This is a fair point. The job market is actually quite good if you have a decade or two of experience, but it's abysmal if you're just starting your career. It's hard to notice the latter when you continue to get headhunters calling a couple times a week, so it's no wonder you're seeing such diametrically opposed views in this thread with regard to the state of the economy.

I've filled a dozen or so positions in the last 4 years, most of them took 2-3 months to find a qualified applicant. Only once did I hire someone inside of a month. So while I am not arguing that there are a lot of fake job ads out there, the assertion that any 30+ day aged ad is fake is demonstrably false. Larger companies take time to fill positions, and with the economy slumping there is pressure to find exactly the right applicant even if that means the spot lay unfilled for a couple months (often at great pain) rather than hire someone "with potential" as was the common practice 5-10 years ago.

The jury is still out on this, absent real evidence I'm going to wait until more is known. Microsoft asserts (and it seems pretty credible) that card information is never stored on the device, making this attack impossible. (http://www.theverge.com/2012/3/30/2914332/microsoft-xbox-credit-card-hack-response) Anyone who has implemented this sort of system would agree that would be the natural design. I would rate it is likely you can recover account information, but incredibly unlikely that you can recover credit card info, but I'm giving this a few days for information to surface before I decide this is a valid attack vector.

This post fails a basic syntax check due to incompatible statements:

1.) >>I've been out of work for two years. I've had plenty of interviews, but no job offers.

2.) >>I'm expensive. I have 30 years of experience in the 'biz and a masters degree in CS.
        >>I'm not cheap. You could hire two 25 year olds for what I'm asking.

These two statements are not compatible. You need to edit one of them (unless you have sufficient savings that you don't NEED a job-- in which case more power to you.)

If you are out of work and need a job, you don't have the liberty to "be expensive." Get a job first, then look for a better one. Being "too proud to take a job that's beneath you" is synonomous with "long-term unemployed."

California already taxes items purchased out of state, even by non-residents.

I moved to California in January. When I went to register my car, they said I had to pay sales tax on the purchase. "But I bought this car 8 months before I moved to California." Doesn't matter, they still said the tax was owed, about $3K worth.

Clearly illegal, but nobody is going to spend $100K in attorney/court fees to fight $3K worth of taxation. Welcome to the People's Republic of California.

The document is really quite simple. A good way to think about it is that it's an INCLUSIVE list of governmental powers, rather than an INCLUSIVE list. In other words, if the Constitution doesn't SPECIFICALLY allow it, the Federal government can't do it. (At least that's the theory.)

So it shouldn't be surprising that so many things are unconstitutional-- it's a pretty short document.

Actually, I heard a brief clip of the interview on the radio this morning-- it was his voice. He did say this.

That being said, he didn't suggest it-- he was asked if there was a role, and he went off on a hypothetical about IF you were to do it, you'd have to have these safeguards in place. He was not saying that it was something that we should do.

Google did testify. However, where Apple sent a VP, Google sent a lobbyist. I believe you will be able to watch the archived hearings on CSpan once they've been posted.

Who did they cheat, exactly? The only fraud they committed was incorrectly identifying the purpose of the dollars exchanged because the U.S. unreasonably (and illegally, I might add) restricts online poker.

There are no allegations of cheating the users, who desire the services these sites are providing.

Exactly.

I'm not against regulating online poker-- but I am against prohibition. The absence of regulation does not excuse the prohibition.

I'm just glad to hear that all of the crimes against victims have been solved and the perpetrators brought to justice, giving the DOJ time to focus on victimless "crimes" like online poker.

At least I assume that's what happened.

I use Evernote (http://www.evernote.com) for just about everything. It allows me to easily combine text (vast majority of my notes are plaintext, obviously) with images, files, voice notes, etc. It's a great tool that stores everything in the cloud and syncs to clients on Mac, PC, and most mobile platforms. I've been really happy with the solution.

For task management, I bounced back and forth between OmniFocus on the Mac and Outlook on the PC... haven't really found a solution I'm happy with. As a result, I pretty much use an old-school paper to-do list that gets regenerated daily in a Moleskine-style notebook.