We vote in representatives to vote on bills. They are supposed to use their judgement as informed citizens to decide if a bill meets the interests of his/her constituents. They are supposed to be making their best guess, just like we rely on citizen juries to evaluate evidence to make an informed judgement during trials.

The bills need to come from somewhere, and unless we have a congress packed with lawyers, those bills have to come from somewhere other than individual legislators.

Yep, the whole system is rife with holes, bias, and potential for corruption, but I have not yet seen an alternative system that's any better.

So who exactly is supposed to write the bills?

And where in my post did I say anything about "corporate rights"?

(Before I get started, I would like to acknowledge that this bill is indeed a steaming pile of horse$hit. Now, back to my regularly scheduled criticism of knee-jerk Slashdot populism.)

It is not at all uncommon for bills to be written by those with an interest in the matter. What's the alternative?

Let's say Congressman X gets a bug up his butt about righting some wrong... we'll use warrantless wiretapping as an example. He needs to write a bill, and one that will not be as full of holes as Swiss cheese. The best person to write such a bill is a lawyer. Now, Mr. X isn't a lawyer and has not used his staff budget to hire an expensive civil liberties lawyer on retainer. Where does he go?

Well, a logical solution is the EFF or ACLU, but those are a bunch of lobbyists too. Who, exactly, is supposed to write this legislation in a way that it can be fairly certain it'll actually work?

Just because a bill is written by a lobbyist does not mean it's defective by design. Just because a bill is written by a company with a financial interest in the bill does not mean it's inherently defective. The congressman is more than welcome to reject or modify the bill, or pay a (smaller) amount of money to a lawyer to review it. Yes, many congressman are unduly influenced by things like campaign contributions, but that is a separate question from where bills come from.

In addition to either allowing yourself to go into another part of IT (I mentioned management or technical sales), or risk-taking, there is a third option: Be willing to take a pay cut, and it may be a large one. If you are willing to take a pay cut, you can perform a career switch. It's not at all uncommon for people to switch careers entirely, but matching a good IT salary is usually not an option absent serious (read: expensive and time-consuming) training.

In fact, I don't know of too many non-management salaried fields, period, that match what a decently-paid IT "veteran" can earn that do not absolutely a degree in the field. (As in, accountants, lawyers, certain kinds of engineers, and the healthcare profession can make serious coin, but it takes years to make that switch.)

You missed the part where he doesn't want to risk the mortgage and kid's college fund.

Dear Slashdot,

I've spent my entire life doing one thing. I have no marketable skills except doing that one thing. I like doing that one thing, and that alone. I hate my job because it also involves doing something other than that one thing.

I want to stop doing that one thing, or anything related to it, but still make the same safe, secure, decent amount of money doing something else. But I have no idea what that something else is, and I don't want to take any risks finding out.

What do I do?

Answer:
You're fucked.

Seriously, open your horizons some (management or technical sales is where many geeks go when they reach this point), or be willing to take risks. But the magical safe, secure, job you are looking for does not exist.

A couple of years ago, the IEEE magazine of the Society for the Social Implications of Science and Technology had a fascinating article about this very topic. (Although it did not involve solar stoves; instead it was about combination stoves/small generators to supply low levels of lighting and communication access to a rural village, in addition to a stove.) I can't remember how the electricity was generated; it was something non-mechanical... As an added bonus the stoves vastly improved the air quality of the dwelling; at least, they would have if they were used.

What they determined was that the style of cookstove used varies by region, and that a design put together by some appliance designer many thousands of miles away is invariably not going to design a stove that is going to get used in some isolated rural village in the boondocks.

It'd asking somebody that's used an oven all their life to start doing all their cooking over an open fire... given the choice, I'm just going to keep doing what I've been doing.

The project also failed to account for distribution and transportation difficulties. A bulky stove weighing a couple of hundred pounds is really hard to transport into a mountain village accessibly only via a one-week journey by donkey.

I'm constantly having to babysit the GMail Spam filter; I get about two false positives a week. But it has done a fine job on my inbox; I've never gotten a Phishing attempt in it, and the only e-mails where I have to click "Report Spam" are usually just annoying websites I got a login on that decided I absolutely needed their useless newsletter.

A 20-30 foot deep pool comprising 2% of arable land would be prohibitively expensive. In areas with a high water table, you'll have to keep it from caving in; also you are going to need to blast rock in many parts of the country, and the pool is going to have to be lined with something expensive (either concrete or a thick plastic liner). You'll also need to dredge that thing on a regular basis, as ag runoff is rather silt-laden.

Theoretically possible? Sure.

But "an easy way to help"? Nope.

The equipment design is the easy part; the problem is spectrum scarcity. LightSquared bought up a bunch of cheap satellite spectrum with the idea of using it for a vastly more valuable terrestrial network. While they DO have the capital to change their equipment to use a different band, they DON'T have the capital to actually purchase that band.