Outsourcing has definitely made me work harder and remember to say "Yes Sir!" to my overlords when they ask me to fetch coffee.

The kits that used to be just a random collection of bricks are a lot harder to find today. Head over to Toys-R-Us and almost all of it (other than big blox things for toddlers) are specialized kits. Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Star Wars, etc. The lego kits we had in the 70s or 80s just aren't common at local stores.

People have to get the legislators to make laws saying what is right or wrong. The legal system is only there to decide whether those laws were followed correctly or not and to adjudicate in cases of disputes over the law. Thus the anger of the people needs to be directed towards congress and not the judges.

How about terrified that it's another civil war in the brewing, and that these thugs appear little different from the thugs in eastern Ukraine or northern Nigeria who take power when the government is weakened?

Most of the land was originally the feds in the first place and only leased to others. And before then the land belonged to the natives who lived in the area before the white man came and decided they wanted it instead. At no point in the long history of southern Nevada was there ever a divinely granted right to this farmer or his ancestors to own or occupy the land.

The lesson of Nevada is that there are self entitled people who don't realize that they belong to a country. This guy only had grazing rights because the feds allowed it in the first place. Since he is not a native American then the land he is on is only his through the good will of the federal government. If his cattle were grazing on some other private citizen's land then you could be sure that those cattle would have been removed from the land, possibly shot, and any incursion by the cattle's owner with an accompanying gang of militia onto someone else's land would have been likely met with violence. But instead the land he's tresspassing on is the fed's land so that makes it ok to the anarchists.

I don't believe that's true. Most of the bullies I knew in school would never have been able to become cops and most certainly never judges. The people I knew from school who did become cops were not bullies.

Teachers are essentially forbidden from controlling the classroom anymore. Parents disapprove of this. Their children are special angels who can do no wrong. A teacher who uses disclipline, even non-physical discipline such as detention, can get into a lot of trouble with the school and the school can get into a lot of trouble with the parents.

School admins have basically hamstrung themselves. They have zero policy rules which remove the need for any thinking, and indeed even forbid any independent decision making. These changes have been brought about through fear of lawsuits, fear of what would happen if there was a school shooting and there was some rule they failed to implement that may have prevented it, and fear of angry parents (and I put a lot of blame on parents too for being too protective of their precious snowflakes and intimidating schools into making the changes).

I had the update waiting in the list of optional updates (listed as "important") but it was not automatically installed for me.

Y2K was indeed going to be a problem. But there weren't too many serious problems precisely because people did something about it. There was enough warning that there was some time to solve things. In 1996 even we had some Y2K problems. The myth was that things would suddenly die at midnight on 1/1/2000 which was not what Y2K was all about.

And sometimes it took months or years for any patches to come out, sometimes never.

I remember the first internet worm that attacked via sendmail. The thing was that a core group of insiders knew about the bug and had patched their systems, but the larger community of sysadmins had no idea that the vulnerability existed. It was especially a problem for those systems were the people operating it relied only on official documentation from vendors and who didn't hang out on usenet or at conferences. It wasn't open source, as only people who spent the extra money could get the source and recompile to fix things, assuming they knew something needed fixing. I think one of the big changes from how I saw it was that after the worm the communication became more open about security issues.

Encryption is meant to make the original text be obscure, however the means of encryption should not remain obscure. What "security through obscurity" refers to is the common and naive practice of assuming that no one will guess your security methods, and the problem is that people do find this stuff out. Ie, assuming that no one will guess your backdoor debugger password. Now it is fine to start with a strong set of security practices and then only after that is in place it can be made more obscure. But usually when something is made obscure it is because the security is really weak in the first place.

As for ActiveX, the problem was not that the end user would go and hunt down a trusted plug in and install it, but that it relied upon the web to tell you if something was trusted and then automatically install it (and for the average user this happened even without their knowledge). This was done at the same time that Java was promoted as an alternative, a system that was intended to be designed for security by sandboxing the code (though of course it had flaws) as well as being cross platform, whereas ActiveX was all about taking plain x86 code and executing it as long as it was signed.

The real problem with ActiveX was the idiotic idea from Microsoft that it should be installed automatically without bothering the users with annoying questions such as asking for permission first; they did the same boneheaded move by allowing executables in emails to be executed without a confirmation. It wasn't until they started added UAC that it seemed they understood what the problem was.

The issue is more with the home users, without an in-house IT support group. They most likely don't even know what Windows 8.1 Update 1 is, much less that they should be on the net researching how to get it installed.

Can't do that, because the IRS makes you pay a penalty if you end up owing too much taxes. If you force everyone to do quarterly estimated taxes then they'd soon vote in a law to allow paycheck withholding. So you'd also have to do away with penalty for underpayment during the year.