And all too often those brilliant jerks end up in management positions, where they wreak even more havoc. The sheer lack of real management smarts and enlightened sensitivities in the tech sector, is stunning. Other sectors have this problem as well, but in the tech sector it's more alarming because most techies are fairly well educated. You'd think that would make a difference, but it doesn't.

Try "instand" http://www.instand.com/ . I am using one of their stands right now; I've had it for almost 10 years - very durable and stable, and portable!

Another solution is to simply place an office file box on your regular desk (put some weight in it, to keep it stable); then add phone books on top of that to achieve an ideal height for your use. Any "regular" desk can be converted this way, in literally minutes.

Khan Academy is a great resource, but it's far from a perfect substitute if one want to accomplish deep learning. The fact is that there is a LOT of free and very helpful tutorial learning material on the Internet. Khan has caught a lot of interest because of the sheer scale that Sal Khan accomplished on his own. I think it's a great tool, but is becoming quite overrated in terms of what we know from those who teach face-to-face, and learning science.

Here are some valid criticisms of Khan Academy. http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/castingoutnines/2012/07/03/the-trouble-with-khan-academy/?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

http://fnoschese.wordpress.com/2011/03/17/khan-academy-and-the-effectiveness-of-science-videos/

In sum, Khan Academy is NOT a revolution in learning; it's a tool that many will use to help revolutionize education.

Diversity within a culture allows for more, and usually better, ADAPTATION. That's what societal, enterprise, and individual sustainability is really all about - i.e. it's about adaptation.

That said, this is a complex topic. We are not generating enough indigenous intellectual diversity because our education system needs a rehaul, or a completely new re-start. This probably won't happen, so we import the necessary diversity. This is one of America's strengths.

All that aside, I think it's abominable that way corporate leaders and our policy makers abuse the H1-B and other student and work visa programs. Too many highly skilled and innovative American workers are washed out of their careers, replaced by lower-priced, imported labor. There should be much more Congressional oversight about this, but that won't happen as long as private money (in the way of political donations) pollutes policy makers, and the policies they put forward.

China has no history of embedded civil code; it has always been run from the *center*, by powerful interests that made the law punitive only when one upset "the natural order of things" - e.g. poisoning a rice paddy, or carrying a sign in 1967 that claimed "capitalism is good" - those things would get you killed. However, if you stole someone intellectual property, the dispute was settled strictly between the parties, without the intervention by a civil authority; essentially, it was between you and the thief. In those situations, the person who had the most political power, or local connections, would win. This is simply the way things have been, until very recently, in China.

In other words, no LEGAL sense of protected IP. That is starting to change, slowly, as the world gets wired up, but it will take a while. Another way to say this is that many, many people in China have no problem with lifting someone else IP, because that's the way things have always been. btw, this doesn't make China a thieving culture, but rather a culture where there have been no strictures embedded in civil code to prevent this sort of thing. This is one more reason why international companies need to be cautious with IP in China, and understand how to play hard ball when they have IP stolen.

These telecommunications companies are little more than parasites. They don't ENABLE anything on their own. First, they leverage all kinds of free subsidies (your tax dollars) to build their networks. Then, they wrangle out of taxes by taking business deductions, usually paying their worthless CEO's and other senior executives obscene amount of money for doing exactly what? Taking credit for the INternet and its associated benefits to technology, even as they choke off the benefits of those technologies.

What's even more breathtaking is that its tax money (made from our tax dollars, earned by the sweat of our ever-longer work days) that actually *paid* for their infrastructure.

Last, the thing that really amps me up about stuff like this is that telecommunications companies and ISPs, etc. are essentially using technology that they didn't invent, to leverage YOUR and my communicative assets!

Communication was "free" until we began to find ways to increase it's speed, depth, and breadth. From the stone tablet, to the scribes, to the early offset printers (and print distributors), to the Internet and its multifarious ways of data and information transmission, certain folks have found a way to horde either the means to information production, or its transmission.

Guess what? That model isn't going to work anymore, not if we want a sustainable information ecology that is as diverse as possible.

Sorry, but these ISPs and telcos are little more than traitors to human advancement, masquerading as enablers. They want to suck us dry; they want all the benefits. They want tax breaks made by the policy makers that they buy every few years to build their infrastructures, and then they want us to pay them more, as if the tax breaks (which we ultimately pay for) and the infrastructure (which we also pay for), and the very source of communications that they leverage (you and me), isn't enough.

We need to start finding ways (I don't have the answers, just posing the possibility) to once and for all RID this world of these gatekeepers, because they are interested in keeping only one thing sustainable - their bank accounts. They could give a damn about whether the world is better serves by more transparent and facile communications technology. The Telco and ISP sector are, again, traitors to human growth and development. We need to find another way.

This is exactly right; it's an "economy" move that will strip more employees. Whitman is, and always has been, nothing more than a figurehead. She sat by while eBay dropped into oblivion, and now she will do the same at HP. They're prettying up hp (if that's possible, after Fiorina's debacles) for a sale, period. They will simplify operations so that it will be an easier pill to swallow for some buyer, a few years hence. Whitman will get credit for "saving the stock value" of some other such nonsense, and more thousands of hp employees will be out of work. It's a pathetic sideshow, with talentless, worthless senior executives and board members playing checkers with people's lives. Hewlett and Packard would roll over in theor graves if they could see what has happened to a once-great company.

Act first, apologize later is how that regime acts! They're pathetic.

I'm not a Marxist, but we have never seen true Marxist Communism. Soviet Russia and The People's Republic of China were/are corrupt "capitalist" systems, where there is a lot of reward at the top, and practically nothing left over for anyone else.

How does google or Time Magazine, or the New York Times make most of their respective revenues? Advertising. Who buys the advertising? Paying ad customers (subscribers barely break even). Why do advertisers pay media companies? Because the media companies deliver a "product" - i.e. our eyeballs and ears. You (we) are the product, whether you want to admit it or not. Without delivering your (our) attention to advertisers, there would be no priivate media. Our attention is what the media sells; it's a complex relationship, but that's the guts of it.

I don't like this any more than you do. However, I do see the logic in arguments made to show that *responsible and transparent* surveillance can help keep a society safe, *if* surveillance is not abused.

For instance, how are we going to prevent small groups of people from doing ungodly amounts of real harm (via violence) as the means to do that becomes more and more easy to access. Just look at Bill Joy's now-famous essay - "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us", written some years ago, to get a clear idea where we're headed http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy_pr.html.

The key here is that all surveillance activity that takes place in a Democratic society *must* be transparent. You and I should be able to know when , where, for how long, for what reason, and by whom we have been the subject of surveillance *on demand*.

Two additional problems, yet to be solved accompany the coming of universal surveillance:

1) Massive retraining and transparent accountability of *all* persons involved in surveillance, with harsh penalties dolled out for abuse.

2) Keeping the most dangerous among us from knowing how and when they are subjects of surveillance. This is a complex problem, because it also deals with the "mission creep" of those who are governing surveillance systems, because they get to decide what and who is considered "dangerous". Thus, the absolute importance of #!, above.

Again, I don't like the idea of being watched; I don't like the idea of being groped at an airport; or, taking my shoes off before I board a plane; or, being made the subject of search based on nationality or skin color; or, the chilling impact that comes from having certain kinds of speech assumed as "terrorist", if they're clearly not intended to be so.

We are approaching a time when we *must* make ourselves aware of the impending trend toward universal surveillance - because it *is* going to happen. The advantage we have in a Democratic culture is to insist on and legislate transparency, and do everything we can to insure that abuses are not institutionalized, and kept to an absolute minimum, otherwise.

Also, AT&T spent $15.4 million lobbying Washington last year, the eighth-highest of all corporations. And it has ties to the White House — Obama's chief of staff, William Daley, is a former president of SBC Communications Inc., which bought AT&T in 2005, creating the current telecom giant. This isn't just coziness, it's near collusion.

The telcos make me sick, and they are making America sick! Imagine what this will mean as education, training, and other necessities migrate online - with massive, bandwidth-sucking applications; those who can pay for bandwidth will be able to access these things; those that can't, won't.

The telcos have done *everything* they can to cripple expansive growth, so that *they can save infrastructure investment dollars*. In the offing, they have paid off our legislators and others who are supposed to be looking out for us. Their actions are nothing short of criminal, and are legal only because they pay for the laws that are supposed to "protect" the consumer.

In a word, these capping policies are UNAMERICAN (and, I'm not a nationalist, by any means.) What do these caps do to things like scientific research, education, legal artistic sharing, etc. etc. They *cripple* those innovations, thus crippling the forward promise of Americans, and America. Something HAS to be done; the pure profit motives at any cost of the grotesquely greedy telcos must be legislated. It's time to nationalize these companies, or else slap them upside the head so hard that they will start *serving* their customers instead of crimping their futures.

What's more, we need to start with the people who run these companies; we need to see them for what they are, and the large-scale harm that they do. They may be scions of their individual communities, and good parents, and all that, but they are literally putting us on a path that will disadvantage this country for decades, if someone doesn't put a stop to this egregious insult to information access, invention, and innovation.

Bandwidth is (theoretically) unlimited; we don't need to meter it; we need to *make it accessible*, and let 1000 ideas bloom. From now on, we must *insist* on nothing less - our future depends on it!

No! It will cost you and I an increase in the product price from both companies - because win or lose, the IP attorneys will charge a king's fortune for their services, and Apple and Samsung will pass that on as higher prices. These IP suits, in most cases, only profit the lawyers on both sides. It's a sick game. Drive from Menlo Park through to Mountain View, California someday - or Google how many IP law groups live there. They're popping up like mushrooms, and are often more successful than many tech companies. Some years ago, Wilson, Sonsini - one of the biggest in the country (home is Palo Alto) showed more than $1.1M profit per *partner*. (that's after the partners were paid and the light bill, rent, etc was paid. These IP law firms even have "sleep over rooms" so their paralegals can literally live there on the job to rack up more billing hours. It's a scam - and we're paying for it.

Thomas Jefferson: ""Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property." "