Ther employee signs at hiring that the checks may be made "periodically" with no further info on just how periodically. It happens in the US, yes. But I'm from Canada.

Credit checks aren't for viewing potential wealth. My company regularely checks credit records of current employees as part of its loss prevention. If you're deep in debt, you're more likely to steal from the company - so they argue. How does this not equate to people being googled to see if they're really jerks?

I don't agree with the easy extension of this practice into the realm of "Gosh, you (insert personal behaviour not related to job) so I'm not hiring you" but even HR can have a failure of non-bias sometimes.

And if said HR person accesses from home rather than the office? Research or not, lots of offices have VPNs, and VPN means MySpace, Facebook are blocked.

I think the point here is not the ability or commonality of the researching phase, but what exactly is embarrassing to the employer. If someone finds out I'm an anti-semite murderer and confirms it's actully me, I'm legitimately not getting the job. But if I fail to be hired because someone found my Wiccan-centric blog and decided that a Pagan in power is embarrassing to the Christian ideals of the company's execs - that's discrimination, no matter how you cut it. The problem isn't the practice, the problem is the extension of the practice beyond its valid use, and the total lack of regulation therein because no regulation is possible.

Cap at 100k? And you expect to attract high-power, high-earning execs to your company how? Sunshine enemas? Be logical. If a programmer makes thirty to forty thousand per year, and his boss makes twenty percent more - move five or six steps up the logical chain and of course you get million dollar salaries. Is it fair? Not really, by most logic.

But even if you project a 20% pay raise per position five steps up the chain, you still have nearly 100k salaries - and I don't expect jumps as low as 20% are realistic. In my company, salary more than doubles from location manager to district manager - five steps up from that (Which is roughly executive level) puts salaries nearly half a million a year. I'd call that estimate conservative and I work bloody retail, where there is NO profit margin WHATSOEVER.

This isn't an attempt to curry favour with execs, as I don't know any who read Slashdot in the first place. Your use of 100k-no-bonus just makes me wonder where in gay hell your logic is coming from.

Guesswork isn't my field; I'm a salesman, not an accountant. However, yes, I expect they may be shrinking headcount, but if you answer "No paycut no how" you're likely to be the first one on the block. Self-preservation is a bit more useful than wariness in some cases, it's up to the contractors themselves to decide which is in their best interest. Taking your ball and going home is usually not the best option.

All this Microsoft bashing, and no one takes the chance that they're giving these contractors a pretty good choice? If I had to choose between taking a pay cut and losing my job, in a market where getting a new one is shaky at the best of times, I'd take the pay cut. At least it then gives me stability till the end of my contracted time. Way to go, doomsayers.

It does smell a lot like a publicity stunt, but for people concerned with speed in an OS, and with major improvements over Vista, it's not a bad move. If I think something is crap, I don't want a patch, I want something new. It's the same reason more people buy new computers rather than upgrading the same case or modding an existing box.

Windows 7 runs smoother. It's quicker. It's even, to a degree, prettier than Vista. For a programmer, this might be nothing but frustration at the greed of Microsoft, and look like a jerk move. But for a consumer who's been holding off because of bad Vista press, it's Windows Classic.

And the difference is... What. CTRL+TAB versus ALT+TAB? I thought when tabbed browsing came along everyone got the memo that other programs worked the same way. Or am I missing something fundamentally evil about a less-cluttered taskbar?

After all, if every feasible option were posted, what would the bulk of us wee posters kvetch about?

Someone's clearly never seen the beautiful trees and rocks of Canada. Why, Ed just got himself a computer. I wonder if he's heard of this Internet thing yet.

When did /. become Your Average News Channel? Working by that logic, I could bill my iPod-infused bus ride to work as getting there by "Distraction" or perhaps "Agoraphobia".

Unfortunately, Nexus suffered when the control set changed and no one got told before they picked up the controller - game documentation always sucks in my opinion. But the storyline was solid, better than previous, and the Revolution disc had a massive dose of nostalgia for revamped, reworked missions, which was nice. NineBreaker stood as a great training game - I actually went through it on the new control set and played Nexus with a much higher rate of success, which was nice. It's a good window into how the game designers think you should play the game, which is a chance most of us don't get often.

Last Raven was and remains frustrating. It's a very unbalanced game, with not a lot to it other than "Let's play seven or eight repititions of the same ten-mission scenario, but with ALTERNATE ENDINGS!" I'm sure whatever exec thought that up got a raise, but two years in, I still haven't unlocked everything, and I only keep playing because I'm damned stubborn.

Armored Core 4... Was NOT canon AC. Sure, it was graphically beautiful, but with new publisher backing... Let's just say, I've been playing LR for two years off and on, and after about an hour with AC4, I put it up for sale on eBay and forgot it existed.

There seems to be a certain balance between nostalgia, cult praise, and actual playability that works for remixed games, something that new titles in the same series never seem to match up to.

Look at some prominent titles for this. Any Final Fantasy reissue is always well done because Square Enix actually seems to care about not getting hate mail. And, in a recent Armored Core release (Nexus) there was a B-Sides disc included that had updated missions from all of the previous games. It wasn't a reset or a rehash of sorts, but more of a look back with updates, which worked very well for alot of fans of the original series.

If the effort is made, not to keep the bloodlines pure, but to either step completely away from the original or to update for the sake of nostalgia and proof-of-concept, it seems to work more often than not. TDoes feel like there's some kind of inverse correlation to fan praise though, which makes me very frightened of a re-release of, say, Final Fantasy 7 for some distant future PS4/XBox360-replacement console. It's sure a fine line to walk.

Imagine you have a bug cue of 1000 items. Every day you look at three and fix them - thoroughly, concisely, permanently. Every day, thirty more bug reports come in. Are you still looking at bugreps, or people just bitching?

Never having gone to market still means it didn't exist. Concept devices and mockups don't count for most people.

But at least you've got a cool keyboard.