There's an easy answer for that, once you've had 16+ years in the industry, and I stumbled onto it by accident, and thanks to this one weird tip I have gotten a raise every few months.

That weird tip: keep your Dice, Monster, and Linked In profiles active and up to date.

I'm not currently looking for a change, but last week I had 48 hours in which I had 12 recruiter calls. And I've been able to wrangle a 2%-4% raise out of every job change for the past three years.

"The vast majority of your deities, including today's most popular ones were conjured up by winos and opium addicts."

Yes, they were. You can tell them from the real thing by not being universal and lacking the ability to say, choose the gravitational constant for the entire universe.

And this problem, unfortunately, extends to the settings. Which settings are in the Control Panel, and which are in "PC Settings"? Who knows? Do the settings in the metro-based "PC Settings" only apply to the metro environment? Nope. There's not a clear distinction.

I think part of the problem there is they were thinking, "Well we have all of these aging applications like Paint and Windows Photo Viewer. Instead of fixing them or making newer versions, let's just replace them with Metro apps!" So you have the metro apps which are simplified. They're simplified both because the metro UI requires simplification, and because they're new applications that haven't undergone years of development.

But they didn't seem to consider that, as a user, this leaves you with a dilemma between two unappealing options: Either use the old, dated "Windows Classic" applications that have sucked since they were written 20 years ago, or go with the new underdeveloped "Metro" applications that create a jarring experience every time you open them.

Generally yes. "System Tools" is under "Accessories" and has like Windows Backup, Disk Cleanup, Disk Defragmenter, Task Scheduler. "Accessories" also included communication tools (Remote Desktop, HyperTerminal) and other things like Window Explorer, Notepad, Calculator, IE, etc. Of course, Microsoft made a regular habit of shuffling those things around a bit with every release, but it was relatively stable for 15 years.

In Windows 8? That stuff probably isn't on your start screen, so you'll have to search for it, or else switch the view to show all the applications. The list of applications is unfortunately flat, so you can't rely on the same kind of spacial orientation that nested folders provided in the star menu.

And they won't be able to. On the desktop, you can already maximize windows if you want a "full screen app", but most of the time, it's extremely useful to have non-maximized windows arranged freely on the screen.

Google has enabled applications that are cached and run locally, without need of an internet connection, and basically appear to be local apps. Their strategy seems to be to use this method to enable cross-platform application development on any platform capable of running the Chrome browser.

Because honestly, what difference does it make if the browser was created using HTML, CSS, and Javascript? If it runs locally and looks like a local application, you might not even notice the difference.

This is the correct response. Net neutrality is the only way to preserve freedom in the "market" of Internet services. The ISP market is not an example of free market capitalism. There are various governmental restrictions on where you can lay infrastructure, and the cost of that infrastructure presents an extremely high barrier to entry. This results in a monopoly or duopoly in most areas in the United States. Therefore, we're not talking about a "free market".

So if you want to allow for a free market of services provided over that infrastructure, you have to bar the ISPs from playing favorites, or using their control to further their own agendas. For example, if you want to allow services like Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, and Box to all compete in a "free market", then you need a level playing field. You can't allow Comcast, Time Warner, and Verizon to all decide that they'll partner with Box, and throttle access to the rest. If they did, that would give Box a de facto monopoly over the market, and no one would have an opportunity to compete.

And it's the competition that provides all those nice features that capitalism is supposed to provide-- the "invisible hand" and all that. So that's all that "net neutrality" does; it provides a level playing field, which enables competition. It's actually a very capitalist policy.

I would have my doubts that this were the real explanation. Maybe for a few people here and there, but most techies that I know wouldn't mind things being much easier. I think it's more of a stubbornness and resistance to change, maybe with a little bit of laziness in the realm of "I don't want to have to relearn things." And as you say, "I've developed some ways to make my life easier, and I don't want to re-develop them all."

Of course, there's also the possibility that some of the new ways of doing things are actually not as good as the old. That can happen too. All of these things can happen, but I don't know many IT people who actually go looking for ways to create job security. For most of us, the "laziness" overcomes that, and we're overloaded enough with other work that we're just looking to make things as easy as possible.

I said that druggies were harmful to themselves. The entire intent of getting high is to escape reality, so why are you even arguing the fact that I acknowledge that those who get high are escaping reality?

The Objective universe does exist, even when your brain is too addled to notice. Plenty of people have met their ends while high because of that.

Better than somebody who continually uses illicit substances to specifically blur the line.

"What miniscule fraction write screeds and take up arms"

Approximately 10%. But that's not the reason I say Islam is a fake. The reason I say Islam is a fake is because as a theology, it can be used to justify everything from Sufi to ISIS and everything in between. There is no coherent morality to Islam, because Allah himself, as portrayed in the Koran, is not a faithful God, is not coherent from verse to verse.

A similar problem can be found in the Old Testament, and has inspired an awful lot of fundamentalism and atheism in Christianity and Judaism, perhaps the extreme example that can be found in our time, and a close cousin to the violence of ISIS, is Zionism in Israel.

"Catholicism has the bloody destruction and enslavement of the Americas on it's conquistador hands."

Yes.

"Islam - past and present - has nothing to shade that, by way of comparison."

Have you paid attention to what has been happening in Africa in the last 150 years?

"The "muslims" that you see and read about with violent conversion and conquest? They are created, inflated and supplied by the various trans-national agencies and alliances in Global para-politics."

They've been in existence far longer- the Sunni/Shi'a split happened within a generation of the death of the Prophet.

Maybe just that they want an audience...?

So you're saying, "You can't claim that there's no value in watching the video unless you've seen it." On the face of it, it seems reasonable. But then, if I were to claim that there's no value in watching it, then why would I have watched it? If I had chosen to watch it of my own accord, then it would actually undercut my argument that there's not value in watching it. Obviously I would have thought that there was *some* value, or I wouldn't have watched it.

It's a little like saying, "I'm against gun control, but don't even argue with me unless you own a gun. If you don't own a gun, then you don't understand guns, and so you should just stay out of the conversation." It kind of almost sounds sensible until you think about it.

I think, rather, that it falls on you, as someone who has seen it, to explain what value I would get from watching it. Other than a sadistic juvenile rubberneckinig enjoyment from seeing something awful, what would I get out of watching it?

You know, I've thought about why this is the case, and here are a couple of thoughts that I had:

1) With all we've found out about big businesses cooperating with the NSA, I wouldn't be too surprised if the NSA had, in some ways, actively discouraged security and encryption.

2) I think part of the problem is coming up with, agreeing on, and an implementing a set of standards. We don't do standards anymore. Everyone has little walled gardens. We're not going to come up with better email standards, for example, because the days of everyone wanting to agree on protocols like SMTP and POP3 and IMAP are over. Now Google wants to have its own email standards and protocols, Microsoft wants to have its own, and Facebook wants to have its own. You aren't going to get those companies together into a room, working towards a better solution that they can all use. Even if you had a better protocol all worked out, they wouldn't use it. It's a combination of "not invented here" syndrome and "I want to control the patents and the infrastructure" and finally, "I don't even want people to be able to communicate with people on my service unless they also sign up for my service."

3) People prefer to do nothing than to undertake change. Fixing things takes effort, and your attempts to fix things might not go according to plan. As long as nobody important to yelling at them to get things fixed, a lot of people would rather sit back and watch things fall apart.

In being able to tell fantasy from reality, quite possibly.

As in, ordinary "Neurotypical" people are not capable of it.