We get an option of a couple high end lenovo's and the 15" macbook pro retina. The shear size and weight of the thinkpad with the 170 watt power supply is basically a non-starter for people who even only travel occasionally or just to meeting rooms and back.

Lots of people in my office learning OSX now and not because they love apple or are expecting productivity gains. One guy still loves windows so much he only boots his macbook pro into Windows 7. The lenovo hardware just sucks by comparison.

The failure was in leadership not effort. People wanted to help. The FBI can and should take that into account for major incidents. Provide some outlet for people to actively help in a useful and meaningful way.

In light of the failures of facial recognition software identifying people wouldn't it have at least been useful to have an FBI website where people could tag people against facial images the FBI has determined to be unique?

As a 40ish year old technical engineer I can tell you that I spend less time chasing ideal solutions and much less time believing marketing hype. You assume that your co-workers don't want to learn new technology but you've skipped the entire story about the requirements for the deployment.

My advice to keep you employed is to find a mentor, one of them you get along with well and go to them with these questions. Hey Bill, can I ask why we chose to use XP for these PC's rather than something more current? For all you know it's a business policy that all PC's deployed this year use XP until the company cuts over to 7. Pissing off people high enough to fire you with off handed comments about technology is a good way to get fired but there is nothing wrong with people knowing that you are a fan of xyz technology.

Successful non-technical businesses do not upgrade because it's a possibility, they upgrade when doing so makes them money or they can no longer buy support for what they already have. Your job as a tech or engineer is to learn the new stuff as you can so you are ready to support it when eventually they switch but don't bother recommending upgrading until you can justify the cost in savings. Dollars is what the real world is about, not just running the latest software.

As far as the age thing goes, some people have a passion for technology, some people don't. As someone who does many technical interviews both right out of college and also people switching technologies I can tell you that age is a poor indication of how good of a engineer they turn out to be. Passion, interest count for more. There are college graduates that will obviously go far and some that will just sit around and facebook all day. Older engineers have the same differences.

tl;dr: Been there, done that. Learn to come up with business cases for choosing new technology when appropriate and businesses will almost always follow the savings.

In video it seems a lot more common sense and a lot less scandal.

http://gawker.com/5419271/google-ceo-secrets-are-for-filthy-people

Basically, Google is subject to the law of the land. Your searches are retained for some time and if you absolutely want to make sure that the information doesn't end up in government hands (via legal methods) then don't search for it.

Simple and truthful advice that any tech savy person would give.

On a high school level then yes, states generally chose text books that everyone in that grade uses. We don't pay for those books though, they are free so there is no real real need to come out with many many editions with small changes since the states are large customers who have good bargaining power. The only way that students would have to pay for these would be to replace ones that they destroyed.

Once students enroll in University though they buy their own books, many of the teachers have "authored" their own books which they then require people to purchase to make more money for themselves. The teachers (authors) usually change the text often not to improve the quality of the book but to make sure you have to purchase a new one so they make money.

Just for Fun, some numbers from Wikipedia

France 260,558 sq mi
US 3,794,066 sq mi

1/14th size of the US in square miles

US GDP 14,264,600
France 2,865,737

1/5th size of US in GDP

US population 298,213,000
France population 60,496,000

1/5th the size of US in population

I'm sorry but some people are idiots and they shouldn't be working the job they have. If you can't find someone to hire who knows how to setup DHCP you are a cheap bastard. Hire a competent person and stop asking other people to tell you how to do your own job. I see a lot of this in the US right now and I'm non too happy to have to do other peoples jobs for them when I'm getting paid for it let alone when I'm not.

This whole new password every 90 days things blows monkey chunks too. All it does is make me have a half a dozen passwords or more likely variations on a few passwords that I never know which one belongs where and end up putting every valid password into all the wrong sites.

If the password is strong to begin with then changing it every 90 days is stupid. Who's to say the password I change it to isn't next on the list to be guessed?

Monitor systems for strange access, restrict my access to just what I need, let me know the last place and time I access sensitive systems from and leave my fracking password alone.