You bought a new car via a private sale? That's pretty interesting, do you have more information about how you did that and where your seller got the cars from?

Your #1-4 do certainly match my experience. Your point #5 though doesn't seem to be borne out by the facts.

The notion that engineering majors make less than finance and business majors isn't borne out by the statistics. Law is an unfair comparison since that's an additional 3 years of expensive professional degree tuition, although their new-graduate employment numbers aren't doing that great.

Let's compare stats. Here we have have an undergraduate business program, hyped as being in the top 20 undergraduate business programs (pay close attention to the mean base salary and % employment numbers):

http://dyson.cornell.edu/undergrad/careers.php#placement

Here we have an undergraduate engineering program, also hyped as being highly ranked, at the same university, for the same year:

Computer Science: http://www.engineering.cornell.edu/resources/career_services/students/statistics/loader.cfm?csModule=security/getfile&PageID=78827

Electrical Engineering: http://www.engineering.cornell.edu/resources/career_services/students/statistics/loader.cfm?csModule=security/getfile&PageID=78828

Now, the business degree majors do have their data updated for 2011, the engineers are only at 2010, but take a look at the 8 year trend reports to satisfy yourself that the numbers are relatively stable:

http://www.engineering.cornell.edu/resources/career_services/students/statistics/postgrad_reports.cfm

Undergrad CS majors are making 28% more than the undergrad business majors. Electrical engineers are not doing as well as the CS majors, but still better than the business majors.

The majority of business majors end up in just as boring and dead-end jobs as the majority of other majors. You can't look at the high-flying business and finance guys on Wall Street and think that those guys are "typical" for business majors any more than you can look at Bill Gates, Gordon Moore, or any of a whole range of tech company CEOs and execs, and think that they are typical engineers.

If China were simply limiting the amount of rare earths permitted to be dug out of the ground, there would be no WTO issue. The problem is that this is an export cap which has the potential to create different pricing for rare-earths between domestic and foreign purchasers of these materials.

Now if you look at mentions of today's prices of rare earths (by googling for "rare earth prices"), as yet, there is no such disparity. The linked WTO article also doesn't directly talk about price disparities between domestic and foreign purchasers. It turns out that global demand for rare earths went down quite a bit last year, and as a result, only about 60% of the export quota was used up (according to this FT article).

The concern is that as the global economy recovers, if demand is seen to exceed the quota, then a huge price difference between what domestic companies and foreign companies pay will emerge. This would amount to a kind of state subsidy (making prices for domestic producers artificially cheap) and would violate WTO rules.

The two metrics to watch to determine whether or not the claim of environmental protection vs. economic protectionism would be:

(1) Domestic rare earth production volume (e.g. in tons) - If slope of this curve continues unchanged, then there really is no environmental effect. If the slope flattens out, then it could be argued that the quota did slow down the pace of mining and did have an environmental consequence

(2) Domestic (China buyer) vs. Foreign (non-China Buyer) price (e.g. difference $/ton) - If this disparity is big, then there's a stronger case that there is some kind of domestic subsidy occurring, if the disparity is small, then the case that there is a subsidy is weaker.

This is not really a matter of sovereignty since China is a willing party to the WTO and has volunteered to play by those rules.

"News sites" hosted on port 82 set off some alarm bells. That being said, this piece has been picked up by other news sites with more direct citations. Techdirt (http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120126/11014317553/european-parliament-official-charge-acta-quits-denounces-masquerade-behind-acta.shtml) and The Register (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/27/eu_signs_acta/) both have articles that are worth reading.

This problem seems almost too simple, text-only and only up to 500MB per year.

I have a much tougher problem, a mailbox that is growing about 5GB per year that I still need searchable. And, stripping out the attachments is not okay, I need a way to still access them since many of them are receipts in PDF or edits on documents where the e-mail trail is the only record of changes over time. Thus ideally, the attachments should be indexed as well.

I guess you could do what many apache.org sites use: mod_mbox to make a web-accessible version of your your mail folders, possibly pre-processing them with an mbox splitting tool to get them into bit-sized chunks.

Then, overlay a search tool like Lucene Imagination (which is what lucene.apache.org uses) or any other local web indexer of your choosing in order to build searchability.

The owner of the code can do whatever they want with it. Making it GPL doesn't force them to keep making future versions GPL, because they own all the rights. Users of GPL code need to adhere to the terms of the GPL because they don't own the rights, but are rather licensees of the owner.

That being said, if you have a copy of the GPL'd code, you were automatically granted some rights under the GPL which can't be revoked. So you can continue to use the code that you have under the GPL terms for as long as you want.

I don't want to seem like I'm disagreeing with you, because I'm not. My use of the the term "certainly" is not intended to be sarcastic or hyperbole. I just want to convey a practical story.

Among these many international-travelling colleagues are Arabs and Palestinians who are originally from Pakistan and Jordan. One particular Pakistani-American colleague of mine even has the exact same name as a known wanted terrorist. Does he get stopped for secondary screening more often than average? Yes, pretty much every time he travels. Has he ever had his laptop searched and copied at the border? No.

And specifically for the GP's issue, even Moxie Marlinspike (the guy who did get stopped at the border for searches) was less concerned about the data being copied (since it was encrypted) and more that international travel may become unfeasible for him because he has to bake in the potential for 5+ hour searches each time. If you were on such a list, carrying a clean computer dedicated to travelling doesn't really solve this problem, but at the same time, if you're not currently being stopped, the issue is not likely to affect you in the same manner as for Marlinspike, so long as your data is encrypted.