This is the fasted growing sector of the economy; for the midterm election we are on track to spend as much as the last presidential election. When you add in related jobs at dark money PACs I don't see how you could not have exceptional job security.

One advantage Open Source has is that there are no deadlines and a good project leader can simply reject sub par code. For commercial code no company is going to pay a programmer big bucks and simply throw away his output because it sucks.

I use the paper method for the federal returns. Massachusetts has a WEB based application on the Department of Revenue site that I use for the state returns. It takes about twenty minutes works quite well. The federal government has a similar service, but it is run by an unnamed consortium of companies and paraphrasing their privacy policy; "We're doing nothing illegal with your most sensitive financial information". Until the Feds produce a real data protection policy I'll just keep downloading the PDF form and mailing them back.

With current technology the incremental cost of going to 24/192 is next to nothing, so why not do it? All of these effort to produce "better sounding" formats have all failed in the past because they double the price of the recordings despite that fact there are no real increases in manufacturing and distribution cost. People are basically cheap and that is why this will fail, like all of the enhanced audio formats that have proceeded it.

But, They seem to be saying that because Xerox invented Ethernet (Along with DEC I might point out) that they invented the internet. The Ethernet that xerox invented ran on RU6 coax, about as thick as your thumb, and was good for a distance of 100 Meters. It seems if you want to give Xerox credit for the internet you should at least mention XNS which was an internetworking protocol.

Going back to the bad old days, we really have to give TCP/IP credit for connectiog computers. Prior to TCP/IP the IBM mainframes ran SNA; the Vaxen used DECnet; the PCs were running either Netware (pretty much the same as XNS), NetBios or Vines; Apples were running AppleTalk; and I can't remember what Sperry/UNIVAC called thier protocol. TCP/IP was the first protocol that actually allowed all of these systeem to talk to one another. (I don't mention Suns and BSD because ther were allready running TCP/IP)

As for the growth of the Internet after it was privatized. It was growing expontentially when it was DARPAnet, it continued to expand expontentially as NSFnet, and it continued to grow after privitization.

This distinction between content delivery and content creation is probably the best comment posted to this thread. Smart phones and tablets are for content consumers and will eventually replace desk top computers for most users. Desktops will continue to be used for content creation and be used, if not be more sophisticated users, at least better trained users. So they require a different desktop. The guy who came to replace your roof was most likely driving a pickup truck, not a two seater sports car.

Actually most people liked Windows 95 a lot better than 3.1, I know I did.

It seems to me that people are not informed because the media tend to cover politics like they are a sporting event. " Gee Bret, Rommeny would have done much better in he Iowa straw poll if he ran further right on the tax issue and then cut back up the centre on abortion rights." -- All we get are poll results, tactics and points spreads. Great if your making book on the election in Vegas, but it doesn't lead to an informed electorate.

It is amazing that people still say that "Patents foster innovation" with a straight face.

The price of basic cable may not fall as much as you would like, but it may not go up as much as it would otherwise. The "bait and switch" part of the argument seems to be unclear to me. The source article was kind of fuzzy. It seems that what the cable companies are proposing is mini-bundling. A soccer fan that buys ESPN will get all the ESPN channels, even if the Ottawa curling finals are of no interest. Even this kind of unbundling is good however because it places programming decisions back on ESPN. Which now because it is a separate charge on the your cable bill has to explicitly balance between programming cost and viewer ship to keep customers.

Contractors can be useful in some situations. For example if an agency is upgrading a database system, they need people to migrate the data, test the new system and train the db admins and users. For a six month project additional costs of using contract labour is justifier. If we limit contractors to one year with a given agency they will be used on these kinds of projects and not just be overpaid perma-temps.

It doesn't matter which of the above languages that you teach. The fundamental flow control concepts are the same. Things like functions, for-loops and if-then-else are common concepts that are easily transferred to any new language that comes along. Learning a new computer language is much easier than learning your first computer language. You even acknowledged that your "good C class taught you theory that you use today"

I agree that printing money could be equally destructive; may a little less because it doesn't cost anywhere near $20 to print a twenty dollar bill. I think our difference of opinion is based on confusion between "hard currency" and "money". The world doesn't run on hard currency, it runs on money which is mostly credit. When the fed votes for quantitative easing nobody calls down to the basement and tells them to fire up the presses. New money is created by economic output which increases the supply of credit with no governmental action. These days fed can only effect changes around the edges and is mostly along for the ride. I don't disagree with bitcoin as a medium of exchange to provide trusted transactions between parties, but presenting, it as a new and improved currency is overreaching.

The biggest flaw in bitcoins is that creating them is destructive. I agree that the deflationary effect is real and serious and this alone would should be enough to prove the system is flawed. But what is worse is that to create bitcoins you expend energy while providing no beneficial goods or services. In credit based monetary system the creation of wealth is constructive. You go to work and create products and services that people want and wealth is created. The currency is a marker for these goods and services, not something that has value in and of itself.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by robocalls, annoying ceaseless rude, asserting themselves through my telephone at dinner looking to get me to refinance my debt ... When I saw Watson I was really impressed, but, sadly I thought to myself that the first real commercial application was going to be telemarketing. And look it didn't take more than a couple of months.