I had many similar run-ins with immigration when I worked for Microsoft in the Redmond area (brown guy with a beard, likes to travel the world [sometimes taking trips as short as one weekend]). I've missed more than my share of flights (at one time my name was in the do-not-fly list because it partially matched the name of someone they wanted).

Final straw came when one time I was returning from an international trip with my x-wife and kids when the immigration officer decided she didn't qualify to accompany me (we were married at the time).

"No big deal, she'll just fly back to Canada" (we're Canadians). We were told she couldn't do that, she had to be deported to the country she came from. "But sir, we just had a single entry visa and cannot re-enter". "That's not my problem, the law is the law. You need to be deported back to countryX". "But sir, we have no ties to countryX. We dont have visa to countryX. We have a Canadian passport, if you dont want to admit us then let us just turn around and go to Canada". "Oh y'all can come in, but she can't".

So I ask for a supervisor and he refused (I later learned he wasn't allowed to do that). Had us sit there for many hours with cranky kids after a transatlantic flight and then said:

"You can take her now (take her??) but I'll hold on to her passport. She can come before the judge in 30 days with the document and collect her passport or she'll be deported to countryX".

I had to unnecessarily waste time and money hiring a lawyer to figure out what the heck went wrong. She showed up 30 days later with our lawyer and the judge couldn't figure out why she was there. Gave us the passport. My x-wife dropped me home, told me to pack up and drove up to Toronto the same day. Even though I was about to get my green card (everything including labour cert was done) I told my employer to halt the process and moved back. For next few years I continued to work for US companies but remotely from Canada and pulled in close to $1 million in salary and stocks over the years that IRS wasn't able to tax at all. Canadian economy (not the American economy) benefited from my well over average spending over these years.

I can wrap my mind around "your name is similar to xyz we are looking for [even though xyz was a different ethnicity with a different age, height and everything]. But for me this made me realize how vulnerable non-citizens are when it comes to US immigration and border patrol. To this day I have no idea what ticked that guy off to single us out like that but I decided I did not want to live in a country where I had such little rights. I am well educated, make a lot of charitable contributions and spend a lot of time volunteering in the local community. Everything the US used to benefit from but now Canada does.

Oh boy. When has it become fashionable to quite X and announce it to the whole world?

LinkedIn is just a tool - it's usefulness depends on what your current needs are. It's useless today and useful tomorrow. Just like any other tool - i.e. take hammers for example.

Would it sound absurd for someone to announce that they quit hammers tomorrow? Does any of this make sense?

- Yeah, hammer was really useful to me when I hanged that picture on the wall last year. Not so much any more, I should quit it!

- I'm past hammers - electric drill with screws can do 90% of it does and for the 10% it does not I should really re-assess whether I'm doing the right thing in the first place.

- I tried to make a cereal with a hammer this morning, but it did not work! WTF???

- I watched this movie where someone was killed with a hammer. What an evil tool, I should quit it as it stains my karma!

- I don't use it any more, but every time I pass by the toolbox it reminds me that I still have it and I get this strong urge to get rid of it. It depresses me so much, that I want to throw away the whole box or move out of the house!

Don't mean to be harsh on Cap Watkins, I'm just tired of reading this kind of posts. Oh wait, I know - I should quit the Internet!

Here is a tip from someone who lost his sight last year: If you suddenly see little black spots, don't f&##^ing wait and get your eye(s) checked out by a specialist at once! Have a deadline? A demanding client? Or perhaps it's just a really bad headache? Don't wait.

I literally waited a whole week and thats waaaay to long and saw the curtain close (literally, that's what it looks like: a curtain closing). Finally (and only thanks to my experience with inplant-contactlenses that made the doctor confident I would be able to hold still like a statue when they insert 3 or 4 metal tubes in your freaking eye with only local anesthetics). My eye was fully drained and I was operated at midnight. The nice thing about local anestetics is you'll get to see everything.

After 4 weeks I was able to see again. Another 4 weeks and my brain had made the new 'connections' linking my left and right eye. When I started seeing little black spots with my other eye (half a year later) I took immediate action and dropped everything. The doctors were able to use a laser to burn/isolate the distortion and prefented my retina from ripping up.

TLDR: DO - NOT - WAIT. Drop everything when you see black spots that remain constant. Regular doctors can't help you, even specialists have difficulty finding the little holes in your eye.

Funny to see something even more locked down than Windows being cheered by the Linux crowd. There are no native apps,you need a Google account to access it(don't know what happens if your Google account happens to get disabled for whatever reason). Google neither releases the source for it's online offerings, not is it very useful even if they do.

The kicker is that the 100GB free storage on Google's cloud is only free for 2 years, after which you have to pay for it.

How is any of this better for consumer freedom than just Windows 7? The answer is not "because it has a developer switch on the back to install Ubuntu"; you can do that on a Windows PC as well. And an overwhelming percentage of normal consumers buying it won't be installing Ubuntu on it. In fact, I suspect that this kind of device that is absolutely at the mercy of a corporation is much closer to RMS dystopian vision than any Windows PC.

Would it make any difference to the user or even developers if it ran GoOS as the kernel instead of Linux? This is pretty much like a Tivo or a router.