I play on changing my age on a few accounts to ward off some obnoxious tracking...

Love it! 126 million, and last time I was still topped out at 25kbps....

Agree with this guy. As a contractor, there really shouldn't be any expectation of long term work. You don't need to teach this guy how to develope, just how to maintain your system. That's it. For example, companies buy MS Office all the time, then hire some guy to maintain the entire network. As opposed to pay microsoft to send a guy out from time to time. Microsoft and Cisco etc, have certification standards so that dumbshits can't just say, "oh, I got this" with absolutely no clue. This reduces the risk of dumbshits tarnishing their companies name when said product fails to work. Basically, they wan't you to give this guy a YOURNAMEHERE certification. I do think you should get some reimbursement for any extra time you spend training this guy. Or you could try to offload some of the tedius tasks onto him and finish ahead of schedule, assuming you're paid for the job rather than the hour. I'm pretty sure that they never intended to keep someone that charges as much as you in the long term. You're expected to find other work at your level until they need something new developed. And if your last job looked shoddy because some kid couldn't maintain it, you aren't getting the next one from this company. Why does microsoft keep in business even with windows 8? Companies don't need a hot shot developer to to maintain it, just some kid fresh out of college will do.

If you don't want google to know everything you do on the internet. Don't use google for everything you do on the internet.

Speaking of night and weekends. If we could get a billing arrangement where our night time use wasn't counted, or counted as half it would make billing schemes like this much more tolerable. I still have a habit of saving my larger downloads for when I go to bed anyway, It goes through faster, I'm sleeping while I wait, and it doesn't disrupt my other activities. It will also only disrupt that one other guy up late downloading porn .....also. I have no idea how many users they intend to put on the same node with 1 gb caps. I feel it's safe to say that users who use that little aren't up in the middle of the night on the web. And in that case, without people like us, the network would be completely unused during those times.

they also eat sausage...

I must be a retard then because I bought several consoles. Mom bought be an NES, loved it. Bought a SNES, loved it more. Got a N64 for christmas, loved it. Bought an Xbox, loved it. Bought an Xbox360. They ALL still work, more than I can say about the computers I've owned over the last 2 decades. Xbox 360 burned a few disks, and 1 HD broke. Aside from that, a console is a bare bones dedicated system that doesn't need to be upgraded, and there is no need to check hardware requirements before buying a new game. It says Xbox, it'll work. Not going to mod my games...ever. For the same reason I quit playing WOW, picking flowers and skinning, and doing errands for NPCs(quests) quickly started to feel like work. FF8 was too grind intensive for me. As far as PC custonization goes, you can improve your performance, but on console it provides for a more even playing field. I don't have to listen to anyone whine about how they're lagging or their computer keeps locking up when we play on splitscreen. My buddy can say "hey, lets play CoD" and I can just log into my name from his console, because an extra controller is cheap and it's game on. I also usually buy most of my games a year late, because I'm che--- letting everyone practice and get up to my level. I do have fun on PC games, but I do enough damage with basic understanding of game mechanics and just reading the descriptions provided. I was a champion kite tank on my warlock a while back. I used to run the tank out of the party, then drag the party kicking and screaming through the rest of the dungeon. Their is so much PC customization, but some of those same people refuse to accept anything but the blizzard recipe of 1 tank 1 healer 3 dps. Long story short, I hand my kids a controller, they play and leave me alone. But I'm constantly being called to *fix* my 10 yr olds linux box and my wife's win7 laptop. I like to be able to say, I'll fix it later, go play xbox. Angry birds isn't going to replace any of that, now I just carry my phone instead of lugging around my gameboy...that I haven't used in years anyway....nevermind.

How's the mileage on the horse? And can he pass emissions?

WRONG! The navy is filled with some of the laziest people you'll ever meet. Everyone in the navy I've known who had a wii just flipped the controller and never actually did any of the swinging that makes it "active". I'm fairly certain they don't even get off their asses to put in a different game. On that note you can't really blame all of them, depending on where they work they may not have the space to move around enough. So unless terrorism involves flicking grenades with a Popsicle stick, there will be no wii training camps.

Right... there's a quite a mess in the embedded world with a lot of device makers stuck on bug-ridden, horribly hacked-up 2.4 kernels. In particular, the execrably unhelpful Broadcom has never released any open-source drivers for its WiFi chipsets, and no binary drivers for 2.6.x kernels (except recently for x86).

Microsoft just doesn't "get" the way Linux works. It's kind of astonishing that even the developers responsible for writing Linux kernel code there haven't figured out the value of cooperating with the kernel team. Well... maybe they have and the suits overruled them. Hard to say.

Stuff that needs Linux permissions/features explicitly, such as symlinks, I store on ext3 partitions. If I need to back them up, onto non ext3 partitions, such as when wiping the computer drive completely, I generate a tar.gz or tar.bz2 file on the directory, and back up that file onto an external drive accessible from all OS's.

For a while I tried the ext3/ifs windows driver for 2k/xp, and stored everything in Linux file systems, but I think I was hacked or something, because stuff started disappearing. I try not to use windows much on the net anymore, but for some things, mostly legacy stuff, you simply have to use it. My last version of windows that I can comfortably use is win 2k, which still has some leave you alone professional taste to it. XP has way too much bullshit automatically loaded into it, it looks prettier than 2k, but the trade offs in freedom are grave. Vista - no comment.

Citation needed. You are the second person to suggest this - I would be most interested to see a definitive source for this interpretation of his statement.

Nothing in the link you provide backs up your assertion - there is a statement about another person using forged handwriting, but not Richelieu himself. Otherwise, Richelieu's words seem to have a plain meaning on their face which is equally plausible, which is that he prided himself on being able to twist any honest words to amount to a crime under the law at the time.

I would say the national highway system has fared pretty well.... At least in the 48 continental anyway. Sure its aging and it needs some upkeep but it has been there since the days of Eisenhower. I am also pretty partial to the library system. More state and county admittedly, but there is no need or additional benefit to making it a federal system. Perhaps the solution is for states to institute their own governmental health care. Maybe not. Point being, what we have right now doesn't work.

We knew WPA was broken when it was released. It was inconvenient to wait for better IEEE security standards, so the WPA standardized on what was already implemented (which was still much better than what was out there). Ie, convenience trumps security, because wireless is all about convenience. WPA2 isn't that much better in this regard.

For example, here in California cable TV is not a state-granted monopoly. And yet, you will find close to zero overlapping cable TV regions. Why?

Because, until fairly recently, it was, in most parts of the state, a local government granted monopoly, and while the local carriers have changed hands (largely to consolidate regions and create bigger regional monopolies), there are significant barriers to entry in any local market, which means that the monopoly carriers are pretty well entrenched, with the main competition coming from alternatives to cable (satellite, services delivered over internet, though the cable providers themselves are also some of the biggest broadband providers) rather than alternative cable providers per se.