Hear hear!

Yes. Or IPv6 NAT64/DNS64 ... there are already mobile telcos doing this with their customers. End users get IPv6 but can still talk to the IPv4 internet through NAT64/DNS64.

Yeah. And ironically, Comcast Business doesn't offer IPv6 yet, so I'm still tunneling. :-(

If only their "business class" service were as aggressive about it as their residential service. And more irony, the only reason I have business class I can have static IPv4 addresses.

I agree. I have an e-reader simply because it uses e-paper. I don't enjoy reading books on an LCD.

Keep It Simple Stupid :-)

I'm fairly sensitive to outside noise, and my solution for years has been a simple electric fan. It generates plenty of local white noise which drowns out all the noise from outside.

Works great with no need for parabolic reflectors or active noise cancellation or anything else that might require a DARPA research project. :-)

Here here! If people drove courteously and obeyed basic rules of the road, and used some common sense, there would be way fewer accidents, and traffic snarls.

OOPS. s/visualization/virtualization/

Speaking for myself, I've been in IT as a Unix sysadm and a Networking guy since 1988, and I have no college degree, and a night school HS diploma. I'm completely self taught. However, my background as a programmer hobbyist since age thirteen helped a lot here. I likely was a better programmer with more real world experience than the average CS grad by the time I was sixteen, having put out a few shareware programs.

My entry to my first IT job came directly from attending a local Amiga users group meeting. I was showing off some program I wrote, and one of the guys there happened to work for my future employer (a well known Govt agency), and set me up with a sort of internship. And it was actually for more money than I ever made before, and quite a good salary for someone in their early 20s.

So I reiterate some of the other posters advice. Go to users group meetings, and teach yourself stuff. Today, the opportunities for self instruction are WAY better than they were for me back in the early 80s. Back then, I had an 8 bit computer and a few books I had to mail order to help me learn. Today, we have the internet with a vast array of free software and web sites with free tutorials and references everywhere, as well as free visualization software to allow you to explore different OSes, etc. There are pretty much endless opportunities to help learn on the web today.

Just about any degree, even a liberal arts one, is better than no degree for employ-ability. So don't worry about that. I've actually met many extremely good programmers and sysadmins with totally unrelated degrees.

They'd really help with comms to/from future robotic spacecraft, mars bases, etc. :-)

LOL. Generalize much? Maybe this is your experience, but from my experience Americans hang out with each other as much as any other culture. I know it can be ... er ... trendy (?) to bash Americans and American culture (even in many American circles), but if you're going to do it, at least pick something that's true.

Yep. I was one of these users. I had a TRS-80 Coco and an Amiga, and although I was on services like Compu$erv and GENIE (anyone remember that?), the lions share of my time was on private BBSes, typically in the local calling area.

It was the "social networking" of the era, since most of the local BBSes had fairly frequent get-togethers. We had parties, scavenger hunts, gatherings where we just had some good food and brought our computers to play games (sort of like a LAN party) or show off some new hardware or software (which we often wrote ourselves).

In my case, I got into the IT industry via one of these gatherings, where we got together weekly to drink some home-brew beer, eat some good food, hang out, etc. I was showing off a piece of software I wrote on the Amiga, and it happened that one of the regular attendees was looking for an IT intern, and basically hired me on the spot.

Also, we can't forget about UseNet, which I see as a sort of grandparent to things like Facebook, etc. :-)

Unlike the OP, I found those times to be a bit more ... civil? ... than today's Internet. The online universe of that day was populated mostly by a bunch of geek types. The way I remember it, things didn't take the turn to what we have today until Joe 6-Pack showed up online.

Is this the same thing you hear in many advertisements directed at a female demographic? I've always referred to it in my head as "the gravely voiced girl". It almost sounds like they hire the same voice over person to do "that voice" for lots of different ads (actually wouldn't surprise me much). I'm glad I'm not the only one to have noticed this. :-p

Hear hear. If they're to be given access to anything, it should be some sort of guest WLAN with internet access only, and heavily firewalled VPN only access to the corporate net, if any. End users simply can't be trusted to keep their personal devices secure. It's hard enough to assure this with their corporate assigned hardware.

Many business, especially regulated ones (SOX, FDA, HIPPA regulated, etc) don't allow personal devices to be plugged into the network at all, and it is a serious breach of policy to do so which could result in termination.