Sounds like you didn't get as much of a feature/value lift as I did, except maybe newer hardware, and possibly improved audio quality.

Yeah, we probably both got the Kyocera XV. I already had a 4G plan with Verizon, so the new phone rolled neatly into it for $20/month for service (same as the old phone).

If you got something in writing that service was going to be shut down in December, and were sold an unnecessary phone under what you reasonably believe were false pretenses, you might want to at least lodge a complaint with your state's Attorney General or even Public Service/Utilities Commission. If enough people do that, it might get their attention. Even the most indifferent state governments don't take kindly to mistreatment of the disabled.

How old was your phone? It's unlikely that anyone bought a 3G-only phone for the past five years, at least. Did you not get better service/features with your new phone? Did you take advantage of the opportunity to pay for the phone over 24 months? Was 300 dollars an unreasonable price?

I was suspicious that the deadline would be extended, but also didn't want to wait until the last minute. I kept an old flip phone for battery life and range to support travel and professional on-call. It was 10 years old, on its original battery, and still working, but I got a better, 4G LTE phone with similar battery life and more features (HD voice, water and shock resistant, Wi-Fi calling, e-mail, FM radio, additional legacy bands for roaming on other carriers). It was $240, and I could pay $10/month for 24 months. My old phone started to show just "1X" around town, and had noticeable drop-outs of service on rural highways, drop-outs that seem smaller on the 4G network.

... All employees who failed the phishing test were given a can of delicious peanut brittle.

Not all engineering graduates become engineers, or stay "pure" (hands-on, technical) engineers. Practicing engineers (i.e., in specific enumerated fields where incompetence directly risks the safety of the general public) can often be distinguished by state licensing (such as "Engineer in Training" (EIT) or "Professional Engineer" (PE)), though that may not be required for engineers employed by larger companies (the "Industrial Exemption"). Not sure how far along Padilla went along the EIT/PE path, but Aerospace, like Hughes where Padilla first worked, is one of those fields where most engineers work for larger companies and are not licensed. Even those who initially work as engineers may go on to related fields. A typical technical engineering career may last an average of seven years, with engineers transitioning to other jobs, like management, "Systems Engineering" (essentially Program Management, working with part selection, vendor relationships, staffing, and budgets, with the math closer to accounting than scientific), even medicine or patent law.

Padilla's engineering career faced challenges with the Cold War draw-down of defense budgets, and he found passions elsewhere fighting for the rights and dignity of fellow Hispanics. Others trained as engineers, like Lee Iacocca at Ford and later Chrysler, found the work experience too dry and overspecialized (in his case, designing modulators in automatic transmissions) and moved into sales and management. There's no implied professional failure in doing engineering for a while, then moving on if something else stokes your passions stronger.

Similarly, not all politicians are, or should be, lawyers. Our Founding Fathers anticipated that our representatives would come from all walks of life. This may be important to understand other than the strictly legal implications of legislation and public policy. Some of our better and most effective representatives (IMHO) also come from the fields of military service, medicine, and business, for example.

So maybe one obvious improvement for Emacs might be a managed and version-controlled extension ecology, like Maven repositories for Java, CPAN for Perl, or the Eclipse Marketplace. That way, Emacs can benefit from its extensibility, not have long-term useful extensions dependent on one specific maintainer, and avoid the risks of unpredictable breaking changes impacting extensions when Emacs changes.

As a 25+ year Emacs user, I find it's not quite a word processor and not quite an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). I see myself using Word or Eclipse more often at work, only turning to it when I need a convenient plain-text editor, file system browser or operating system command-line utility, especially over a simple terminal.

Over that quarter of a century, I've also found that it's better to stick with "standard" GNU Emacs. Emacs is extensible, and non-standard extensions can be useful at least short-term until supported in the "standard" version (e.g., vc extensions for Git or Mercurial, edit modes for JSON, etc.), but I have found that many extensions are not maintained long-term, and will eventually break with a new version of "standard" Emacs. Emacs also does not have a standard, built-in, IDE that cross-references source code modules, highlights syntax errors interactively, or provides code templating, get/set method generation, etc. I realize that all of these could be downloaded as non-standard extensions and configured after much effort, but it's not as seamless as something like Eclipse. I appreciate that you sometimes get what you pay for, but the limitations are at least one reason why I sometimes choose other tools.

Along with newspapers, magazines, and the landline telephone. All of these things came into our homes and brought our neighbors and world closer to us. Arguably things were better then because these sources were curated and edited. The filtering wasn't perfect, but we weren't enduring an unfiltered stream of other's nuttiness, vitriol, and panic like we are today, either.

It's all fun and games until a high-tax state you don't live in wants you to tax you because your employer is located there and you are working remotely out of convenience, not necessity: New York Court Says Telecommuters Must Pay NY Tax

A corollary to the useless job appears to be the important, but extremely scarce job. The carpenter probably had to join a union, spend years in apprenticeship, and the combination of limited intake by the union and a long training pipeline creates a labor cartel that is artificially scarce. What if, instead of an overscheduled carpenter and a full-time coordinator/apologist, there were two carpenters, likely for the same or less pay? How would that be accomplished in a modern labor market?

Extension 720 was a 40-year running talk show on WGN radio in Chicago, effectively a podcast before there were podcasts, from a clear-channel AM radio station covering most of the continental U.S. at night. The host was Milt Rosenberg, a psychology professor at the University of Chicago. The show featured many interesting guests from all walks of life, ranging from Barack Obama to the Amazing Randi. The show on radio ended in 2012, but Dr. Rosenberg continued on-line. Both current and archive material in podcast format are available here and here.

Y cuáles son estos "gatos de LOL?"

Massive newsgroup floods by obviously mentally ill individuals.

When budget cuts happen at a University, usually they must eliminate entire departments, as you can't selectively fire tenured faculty within a department, outside of reasons like gross misconduct. Otherwise, you're picking some pretty serious fights with accreditors, civil courts, and faculty professional organizations (AAUP, etc.).

But why was computer science chosen? Usually, it's low-enrollment, low-income (from grants, etc.) programs like philosophy or entomology that fall under the axe, often at smaller campuses within a state system. Does the computer science department not bring in enough government grants and private development money? Enough tuition-paying students? A good enough track record with placing students in professional careers that make use of the education?

Is this part of a game of University - Legislature brinksmanship where the University is threatening to cut desirable programs in a thinly-veiled effort to shame the government into coughing up more money?

More details (in PDF):

Modernization of the Montgomery County Traffic Signal System

Of course, one of the other ideas House conveys is that is possible to manage the mavericks.

Also:

• Medicine is a complex, experience-dependent, field where you learn how to be a good doctor by doing actual clinical medicine and collaborating with others. Even quirky experts are expected to teach, show, and actively involve the next generation of interns.
• Medicine has overarching professional standards, including stringent practices for safety, hygiene, and record-keeping, that no one is above, not even the quirky experts.
• Even the mavericks understand that the goal is not feeding your own ego and sense of self-importance, or just working on intellectual exercises that interest you, but looking out first for the health and welfare of the patients (i.e., the customers).