Wow, that's a pretty misogynistic comment, and the fact that it somehow got ranked up at *all* is just sad.

You sure you don't want to follow this up with a comment about how male CEOs just buy stuff to prove how big their penises are? Balance is good, if you are going to roll out stereotypes, do it for both sides.

I can two types of people who would jump at the chance for early retirement:

1) People actually close to retirement
2) People who are not close to retirement, but know they have the skills to get another job

The person who is barely scraping by at their job? Not going to jump ship (unless they are planning on changing careers). I see this as a fine way to lose some of the best and brightest really quickly.

Hell, every time our management talks about reductions or outsourcing my hand goes up. A nice package for leaving so I can coast for a couple weeks then look for a new job? Sure, sign me up!

To view the Apple patent diagrams on the US patent site my browser informs me I need to run Apple Quicktime? Why isn't the patent office using PNG images?

C'mon, who could possibly say this isn't cool? As far as I can tell it is 100% useless (somebody please tell me how this will further science) but damn, given the opportunity, who wouldn't?

We were up on Clairemont Mesa so we could watch a bunch of the firework shows around the San Diego bay area. When the downtown one went off it was spectacular. The horizon lit up for 5 - 10 seconds and the sound was wonderful! Everybody immediately started to check twitter to see what had happened and we all talked about it for 1/2 hr while we waited for the other firework displays to go off.

We watched two more displays (yawn) and you know the only one anybody is talking about? Yup, the one that all went off at the same time. You know which ones I'll be telling as a great story for years to come? Yup, the one that screwed up. Do you think anybody cares what the Sea World fireworks looked like July 4 2012? No, no they don't. Hell, I forgot them 10 minutes after they were finished.

The screw up was fantastic to watch and I'll still tell people about it years later: "Ever wonder what it would look and sound like if they all went off at the same time? Been there, witnessed that."

So it sucks people paid to park and sat in the chilly evening, but c'mon, now you have a great story. Nobody would care to hear about the fireworks if they had worked!

You would think that from their response, but I like my friends and I don't deal well with idiots. They're all university educated and lawyers or IT workers, so I figured they'd be smart, critical thinkers. You would be surprised (obviously) about how people tend not to think critically about things when emotions / loyalty gets in the way.
It doesn't help that the government is feeding the fear all the time. /sigh

I've been in the U.S.A. for seven years now and it seems to have gone more and more downhill.

- I was sitting in a room with a bunch of Americans during Thanksgiving and mentioned how much I disliked the TSA and the new scanners (back when they were new) and to a man they all said "We need the better security."
- I then tried to steer the conversation towards their rights to travel between states (in regards to if you refuse the pat down/scan they won't let you travel) and they said inter-state travel was a privilege. I was gobsmacked.

The socialist leaning, big government Canadian was more worried about his personal rights then the freedom loving Americans! Now if only the housing prices would recover ....

Is that all it takes to propose a bill? There is so little content to that PDF! I was prepared for some weighty legalese but it boils down to:

- Unsubstantiated link of violent video games and aggressive behaviour
- Request to put warning on all video games (except those for 3yrs old and younger)

This has to be something they tasked an intern with.

+1 for the previous poster.

I'm a Canadian who happens to be living the the U.S.A. and my American friends are generally shocked when I explain the hoops I had to jump through and the restrictions put on me and my wife to get a green card. The entire process was done by a law firm, thank goodness, but I still had the feeling that the U.S.A. really didn't want me here. Took around three 1/2 years to get it, pretty quick by some standards.

- My wife wasn't allowed to work at all for the first three years, spousal visa (she was aiming for one of those coveted coffee serving jobs).
- I missed my fathers wedding because "If you leave the country, you aren't serious about your green card, and you don't want anything to happen to the application do you?"
- We had to cancel a vacation because the government *might* start processing our green card application and if we aren't in the country when they start, they'll throw the application away. Not that they need to contact us you understand, it just showed we weren't serious if we went on vacation outside the country.
- A co-worker is from Lebanon, he has to tell immigration why he is leaving the country *before* he leaves or they will not let him back in (even with his valid H1B visa).

So yeah, it wasn't exactly welcoming.
Just in case people are wondering:
- The position was open for eight months for an American to take it, they couldn't find anybody with the skills
- Why don't I move back to Canada? I like Americans, they are generally nice people. The immigration process isn't nice.

I like shoes, but the sports aspect puts me over the top:

Everyday (6)

Work Shoes
Comfortable Shoes
Going Out Shoes
Winter boots
Sandals (still shoes!)
Motorcycle boots

Sports Oriented (6) Indoor Soccer
Outdoor Soccer
Trail running shoes
Road running shoes
biking shoes x2 (one at office, one at home)

Ah, that helps. I'm still using 3.6.22 and wondered "How the hell did I miss four major revisions of FF?". Guess I didn't. The reason I use FF is due to the add-ons, the minute they started breaking those I stopped thinking "New version? Yes please!". I'll just stick with what works until there is a damn good reason to change. /grumble

They are finally thinking of using profiling rather than treating every person (old ladies in wheelchairs and babies included!) as a potential terrorist? That isn't the 'future', they could do that now ... of course this would require them to hire better than bottom-of-the-barrel employees. I'd rather they pay the employees more and give them training than spend loads of cash on unproven and invasive technology.

According to the submitted letter in article (and I haven't got a Verizon phone, so I cannot check) they say they have location services turned off *by default* on all their phones. Also according to the submitted letter if you turn on location services (all three types) you get warnings regarding "the application will know where you are and share with, etc.".

So you have:
1) Sticker on the front saying what location services does.
2) Location services turned off by default.
3) Warning when you turn location services on.

After all that people complain about "Verizon isn't taking my privacy seriously!"? I don't know about the rest of the services, but come on, that's a lot of warnings a user needs to go through. I'd say they've done their due diligence.

Note I'm just talking about location services here, if Verizon is ignoring your privacy elsewhere, that is another thread.

I didn't realize you could point multiple Kindles at the same account. Thanks for the information .. she *has* been pushing for a new Kindle. Guess I may be looking at the hand-me-down.

I bought my wife a Kindle for X-mas a couple years ago. She, unlike me, has no issues with DRM. The Kindle fits in really well with a type of book I like to call 'brain candy', fun to read, not deep, no value in re-reading and you sure as hell don't want a copy sitting around your house for the next couple of years.* The whole Twilight series falls firmly in to this category. Read once, discard.

Then she read a book she knew I'd enjoy, I wanted to read it. That's when it hit me, there is only a single device to read the books on. I'd like to read the book she finished but I can't because she's reading another book. It is the equivalent of having a massive library, but you can't take the books out, and only a single person at a time can enter the library.**

I can see why the publishing companies love electronic books. If I want to read a copy of a book she already owns I have to buy another copy of it, or wait until she isn't using the Kindle ... which is rare.

*I'm lazy. Yes I could have a garage sale, yes I could give them to a book bank, yes I could ship them to the third world where they to could enjoy sparkly vampires. Reality is, they just sit around the house taking up space.

** Yes, yes, I could go online and figure out how to hack the Kindle and export all the books and import them on to my laptop to read. I don't want to read on my laptop and if it was a paper book I could just pick it up and read it.