Actually, prior to the iPhone, I had an MPx220. Prior to that an i930. Now, fortunatly, the only windows based OS I have to use is here at work, all linux and osx at home. And to AC below talking about apple products being over priced or whatever... sure, they're a bit on the expensive side. However, I feel you get what you pay for when you take TCO into account and thus give not a single fuck about what you or anyone else thinks about how I choose to spend my money.

I'm always logged in as root. I like to live dangerously.

Why thank you sir. or maddam.

As an iPhone user since the first model, I've never been penetrated through my back door... willingly or otherwise.

I believe, as of iPhone 3GS, it does.. but I'm too lazy to google and confirm.

Ahhh, maintenance.

I had this happen to me, took it in, and they replaced it for free I was waaaay out of warranty. 100% covered. That's customer service, IMO.

We actually have a department that does this, not just one person.

But really.. what is pakistan going to do to us? America! Fuck YEAH!

Also being a 'seasoned' developer I'm wondering why not a 'real' language like C as opposed to scripting languages. I started with BASIC back in the day but I often wished I made the shift to real languages sooner rather than later. Only when I started writing apps in VB6 (when it was first released) did I run into limitations. I wish I made the leap early from command line BASIC to C/C++. C also gives you more insight into how the computer is actually working. In the 'real world' of large scale appliactions today I see far to many a 'script kiddie' that grew up on Java who seem to think you can build huge high performance applications in these languages. At risk of being flamed, since OP has access to a macbook pro, why not give him an Objective C book and let him have at XCode for a while. It's an amazing rock solid IDE (not quite as nice as VS but still very nice). There are many very good books available for introduction to Objective C on the Mac.You might even take it upon yourself to 'learn together' for a time. This is another good quality from the real world... working with others. You could edge him on with an additional requirement or two. This will help re-inforce early a good general life lesson: the fact that things can change and you need to adapt.

Mine does. I helped design the system that figures it out automatically from our smart meters. When the power drops a good number (although not all due to network topology) of "Power Down' messages come back to us before the meter fully discharges. we run this through the 'old school' system that figures out, based on known network design and those reporting loss of power, the scope of the outage as quick as possible.

Don't you love how people think having power, and a responsible infrastructure, but no way to reliably measure how much of it you use is somehow their right.

Of course they knew. They read the T&C when they signed up for foursquare/facebook/twitter/whatever. After all, only after they fully read and understood would they click Accept.

"_Every_" Technically not true. OTP (One Time Pad) cannot be broken unless the key is recovered.

Some utilities (the muni's) are owned by the government. LADWP for one. Be it federal, state, or (most commonly) local. Others are privately or (most commonly) publicly held corporations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Department_of_Water_and_Power