It isn't just the financial sector, its the medical sector, major distributors, casinos, and more, who use mainframes and similar (I work on an iSeries which at our scale is very much a mainframe - especially in reliability). COBOL and also RPGLE (looks like C/Pascal now) form the back end of many systems because of their ease of programming and especially because they are good at business math. Front end we have web facing apps; javascript/php/etc; RESTful services, and more. New development occurs everyday and is far more modern in its application that your aware. It isn't a land of green screens and such, but those do have their place.

The technology is anything but outdated, if anything we are as modern if not more. The key difference is dead nuts reliability, both in code and hardware. Downtime usually is when the site fails.

I have games where I have the physical media but because they are Steam related I found I cannot play them unless I am "connected".

Guess Microsoft would simply be following the lead of someone else this time.

Oh, I cannot lend these games or even give them to another person even in my own household because they are locked to my Steam account.

The post office was forced into this because their unfunded pension fund was a time bomb waiting to happen. They are only paying this increase till 2016 and have had it reduced when it was pressing. As of 2009 it was estimated their unfunded liabilities were over fifty billion dollars.

No, where Congress gets a failing grade is similar to how base closings are done. Just like the military knows which bases are not needed the Post Office can tell you which sorting centers, distribution hubs, and which Post Offices, are not needed. When they go to close them then suddenly every Congressman becomes an expert and you end up with stories about how the PO wanted to close nearly 3000 offices and only got a little over a hundred.

The PO operates under burdensome contracts combined with quickly shrinking sources of income. The number of pieces of mail handled has steadily declined but when the PO tries to downsize Congress interferes or their contracts block them. Trying to hire part time workers is another area they have difficulty with.

So, no their problems don't stem from just having to pay for liabilities they should be paying for; if anything ask Congress why that rule ain't applied to the US as a whole; its from a myriad of items of which two largest are Congress and the unions.

and then worry about excess heat.

Not from the plants, from all the equipment using that energy. One area of energy abundance many over look is the heat generated by its consumption. While we are moving away from some obvious sources; incandescence bulbs many others still exist.

plus you can take all that off peak wind power and similar to power the plants that create the nano particles thereby reducing the risk to investors on both sides.

I guess the concern comes down to, how clean must the water supply be? It would be very valuable if it can work with different level of containments up to and including salt water

or would even try to get them?

It is one things to shut down corps or even parts of the US government, it is a completely different thing to go after people who show no restraint in killing people.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/774%E2%80%93775_radiation_burst

The part about witness accounts to a red cross like image in the sky, meaning someone may have actually seen the event...

where they used these floating islands to dissipate the residual energy of moving someone from point A to point B. The idea being that the moving the person without doing so would be fatal to them.

they were down here for the NFL playoffs with other agencies to bust people for fraudulent NFL gear, I kid you not.

Would have prevented Sandy Hook or Aurora?

The simple fact is politicians are going for low hanging fruit because they do not want to admit we live in a world with dysfunctional people and the money that could be spent to treat them does not buy sufficient votes for those in power.

all those guys playing female Jedi can chase Kira and have her talk dirty to them....

I work with some people who have NOTHING else to do, hence they come in. There are even a few malicious types about too....

I mean, we can work from home and I know people who come to work to get away from the family.... and being sick is no reason for them to stay home.

So yeah, while some might come in because of unpaid sick time there are far too many who come in because they either don't know better, don't care, or don't have anything else to do.

Let me guess, droughts and similar in various parts of the world have never happened before. Really, do you guys ever think twice before declaring doom and gloom and how "THIS DISASTER PROVES BEYOND ANY DOUBT" really looks silly.

Sorry, we have been here before, seen it before, and will see it again. I am quite sure environmental issues faced by previous generations were just as end of world as some are today, replete with fools going "SEE SEE SEE".

About Sandy, there were some big ones in the 50s... the difference is that people hype things now rather than take care of the people affected.

Karma to burn...

but people tend to want to ignore that when they pay for a game or pay a subscription. So this is more than likely the area where Blizzard is concerned.

As in, they are going to charge and most people don't care for "best of luck" when they are buying something. I doubt Linux users will be any different.

If you have seen their forums it is amazing the number of problems people have on supported platforms

The truth is, facebook only collected X million dollars while making a lot more. As in, all their services and such cost a certain amount of money plus that owed to the government. It is known as embedded taxes, this is a great tool of governments to use in avoiding the general population from understanding their true tax load.

A tax on corporations is just an indirect tax on those who directly or indirect interact with that corporation. Any penny paid in taxes by the corporation comes from its customers and so on and so on.

The real fixes are open honest taxation. Let people really know how much it costs them for what they receive.