properties that they simply can't afford to renew and thus they'd have to enter the public domain. If these are so valuable then why isn't the government getting paid for each renewal? And if the copyright holders forget to renew in time, well, tough. In the old days people did forget to renew and nobody cried out that this was just the most unfair thing ever in the history of mankind.

I don't remember the exact wording, but I read somewhere where I think a lawyer said something like this - "You pass a law. I use a hole in your law. You plug the hole. I drill a hole in your plug." This is the real reason why the loopholes can't ever be closed. Lawyers, which is what most politicians are, are simply too good at finding ways around everything.

I think the real problem is that probably about 70-75% of the US electorate votes only on party affiliation and nothing else in a general election and they simply won't ever vote for a candidate of the other party. This is the reason why people keep getting re-elected to Congress once they get in as long as they don't commit outright crimes. The money does help in primaries and in rare general elections that are up for grabs. I've never voted in an election for the US House that was actually competitive. I've lived in both solid Democrat and Republican districts at various times and none of those elections ever had a candidate from the less popular political party have a real chance to win.

Pretty ignorant posting for a post currently modded "5, Insightful". Dude, there's no chance avocados are going to become a "staple diet" of the USA. It would be great from a health perspective if they did because they contain heart healthy fats and they can make you feel full in addition to being good sources of various nutrients but I can tell you that actually it seems to me that most people I know don't like them very much. Is there really all that much cattle grazing and rice growing in California? All the US rice I've seen comes from either Texas, Louisiana or Arkansas. I would think that land is too valuable in California to use it for cattle grazing. And sorry man, but I'm not real crazy about dates and neither are most Americans. Date palms don't tolerate cold weather at all, which is why I assume they only grow them much further south than Los Angeles. You can actually get snow there on rare occasions, which is very bad for date palms.