Thank you. I was wondering how long it would be until someone made that joke. Less time that I had guessed.

Yeah, I'm eagerly awaiting the day when attackers are able to exploit my smart fridge to remotely unlock the smart lock on my smart door. And the inevitable automatic firmware update that bricks my smart air conditioner.

Why does everything need to be a web appliance? My crockpot should convert electricity into heat and produce delicious stews and roasts. It doesn't need to use my search history to suggest new recipes, I have a PC that can do that.

On the bright side, I'm looking forward to the instructions on how to run Debian on my blender.

I really miss my old commute. When I started, the office was a five minute bike ride away. I could ride home, have a nice lunch, and ride back. Six months later, they moved 15 miles north. That 15 miles represents over an hour of rush hour driving. Ended up moving to a spot that wouldn't require me to deal with the worst rush hour roads, but I'm still a good 20-minute drive away.

The worst I've seen are devs at a client in DC. Between driving in from the surrounding area to a parking garage at the tail end of the Yellow line and then taking the metro into town, they spent an absurd amount of time in transit to their jobs (not to mention the $200/month or so they had to pay for parking).

Oh, there have been more than three times where I could have gone over, but since my boss has to pay me for that extra time, he doesn't want me going over 40 (outside of emergencies, like when a RAID-5 VM host lost two drives in under an hour on a Saturday morning and had to be rebuilt). If I end up staying late two hours because a meeting runs long, I leave two hours early on Friday. If I spend Saturday doing out-of-hours maintenance on a mail server, I take a day off the next week to balance out the hours.

Funny thing happens when you negotiate for overtime pay: they stop asking you work late :)

It really depends on where you live and what your circumstances are. Do you have a car loan and student loans? That'll make it really tough, as those alone can easily be $5K/year or more. Do you not have a mortgage? That makes it easier. My parents live on about 25K a year, but this was after moving and buying a smaller house in cash from what they made off their old one. No mortgage means your household expenses could be dirt cheap depending on location ($200/month for property taxes and insurance for them). No mortage, no car loans and no credit card debt makes $1800/month much more survivable.

Plain numbers are tricky. The possibility of surviving on a certain income really comes down to what specific expenses you have to contend with. I could do 35K/year (gross) pretty comfortably with my current costs, but not 25K.

Most people who can't survive on the 35K number the OP tossed out are unable to do so because of existing debt that is dragging them down. If they had been able to avoid getting sucked into that position from the outset, 35K would be a much easier number to handle. Debt is a dangerous creature that we've become far too complacent about.

If you can take a pay cut, you can find better alternatives. Even though I'm exempt like most of IT, I never work over 40 hours outside of emergencies (only three times in five years with this company). On those rare times, I was paid for them. This was something I negotiated from the beginning: no overtime unless I'm paid.

My pay is about 15% below market average, but this was the tradeoff I was willing to make in order to have a less stressful work life (and my lifestyle is such that I could afford the cut). If you've got a huge mortgage, three kids, five cars and a mountain of student debt and credit card debt, yeah, you're pretty well fucked.

My parents quit their jobs when they moved about 10 years ago and became self-employed. They make half of what they did before, but only work about 30 hours a week. They've both said they will never go back to working for somebody else. The freedom was worth the reduced pay to them as well.

SanDisk does that same crap. There's a huge difference between the write speeds for Ultra and Extreme models even though they are both rated USB3. Learned that lesson the hard way.

More languages? No way. What we really need are more frameworks for our existing languages. What's a self-respecting web developer to do if he/she doesn't have to learn three new bleeding-edge frameworks every month?

I'm looking forward to the day when my resume is just a two-page, single-spaced paragraph of frameworks...

You'd be surprised. Most work programs are run by corporations nowadays (I used to work in the IT dept for one). It isn't like the old days where inmates were making products that sold for pennies on the dollar, prices at the company I worked for were good but typically were not that far below the industry averages. And as far as prison control, the inmates who made it into our programs were the low-risk ones that didn't need that much control to begin with. Typically they were "light" criminals with 2 year sentences. The high-risk inmates weren't considered viable for the programs.

Not quite, the summary is misleading. According to the article, the 60% number came from this: there were 600 open tenure-track positions and 1000 fresh graduates, therefore 60%. What it ignores is that those 1000 graduates were emptying themselves into a pool already overflowing with graduates and existing non-tenure professors fighting for the same jobs. The actual percentage will be much, much lower.

And that's just tenure track. Only a fraction of people on the track will actually receive tenure. Humanities tenures certainly aren't as rare as STEM tenures, but they also aren't nearly as abundant as the summary suggests.

The big problem is: if the summary is correct and the new code was signed with the same GPG key, how could we trust anything from TC from this point on? If it wasn't them posting and someone managed to pilfer the signing key, a security lapse that serious introduces major doubts about the trustworthiness of their security product. If it was them, then something happened to cause this that would make any return suspect by default.

In either case, the only safe option is to assume TC is compromised.

Tax returns contain the following:
Name, address, Social Security number, income, employer info, spouse and dependent names and Social Security numbers, bank account number and routing number (if using direct deposit for your refund). Surely you can see why you wouldn't want that information falling into the hands of whoever stole your laptop, right? A tax return is basically the golden snitch of identity theft.

And let's not forget the fact that you can't leave negative feedback for a shitty buyer anymore. Or get a negative feedback rescinded. I have a negative on my seller account from a buyer who didn't like the size of the address label I put on the shipping box, a negative which eBay refused to remove.

A few years back I had a package returned unopened. Emailed the buyer to see what happened (thinking maybe I had the address wrong). No reply. Kept sending emails, about three weeks later I finally get a response: "Oh, I changed my mind and decided I didn't want the item anymore. I've filed a chargeback with my credit card company for it." Eventually, I got the contact from Paypal informing me of the disputed transaction. Her claim with her CC company was that it was an unauthorized charge. I sent everything I had (including that email chain) to Paypal. Naturally, I lost (I always expect to lose as a seller). And I couldn't leave a negative feedback for the buyer.

That was the last time I gave eBay any of my business. As long as they continue to operate like they do, I'll never buy or sell an item on there again.

Diablo 3 wasn't horrible. Not on the same level as Diablo 2, but I'm sitting at 975/1000 GS and never regretted picking it up (more than I can say for some other games). It isn't something that I'll spend hours in grinding up set gear, or leveling up all the different classes, or grinding out the remaining 3.5 million gold I need for the last 25 gamerscore, but for one full playthrough (and one additional hardcore to 30) it was enjoyable enough. Can't speak for Loot 2.0 as I never bought it for PC and who knows if that'll ever come out on the consoles.

I'd class it with the new Thief. Both are decent games by themselves, but seem like shit if you try to compare them to their predecessors. Which to me is more a reflection of the superb quality of the previous titles than the lack of quality of the current releases.

Absolutely. Especially when the domain is part of that lovely new "let's intentionally misspell or leave out a couple of letters or use some random third-world domain suffix as the last couple letters" breed of domains that makes it impossible to tell if you've typed it correctly by looking at it.

First time you go to a new domain: get there through a search engine link. Much less chance of accidentally winding up at a site that's gonna do naughty things. Subsequent visits, you should have the right one in your autocomplete, but I always make the first trip from a Google results page.