Recently a high ranking us gov. official plead the 5th during a particularly complex trial that was part fishing expedition.

Now that I have more experience working in government, I realized I had a new interpretation of her actions that were not immediately 'she did it, but doesn't want to admit it'.

Every day officials are asked to make an awful lot of decisions, based on limited information. Some of them are no doubt corrupt, but many are trying to do the job to the best of their ability. But they are human, with biases and foibles and sometimes just plain oops moments.

In the case of this trial, it was high profile, and it was slanted just enough (as I recall) that the people on the other side of the table would have been very happy to find any misconduct, of any kind.

More than likely, at some point in her career, she did something that was not, strictly speaking, completely legal. I don't think it's possible to avoid it, given the size of the bureaucracy and the rules governing it.

In this case, the 'MAY incriminate me' becomes just that - 'I know what I did, and I did the best that I could, but frankly, maybe something in there wasn't strictly in line with every one of the 10.8 bajillion rules.'

This could (I'm not saying does in every case, but could) prevent some rabbit hole/witch hunt situation that just doesn't benefit anyone.

I don't know your situation, so I can't comment on life choices, etc. What I can say is that the person who made the comment you responded to probably isn't making a value judgment, just stating a fact.

Hiring managers have very little information on which to base a very important decision. Hiring people is easy. Firing people isn't. And getting stuck with someone who is mediocre can screw your organization for years to come. So you extrapolate - a LOT. You generalize - a LOT. And then you cross your fingers and hope the person who shows up to the face-to-face interview is as good as their resume said they were. And then you cross your fingers again and hope the employee you hired is as good as the person at the interview said s/he was.

It is common to see hundreds of resumes come in for a good job. If you give someone a quick shorthand that lets them winnow that pile down quickly, they're going to take it.

Does that mean you weren't the best candidate? Nope. But it does mean you need to write one hell of a resume to overcome the default, because otherwise you're just not going to get past the first cut.

And to the OP: the math may or may not be related (it's always hard to say where life will take you after), but if you figure out how to motivate yourself to do things you don't want to do, and do them well, you'll have a leg up on an awful lot of people.

Holy cow - the best? Really? Despite a foreign policy indistinguishable from Bush? I voted for the man, gave money to his campaign,etc. and even I can recognize a mixed record. There have certainly been some successes - I expect Obamacare will become another strong safety net, for example - but 'best ever'? C'mon!

You may be right. On the other hand, a system that works on modest hardware, that has a solid interface (I have always thought WebOS was the best of the phone user interfaces, conceptually) and that is, like Android, open source, has the potential to fill a very useful niche.

Sort of true, but not really.

If I recall correctly, in addition to commercial support, MoodleRooms also contributed back to the code base. I don't know the percentage of improvements that came from them, or from NetSpot, but I'd bet they were solid components if someone was willing to pay to have them written. And there's all the improvements related to running Moodle as an enterprise app, as opposed to on an old 486 in the back closet, which is often how many installations start out.

If Blackboard's plan is to harm Moodle, they could do worse than taking out some of the key development partners - over time, simply stop contributing. It's slow, but they can't kill the product all at once anyway. So they could collect revenue for a while, and at the same time take development resources away from the community. Eventually the customers decide to move, because the product no longer supports (shiny new thing), and look! they already have a relationship with Blackboard!

If you're lucky, you might be able to donate both globally and locally - the above post references Heifer Int'l, which is HQ'd 30 miles from my house. So I can simultaneously fight poverty far away, and ensure a local employer keeps being a local employer. YMMV, but it's worth thinking about.

Now talking like a pirate will involve phrases like 'tax relief'...

Though in some ways I suppose it always has....

I would point out that much of the recent craziness around mortgages has revolved around the fact that the banks misplaced, misaligned, or outright faked documents. Keeping a copy of the big stuff is important, because more than likely, if it's big, then someone has incentive to pretend it doesn't exist. If the only copy is the one being provided by folks who will lose money depending on what that document says, you may be in trouble.

Marriage and insurance docs fall in this same arena. Things get lost or destroyed sometimes. For example, my original marriage records exist on a small island nation. One solid tsunami, and they're gone. When I turn up 20 years later, noone's going to know or care who I am.

I always buy the lowest level refurb mac mini I can find (paying $300 for an extra 100GB of disk strikes me as insane), and they do a great job. Lower power use, remote control, etc. etc.

Gavron makes an excellent point - I recently got a Nexus One with T-Mobile, and on the map I had solid service at home and at work. When the phone arrived I found a very different reality - roaming everywhere. Don't trust the maps - ask users - when I mentioned T-Mobile to my colleagues at work (too late!) they all knew it didn't work in our area. I could have saved myself a lot of time just by asking a local.