Really? This was marked 'informative'? What is so informative about that? 'Pithy' and 'cute', sure... but informative? Wow.

Regardless of your intention, you are coming off offensive and your point is probably being lost on those that need to hear it most. (Sad face.)

That said, everything is relative. There's absolutely nothing incorrect about an American bitching about high taxes. Or gasoline prices. Or [whatever]. Relative to what Americans know, these are all true and valid grievances. It's like a soldier complaining his arm was blown off in combat... then you come along and smugly point out the fact BOTH of your arms were blown off. Sure, you may be in a worse position, but his complaint is still valid.

FFS, this popular urge to condense down very complex ideas into a pretty soundbite ("I doubt you know what 'high taxes' are. *rimshot*") is part of a much bigger problem re: politics at large.

Keep the files locally on a spinning disk, and subscribe to a cloud-based storage service, i.e. Mozy or Carbonite.

If your house burns down then you can restore from the cloud, and if the cloud goes down (or rather, these days it seems... WHEN it goes down) you'll have your local copies.

This solution is simple, easy, and inexpensive and still provides very good reliability. For my personal files, this is the route I take; my laptop holds 90% of my "important" files, and my unlimited plan at Carbonite gives me piece of mind should something happen to my laptop.

The point is never rely on one single solution. And you want your data to be physically redundant in case of a physical catastrophe--fire, theft, user stupidity--so you'll have the other physical location to fall back on. There's always the chance both your laptop will catch fire and Mozy's servers crash, but data reliability is focused on mitigating risk; removing the risk completely reduces the options available that fit into easy, simple, and/or inexpensive categories.

I wish I had discovered design patterns earlier in my career.

Beside that, maybe "Enjoying the Good Life: How to Pick a Career in Anything Other than Software Development So You'll Still Have Your Hair by 35". ;)

Intelligence is not built; accumulation of facts is. But capacity for knowledge and abstract thought, critical thinking abilities... these are things you either have or don't have.

Seriously, online storage is the way to go. Mozy and Carbonite both offer unlimited storage for $55/year. Both are incremental, so after that initial transfer backups are executed extremely fast. They're in the background, and you can set it to work only when the machine is idle, so you won't even notice it's there. I swear by online backup, personally. It's the cheapest and easiest solution for most people.

It's what my company does, and it works great. Except those of us that use Firefox. (Though that wouldn't be a problem if the security dept. supported non-IE browsers.

I agree with everything except your conclusion regarding it not benefiting the economy. Competition on the global scale does indeed benefit the global economy. Global is the keyword. Proof is the rising wages in the countries where outsourcing work is going. You've got to remember that there is an enormous wage gap between the western world and the more poverty stricken world. Competion--in this case of labor--is doing what comppetiton does best: making the commodity more efficient to produce on the whole.

That's not to imply it doesn't suck for us developers in the States. But the fact is a $3 cut in our pay doesn't have anywhere near the effect a $3 increase on pay has on someone in India or China.

In the end globalization will benefit everyone in the world. It's like when computers became popular; no one can deny they were good for everyone ultimately. But in the beginning it sure did suck for the people who made and used typewriters.

The idea is that to make a higher profit, to be more efficient, one has to serve the demands of the customer to gain the business required to make a higher profit. The instances where this idea stands at odds with those in the "real world" are usually examples of sectors that are highly regulated by the government, raising the barrier to entry and preventing competition.

Take hot dogs... you might be able to make your machines more efficient at making hot dogs than the next guy, but that won't help your profit margins if your hot dogs taste like dog shit. The nasty tasting hot dog manufacturer might then use the strong arm of government to enact legislation outlawing one of his competitors' ingredients. (In the end, all hot dogs are pretty fucking unhealthy, but that point is missed by the politicians wanting to look health-conscious to their constituents.) The nasty tasting hot dog manufacturer might also push to have its brand of hot dogs be served exclusively in schools for the lunch entree on "hot dog Tuesdays".

Take out the corporatism element of government-sanctioned monopolies, and you get the best tasting AND most affordable hot dog becoming "top dog" as it were. Does "top dog" afford some luxuries not existing in the mom-and-pop businesses? Sure. But as long as the barrier to entry is low, regulation is not crippling, the market will tend toward the collective desires of the customer.

The problem is so often the collective customer is an idiot.

Could you not forsee a time when computers and robots have become so advanced that they contain all the knowledge, experience, and wisdom of several human doctors, thereby being programmed with theoretically hundreds of years of real world experience? Humans make mistakes; computers can too, and when they do sure it's really really bad especially if they're cutting you open, but given the right engineering and advancement so that the chances of a robot screwing up is infinitesimal small compared to that of a human screwing up, I'd take a robotic surgeon over a human one any day. Of course I'd want the robot supervised to throw an abort switch in case the bastard goes into an infinite loop or something.

The logic and decision-making skills that doctors learn that give them the ability to work on many different, although basically similar, "models" could theoretically be programmed into the robot. Along with robot precision and speed, the choice is obvious to me.

There might be a good point in there, but it's blinded by your arrogant entitled attitude.