Too bad the security officers haven't caught up with this news, because all pretty much just require destruction still.

Correct me if I'm wrong, government contracting experts, but a little known factoid is that the government can just terminate any contract it wants to at any time, if it can be shown it's in the best interests of the government. Contractors, OTOH, may not.

I have contracted with many government agencies over 16 years. This issue is a lot larger than your one customer. When the government mandates that drives containing sensitive material be destroyed, they mean it, and will not back down, no matter how logical your alternative. The security gurus, if you can call them that, take the approach, better safe than sorry. Rather than doing an expensive study to determine if data truly is gone when you write it over dozens of times with random data, it's just easier to mandate to smash the hard drive with a 10 pound sledge dozens of times. That said, if the hard drives aren't changing hands, it seems silly to me that they'd mandate you destroy all of the old drives and start the same project over again with all new ones...unless I'm missing something. As long as the drives stay at the same classification from the same agency, usually they don't have to go anywhere. However, if the data from the old project must go away, and the new project is unrelated, I might see why they want the old data destroyed. In my experience, though, if equipment never leaves the room, and the room never changes classification, it usually stays. Remember, it's a "better safe than sorry" situation with the government. They won't listen to an alternative, because it's a government-wide security mandate, and they never deviate from those. Given a choice between listening to your security officer and listening to your intellect, listen to your security officer every time. You'll keep your job and your security clearance.

Hah, it's not on the list. I win.

I already put 35 solar panels on my house, switched to 100% wind for when I have to buy, and I drive a hybrid (maybe soon an electric). Quite frankly, my family has a CYA on this one. Do your part!

Most people, perhaps geeks included (myself certainly) just want their desktop to work. I'll worry about what OS to choose for my server, but my desktop just needs to be (a) compatible with all of the latest hardware, (b) able to run loads of great software for pictures, videos, games, desktop publishing, etc. and (c) just work when I want it to. I have enough to worry about. Building my OS from scratch and compiling the software for it just isn't on my to do list.

My personal experience with FreeBSD has been 2 motherboards that wouldn't work, because nobody in the community could figure out the drivers for them, no hardware RAID support for the card I wanted, and several days of my life getting it all loaded and configured the way I needed. No thank you, not again!

Cutting the commute alone is probably worth more than the 7k bump in salary to many people. Why? It makes them happier.

Also consider this. Your employee/employer relationship is a business transaction. You deciding to leave or stay should be purely a business decision relative to your career and life. If it will improve your career and life, go for it.

It's not always that way. I work in contracting for the US government. Moving from company A to company B is like changing from riding the bus to riding the train. It just doesn't matter who you work for, because your customer is the same.

So, I guess it depends. Is company B promising you a career path, future training, a career? Or is just a cold call offer for a job and no other details? Ask more questions.

Yes. I once worked for a supervisor (younger than me) who was friends with one of his supervised employees. When I joined the company, their friendship flourished for many months, but one day, the employee did something where management (his friend) had to step in. Their friendship went right out the door that day.

Take the new job, but promise to consult back to the old company (assuming it's ok with the next company). There was a period of 4 months, I went back to my old company as an independent consultant part time until the project was done.

There's also this. It's your current company's own fault for putting all of their eggs into one basket, you. They should know better, and they should have a contingency plan if you should leave, die or otherwise fail to come to work. That's their problem. To put all of that burden onto you is unfair and stupid on their part.

Uh, just how are people supposed to write term papers, fill in spreadsheets for their boss or work on their resumes on a tiny screen with no keyboard? OK, sure there are some mobile phones and some tablets where you can add a keyboard (or a dock of some kind), either out now or coming down the pike, but do you really want to do the big projects without that nice 20 or so inch widescreen monitor, keyboard and mouse? I sure don't.

What about gamers? I just bought a PC with a nice graphics card in it so I could play the high end games.

What about large computation and memory-hungry programs, like photo and video processing? No, I'm not talking about a business, I'm talking about your average digital camera owner that likes to touch up their photos and videos before presenting them to their family and friends. I do. I sure as hell wouldn't want to do that on any computer with less than 2 cores and 4GB of ram (I currently have 8 cores and 8GB of ram).

What about servers? Businesses do not operate their web sites, e-mail and other services on fracking tablets and cell phones!

Who the hell are these people predicting the end of the PC?! They're absolute morons!

Reading news online is nice and all; I do it all the time and I like it. But, that's only when my butt is firmly planted in a chair at my computer, which is no where near my breakfast, lunch or dinner, when I actually want to read the news. I much prefer reading the newspaper for comfort. It also comes with a lot of extras that online doesn't.

Normally, I'd say do what you like the best, but in this case, do what the market wants. At 41, I'm expensive and falling behind in technical skills. I've gone from being a Systems Engineer back to a Systems Administrator with more server room and virtualization experience, and my salary has not changed for the past 4 years. I'm now also a small business owner and a consultant. I'm boning up on my corporate and management skills a lot more than my old technical skills. I'm learning how to attract and land contracts, manage employees and so forth. If I stay strictly technical, my salary and skills will plateau (they already have). No one wants to employ an expensive SysAdmin. They do want to employ cheaper employees on a contract that I manage. So, my strategy is to learn how to get those contracts and then hire the employees myself, earning my company revenue (and thus me, a higher salary).

My advice: learn what the market wants at the price you want to get paid. Go to salary.com or some other service and find out what the average and range of salary are for the job you want to do. If your salary expectations are higher than that job, consider switching to another set of skills that will pay your salary.

...unlike digital broadcast TV, which was a bit painful, but I got through it...after a few thousand dollars in equipment upgrades over the years.

Give me a good reason to use, or make me use it, or I will continue blissfully using the Internet without it. So far, that's worked for me.

I'd have to buy a new router, my ISP just hasn't come up with a good plan to roll it out, and I haven't even used it at work for my entire 17 year Systems Engineering career.

Also, to all those who tout DNS as the savior for remembering complex IP(v6) addresses, consider this, router & firewall rules don't use DNS, logs record IPs not names, and when you roll out large amounts of servers or workstations and have to enter in the IPs manually, who wants to enter in a 128-bit hex address? I find it much easier to remember what 192.168.0.x stands for than 3ffe:1900:4545:3:200:f8ff:fe21:67cf. I can even recall my Internet IP address from memory without relying on DNS (which I've had to do a few times).

I'll make the switch on the Internet when my ISP mandates it and I get a new router. But, as for my LAN, I really have no desire to use it.