Yeah, every time I eat an LED I break out in a horrible rash!

On call 24x7, pager, company cell, laptop always available and required to respond. So no 'vacations' without cell service. Job description carefully written so that we were exempt from overtime laws and standby/oncall compensation. Figured out that just based on the number of hours physically at the NOC I was earning the same as a entry-level clerk at a nearby supermarket, and if I figured in the number of hours responding to issues outside the office I was making less than minimum wage.

Now I have no mandatory OT requirement, no mandatory on-call, 40 hour work week, 30+ days off per year (counting federal holidays), comp time, and a 401(k), and they pay, either in part or in whole, for a lot of my certifications and training.

Which is also why I support unionizing IT workers (and my current IT department is part of a union).

Actually it isn't. I work for a publicly owned electric and telecom utility. At a cost that can run upwards of a million (yes, $1,000,000) per *mile* to replace move aerial to underground, the rate payers don't generally want to pay for it. Almost all new construction is buried.

And while it seems like most of the causes for outages would be removed by going underground, you only exchange one set of causes for another. Cars get replaced by gophers. Trees on the line get replace by ice when conduit riser fills with water and freezes. Aerial teardowns due to heavy equipment become backhoes that dig on the wrong place and tear up a line.

You also have confined space issues. Now instead of everyone being certified for climbing, bucket trucks, and cranes, they also have to add confined space training and equipment (including continuing education), confined space rescue teams, interlocal or interagency agreements for CSRTs. All of these things add hidden (but not cheap) costs.

In addition fault locating and repair on an underground is much more manpower and technology intensive than aerial. All of these things drive the cost.

Another problem that factors in is environmental regulations. It is much easier (and cheaper by hundreds of thousands of dollars) to get permission to do an aerial build than underground. Every underground build had to deal with permitting for aquifer contamination, native artifacts, wetlands remediation, and so on and so forth. Permitting can add 10% to 100% to a segment of utility infrastructure.

It all boils down to costs. If you can go to your local utility board, commission, or shareholder meeting and convince them that raising rates by 50% to 500% won't get them burned out of their homes, I'll bet they would jump at it. Every utility I know would love to move most of their aging infrastructure underground.

I grudgingly reactivated my FB account a few months ago to stay in touch with family, but the minute I see the first video ad I am actually deleting my account. I HATE those. If I land on a page with a video ad, I immediately close the tab and find my content elsewhere. The exception I make to this is youtube because I'm THERE for video content.

I have similar problem with OCD/ADHD tendancies. I can fixate on conversations, music, beeps, noises, etc. I have several pairs of Panasonic RP-HC55-S noise cancelling in-ear buds (~$50), and I use either ambient music or white/pink noise tracks I have on my mp3 player. They don't cut out high frequencies as well, but the white noise masks a lot of that.

Ethernet over 9600 baud RS232 via a T1 TDM microwave channel. If you follow this entire path end-to-end you would traverse CWDM fiber and a DS3 SONET ring, all the way down to a hand-built addressable serial bridge. Also running 2400 baud serial over ethernet (yes the reverse) using a cell phone at the remote location as the modem.

Games: Civ III,IV
Galactic Civilizations II, Fallen Enchantress (Pretty please Brad?)
Mechwarrior Online
Skyrim
Star Citizen (forthcoming)

Other Apps:
Office. Seriously. This also keeps me tied to Windows and I hate it. Yes, I know about OpenOffice, but there are certain things that just don't work the way I need them too and I can't spend hours fixing every powerpoint presentation and revision I receive just so that I can use it under OO.

I agree. This list is probably opsec from DHS side. Disinformation. If it was me, I would have technically a 'keyword list' matching system specifically for release in FOIA situations like this. The actual searching/identification/tagging is algorithmic and context based and has very little to do with this list.

Not necessarily. The keyword list published probably is only the trigger key links. If you also started talking about 'social media' in the context of 'covert channel' you can bet that social media would raise a red flag.

Many of the algorithms used (especially some implementations of Bayesian filters) for this type of scoring are more than capable of correctly (or almost always correctly) identifying and excluding 'trolling'. You look for patterns of recurring words or linked words or synonymic links (aka if 'anthrax' is in my list, also look for '((bacterial OR viral)+agent)'. You look for deltas in the frequency of occurrence with persistence. Couple that with dynamic weighting based on local/national/global new events. So if you suddenly start using the words 'anthrax', 'cities', and 'target' when there isn't anything like that going on, and your conversation persists, that will get a high score. If every 17 days you post a tweet that contains a city name, a time, and a "random" dictionary word (aka a one-time crypto pad), that will probably score much higher than your talking about anthrax right after someone sends a bunch of letters with white powder around the country. IThe sophistication of the language context analysis software that is in existence is way past anything that most people realize.

Actually there is a fiscal reason that doesn't have anything to do with profit directly, but the cost of regulatory compliance. I work for a small electric utility that takes online credit card payments and payments via phone. If people understood how much it costs us in time and equipment to maintain regulatory compliance for PCI/DSS alone they might stop asking some of these questions. We spend hundreds of person hours a year to maintain our ability to provide this service to our customers. We have to perform regular internal audits. We have to perform vulnerability assessments and mitigation specifically related to PCI compliance that we would not otherwise have to mitigate. We have to pay for external audits. We have to maintain, audit, track, systems that are there specifically so that we are PCI compliant. Systems that duplicate other perfectly acceptable and functional systems but those systems don't meet certain criteria that make them 'compliant'. Failure to maintain the correct paperwork, audits, assessments, equipment, and documentation for all of the above (yes we have a paper trail to document our paperwork) can result in fines or loss of our ability to accept payments via online or phone. We only have about 40,000 customers but we dedicate close to $100,000 year in hours, and this doesn't include additional firewalls and network infrastructure capital and maintenance costs.

These regulatory burdens apply to ANY entity that accepts credit cards or e-check via phone or online. So whether you see the figure as a line item or not, you are paying for it.

I have to concur with this. In 91 or 92 (I don't remember for sure) I was one of the early group of individuals who downloaded the original PGP that Phil Zimmerman wrote from an online bulletin board. I hung onto that file until several years after the USG decided to drop the whole mess. I've advocated for global adoption of email signing (would substantially reduce the spam problem), and I've been a strong proponent of the general use of encryption and key exchange for email. Over the last couple decades I've implemented email encryption (primarily for signing) off and on, always abandoning it after a while because the percentage of people utilizing it just gets smaller each year. When I do have need to transmit encrypted files (which I do several times a year), I encrypt the files out of band (i.e. not in email) using GnuPG or OpenPGP (PGPi), and I perform the key exchange (if I don't have it) via another method. Then I email the encrypted file as an attachment, or in some cases use SFTP/SCP over ToR to transfer the encrypted data file.