Your story was very good. It reminded me of something I did to a co-worker about 20 years ago. I was working for the federal government at a military base in the US. I was in an IT department but we had a small number of senior level paper pushers who didn't do any programming. One of them was a lady who was barely computer literate. I wrote a DOS batch script that called a C program I wrote and installed both on her PC. When the PC got powered up, the batch script called my C program. The program grabbed any keyboard input, shifted it into the ASCII range for Greek letters and echoed it back in Greek with a message that the command was not understood. After doing that 3 times, the program would say that it was doing a "DOS memory dump - do not abort!" and printed lines of dots below ii, opened a new file and deleted it to make the disk active (these old PCs were noisy when you did that) after printing each dot and waited until a counter was reached (about1 minute on average), whereupon the program terminated and normal control returned to the PC. It had been some time since I installed it and myself and another guy (he knew about it) were the guys who got notified about PC problems and she never said anything. So one day I just went into her office and asked her about it. I told her it was a joke. She told me that when she saw it, she just turned the PC off and never used it again! I didn't expect that. It really spoke volumes about the quality of "work" that Uncle Sam was getting out of her.

Only about 31% of US federal workers are unionized. The majority of these are in blue collar jobs. I used to work for the federal government as a computer programmer and none of my fellow IT workers were in a union. Given how it's against the law for federal employees to strike (look up what President Reagan did to the air traffic controllers if you don't know), most federal workers view union membership as a waste of money. I can tell you from what I saw at my job that the only thing the union could do if you were going to be laid off or fired for just cause was to delay the inevitable. You would still lose your job, but they might delay it for a year if they fought against the action. The post by Shivetya is just another example, at least in the USA, of people having big misconceptions about federal jobs.

Ossetia and Abkhazia have always been part of Georgia, but in the days of the USSR, it didn't matter who they belonged to as long as they were in the USSR. With independence, the regions are majority ethnic Russian and they didn't like being joined to an ethnic group (Georgian) who they regard as being something equivalent to rednecks or hillbillies in the USA. So they kicked all the ethnic Georgians out or killed them and proclaimed independence. Being on the border with Russia, Russia sent troops in officially as "peacekeepers" but in reality to prevent a weak Georgian military from re-taking them. But they belong to Georgia. Recognizing their independence is just a sham to justify the illegal action of basically stealing the territories from Georgia.

Kosovo is somewhat different in that genocidal warfare basically made many countries argue for independence as the only way to protect the citizens. There's nothing really analogous to this in Georgia as in Ossetia and Abkhazia they kicked out the non-Russians and the Russians were never in any real danger to begin with, although they like to claim that they were to justify kicking out the Georgians.

That's not correct. T-Mobile uses the 1900 band in the USA and all the iPhones support that fine. It's trivial to find accounts of people with unlocked iPhones who currently use them on T-Mobile in the USA. T-Mobile doesn't have the iPhone in the USA because they were basically unwilling and perhaps unable to pay Apple's exorbitant prices to get permissions to sell it.

I'm something of a student of human nature and I'm really good at observing people and understanding their motivations and often making accurate predictions on what I see. I believe that about 10% or so of human beings are just like RMS. I don't like to use the term "fanatic" because while technically correct, I think it's too limiting. You see, people like RMS don't just see software in those terms or one thing in life in a fanatical way, they see everything in life in narrow terms. I call them "people who see everything in black and white". These people do not agonize over any day to day decisions like which model of car should I buy. Everything to them is crystal clear - good - bad, right - wrong, great - terrible, etc. Everything to them is quite clear and there's no areas of gray or ambiguity.

One of the things about these people is that they tend to be very religious. Now that does not mean that all religious people are like that, despite what many Slashdotters would love to believe, but it does mean that these people do tend to gravitate towards religion. For example, I believe that most of Al Queda's membership is made up of these people. This is why they are willing to commit suicide - the evil in non-believers is so apparent that it's repulsive to them. People who see the world in black and white will sometimes change their minds on something and they will go from opposing it to promoting it or from loving it to hating it. But they don't go back and forth. If they change their minds, that change is probably permanent. And they tend to be completely obsessed with following the "rules", which at times may be religious teachings, and punishing those who do not obey those same rules. They're the kind of people who want severe punishments for minor infractions, like wanting to put someone in jail for a year for running a stop sign. I served on a jury 7 years ago with a guy like this and it was not pleasant as it took some incredible work by our foreman to get him to agree to a guilty verdict on 2 of 3 counts we had to decide on when 11 of us felt strongly that he was innocent on one count and this one guy threatened to hang the jury unless we voted guilty on all 3 counts.

The most frustrating thing about people like this is that they do not get at all that they are the weird ones. They mistakenly believe that everybody sees the world in the same clear cut way that they do. So this is why you are almost always wasting your time in trying to reason with them and get them to see another point of view. To them any other point of view is irrational and they believe that anyone who holds another point of view is insane because they think that no rational person could ever believe something different from them. So this is why when people rail against RMS and point out inconsistencies or fallacies with his arguments that he digs in. He's truly incapable of seeing any other point of view because he views such as irrational and illogical. At least, that's my guess.

Actually, I think the manufacturer thought that it would be more like something you'd see on TV in CSI where only the super-duper elite criminals would be able to pick the locks, not "some dude who watched a video on YouTube or found a web page on how to do it". It's kind of like car alarms. Car alarms don't exist to stop the elite thieves because they won't. They exist to stop Joe Crackhead from trying to steal your car. What happened basically is somewhat equivalent to finding a way to turn off the car alarm so Joe Crackhead is now a serious threat to steal your car with impunity.

Many people use EAC (Exact Audio Copy) for ripping without realizing that it has known speed issues for ripping. Try using a BD drive to rip with it. Your rips will take about an hour for one audio CD. The slow ripping speed is a known issue that has yet to be fixed. EAC is free, so you get what you pay for. I don't rip audio CDs much, but when I do I now use the free CDex which has much better times.

The original post, by an Anonymous Coward, has vanished, so I am having to quote it from PlusFiveTroll's quoting of it.

For quite some time now all SSDs have had 3 year limited warranties. I can't remember if anybody ever truly offered a lifetime warranty. If they did it was probably 2+ years ago. For what it's worth, I bought a 256 GB Crucial SSD in Jan. 2011 and it still works great. Some really are defective out of the box, but the number one thing to remember is that before you use it, you must update it to the current release of firmware. As far as I can tell, every SSD there is ships with older, defective firmware on it. If the AC really and truly has burned through 6 SSDs in a short period of time, he's doing something wrong. I just cannot accept that this would happen without the user being responsible in some way by not updating firmware, using it on a PC without UPS support and subjecting it to repeated power loss, failing to turn off defragmentation if using the drives under Windows, etc.

Indeed. More accurate would be:
In Soviet Russia, IKEA not exist. People buy furniture at local GUM!
(GUM is the Russian abbreviation for Glavnyi Universalnyi Magazin or Gosudarstvennyi Universalnyi Magazin, which was the state run department store in largish cities in the old Soviet Union)

I joined match.com earlier this year and I'm currently going month to month. I sure wouldn't call it a positive use of technology as the main article states. It's not been a complete waste of my time and money but it has mostly been a waste of them both. My experiences might be interesting to other geeks so I'll describe how it really works.

Match requires both you and the person you contact to be paying members to be able to read and send email. Yes, you cannot even read email unless you are a paying member. The reality of this is that as most women do not pay (I cannot speak for male members as I am a guy looking for women), most of your attempts to contact women will never be read. Match won't even tell you who sent email unless you pay. Everything is about money. I've been on other dating websites that allowed some limited exchange of email if one party was a paying member, but Match doesn't do that. This is the number one impediment in trying to meet people on the site.

I cannot prove this, but based on my experience and what I've read online, I suspect that Match by default turns off IM for women members. Non paying members can communicate by IM if a paying member initiates it, but the interface is poor and many people don't notice IM notifications if they get them. And some women aren't tech savvy enough to ever turn on IM, so there's no hope of communicating with them either if they don't pay and don't ever turn on IM.

About half the profiles I see could be classified as "Barbie doll seeks Ken doll." Then you have a rather large number of women with insanely restrictive requirements and they won't even talk to anyone who is outside of them. I've seen short women who only want to date guys over a foot taller than them. I've seen women who only want to meet guys within 1 year either way of their age. I recently saw a profile from a woman who only wanted to meet guys who were 20-37 years younger. No kidding. I also have seen a ton of seriously pissed off women who write very negatively about their Match experience in their profiles. These woman may not have very restrictive requirements, but they don't get any contacts except from perverts it seems. One thing that people should keep in mind is that Match has a cutoff where if you don't login within 3 weeks, they put that your last login was "over 3 weeks ago". Once a woman drops into the "over 3 weeks ago" category, the odds are rather high that she got angry about her experience and she's not going to pay to re-join. Many women are gym rats and between their jobs and the 2 hours a day, 7 days a week, they spend in the gym, it's no wonder they can't meet anyone. But they always have such restrictive requirements anyway that if any guy does contact them, they'll probably never respond.

I am convinced that Match is being run deliberately to prevent most people from making meaningful connections because your failure keeps you renewing your membership, thinking "this month will be the one". In America in the past 15+ years there's been this crazy shift thanks to TV and movies where many people are convinced that there is one and only one perfect person for them. Many of these people are on Match. They never find anyone because they never meet their preconceived perfect person. A lot of women members are on there only rolling the dice that maybe Taylor Lautner will contact them and if he doesn't, they're simply not interested.

Match hasn't been a complete waste of my time and money, but it has been really frustrating. A lot of my female and male friends who joined in the past have nothing good to say about it. It's like having a part time sales job only you find out that you don't get paid until you hit a mystery quota of sales. That sales target might be $1000 or it could be $1 million. You don't know. And if you quit before you reach the target, you don't get paid. But as you have no way of knowing how close or far you are from the target, you might have to work a long time to get paid. If you're going to join and you're not extraordinarily good looking, you're probably going to be on the site for quite a while until you find someone. On the plus side they have a ton of members, but on the negative side very few of those members are ever going to find anyone on Match because they're too unrealistic. I did meet a few women on Match who I liked, but this is long enough so I won't go into details. All I can say is that if you join, get ready to work at it because it is going to take a lot more effort than you might think to get responses. Match isn't the best dating website out there, but I've heard of worse. The only ones that I know of that are better have a lot fewer members and there's some definite downside to that.

There. Fixed that quote for you.

I'm just making a wild guess here, but maybe upper HP management decided that Autonomy was the only possible means of getting HP back on track. This probably filtered down the chain of command to the people doing the investigation. They may have just chosen to gloss over anything that seemed funny because they were convinced that management did not want to find any problems as if this acquisition didn't go through, HP was going to get beat up financially in the stock market and more layoffs were likely. Or we have to accept that Autonomy was just insanely good at hiding their malfeasance even though various stock traders had been shorting the stock for months because they felt their financials were fishy and somehow the traders figured out what the investigators couldn't. I find that unlikely.

I see this as kind of a variation on the way that decisions sometimes got made in the old USSR. During the days of the Soviet Union, bureaucrats got into the habit of anticipating the needs/wishes of their superiors. I'm guessing that there's probably a culture of fear in HP where the masses are afraid of layoffs and those at the top probably shoot the messengers when they get bad news, so this was a natural outcome.

If by saying you "want to buy" music you really mean that ONLY downloads are acceptable, I cannot help you at all.

If you are willing to buy audio CDs, then the following are legitimate sellers for 2 of the countries in your list.
1) Chinese music can be bought at http://www.yesasia.com./ I've bought from them for years and they do not sell any bootlegged product. Period. "Chinese music" includes just about anything sold in mainland China plus Hong Kong and Taiwan. There's also http://www.amazon.cn/ but I've never bought anything from them and can't really offer any guidelines on how easy/difficult it is to use their website or what kind of selection they have. I think it has an English interface, but you'll find YesAsia much easier to deal with. YesAsia also sells books and movies for those interested in such things. I mostly buy movies from them.
2) For Brazilian music you can deal with http://www.somlivre.com.br/ who also does not sell anything bootlegged and they also sell movies and Portuguese language books.

I'm a long time AT&T customer. I'm going to explain to the OP what his situation really is. He can either accept the reality of it or go on his Don Quixote quest to be a one man army against AT&T.

AT&T no longer wants to support their DSL service. So they do things to make it unpleasant for customers who can now get Uverse but have chosen not to do so. The DSL service drops constantly and I believe this is deliberately done to make people angry enough to abandon it. If you switch to Uverse, you will find that your completely unreliable DSL connection has been replaced magically with a completely reliable Uverse connection. Uverse also has much higher download limits. I've never even come close to using all of mine. The Uverse service is so much better and more reliable than their DSL offering that I would suggest you consider switching if you can. They are going to continue to make it painful for DSL customers who could switch but choose not to.

I'm not at all suggesting that the OP's contention that age may be working against him isn't true. However, I have often found that when people over 50 in IT "can't get hired" that what they are conveniently leaving out is the following - they live in some small town of 50,000 or fewer people and there simply aren't any more jobs available in that small town like what they used to do. They aren't willing to move because they have paid off a house or are close to paying it off, have kids in school and don't want to move them, etc.