How did this get modded up? These kinds of statements say far more about the person saying them than anything closely resembling reality. I spent nearly 6 years as a plumber before I made the switch to programming and only one of these points has any validity.

Forget the fact that some summer days you'll wake up at 3:30 AM and head to the job site because by the afternoon it's too hot to throw a shovel (dig holes/trenches). Plumbing is the kind of work with mandatory overtime, 24-hour on-call shifts, AND inversely periods of time where work dries up completely (i.e., no pay).

In 3 years as programmer my income has surpassed the highest paid, 30-year veteran, Journeyman plumber at my previous place of employment. And good luck finding an employer that offers 401K contribution matching.

Tell that to my great grandfather, my grandfather, several uncles, brother, and my father - all plumbers with severe back issues starting early in their careers and worsening to a chronic state in old age.

While I'm sure that poor pay and shitty hours are a reality for some programmers, they usually have a choice whether they realize it or not. Most blue collar professions don't provide you the option to quit and find better conditions in the same field elsewhere.

If you're overworked, underpaid, and unhealthy that is on you to do something about it.

More than anything this may provide insight into the FBI's mentality... spy on your kids, spy on other people's kids, spy on everyone.

You can always make up excuses later.

You may have just validated their point. You, your friends, and significant other all consume porn.

You and your friends are involved in illegal activity. Put two and two together and you've got a network of people (allegedly) illegally downloading porn.

Having supported BB business users before and during a transition to iPhones, I can say that in most cases a user's satisfaction with BB was inversely proportional to their exposure to Android/iOS. In short, BB users may simply not know any better.

So what's your solution? The way you paint it, we're screwed if we're allowed to make decisions for ourselves and we're screwed if the rich white guys make 'em for us. Who is supposed to make the decisions?

If anything, I've always seen Facebook and Twitter as a distraction from reality (in the US). Perhaps the reasons too few people care about US foreign policy, Wikileaks information, and voting is because they're busy playing Farmville or catching up on the lasted Royal Wedding details.

I've made it a point to avoid Facebook over the years for a lot of reasons. Chiefly because of privacy concerns. I've recently found myself single, and with a pretty lacking social network. With Facebook being *the* place to build these networks, I've had to reconsider the downside to whoring out my personal data. Perhaps the question should not be how we keep the data out of the hands of government and advertisers, but how to adjust to an age (and adjust a government) where nothing is personal.

Did Slashdot take up trolling?

This is just one example of how innovation is stifled. Technology is perhaps society's most powerful tool. Yet the aged and uninitiated continue to dictate how and when we wield that power. It will be many years before technology is set free from the grasp of the ignorant.

I have all my emails backed up in a 4GB .pst!

Computers prompting user action in order to compute is never going to be the solution.

If the earth is 4.5+ billion years old, how can anyone be so blatantly ignorant as to assume that we can put stock in numbers like "the hottest decade on record" based off 200 years of climate history? I lean heavily toward environmental conservation, but for my own reasons. No one has ever been able to answer this question for me.

I'll definitely be getting work done today seeing as Slashdot has run out of actual news.