I used to build my computers after carefully researching each component. The pre-built offerings were mostly junk. Then I switched to a Mac, and now I have a laptop and external display. For me a computer is a tool, and this does the job for me.

I work at a genetics research lab in New England and specialize in High Performance Computing. Let me know if you want to talk privately. I would be willing to give a little advice for free, or more as a consultant.

I remember working on a kernel extension for OS X on a previous job 5 or 6 years ago. We were having some trouble, so we started digging through the XNU source code. We found an email address of an engineer at apple in some of the comments and emailed him. After a few emails it was determined there was a bug (we were doing something rather strange, so this wouldn't normally affect developers), he offered a work around and opened a bug report for the issue. This wouldn't have happened had I been developing for windows.

I pay about $100 a month for digital TV plus DVR service. I rarely watch TV - there are a couple shows I make a point to watch, the rest of my TV viewing is usually food network, discovery, or history channel while I'm multi-tasking and hour or so before going to sleep. I could probably spend less than $10 a month on TV show rentals and I wouldn't really miss cable TV that much.

that seems excessive! What state is this?!

in my state (Maine), the age of consent is 16, but there is also an age differential test that comes into affect if one of the parties is under the age of 16. For people age 14 and up, they are able to consent as long as the age difference is no more than 5 years. This means a 14 year old can consent to sex with a 19 year old, but not a 20 year old. There are exceptions, such as teachers, employers, etc. E.g. a student that is 16 (someone of this age can consent to sex with anyone aged 14 and up) can not consent to sex with someone in a position of authority over them. People under the age of 14 can not legally consent.

I live in a neighborhood in a small Maine city that was developed in a couple phases, the first major phase was developed in the late 60s/early70s, the second was in the mid - late 90s. There are covenants here that somewhat limit what you can do with your property, many were concerned with the initial construction while a few were not (house must be a certain size/cost at construction, no mobile homes, no commercial vehicles parked in driveways, ...). Most new subdivisions will, at the very least, have requirements on initial construction, and some require things like window blinds, outside lights that are kept on at night, and landscaping. Other towns in Maine have limitations on color/appearance of houses, especially in historic parts of town, but it a lot of rural areas in Maine it is indeed a free for all... and you end up with people that have 5 nonworking cars on their law, or a sailboat that hasn't seen water in 20 years.

We just filled a senior level programmer position with someone in their 50s. This person had a great resume, and did an awesome job in their interview - blew pretty much everyone else we looked at away. I'd say he's easily 1000X better than the last young intern we had (now a grad student in CS). I'd say most of the programmers here are in their late 30s to mid 40s. A few are older (50ish). I'm a young one here, a "senior" software engineer by title at the age of 30.

We're actually considering going after some young blood and spending the effort to mentor them because we have such a hard time recruiting older developers.

RE: 29,000 floods to recoup costs

I have season tickets for a NCAA division 1 hockey team. For each game that I attend, they resurface the ice 4 times: once after warmups, between periods 1&2, between periods 2&3, and after the game is finished. That is 7250 games (ignoring practices, club hockey, etc) to recoup the cost of the "green" model. At 20 home games per season (NCAA hockey teams don't play a ton of games), we're talking 362.5 _seasons_ for a college hockey team to recoup the increases capital cost of the electric model through decreased operational costs. The electric mode _does_ cost more, unless you are resurfacing the ice an insane amount of times.

"Right now, I am giving presentations with impress. Slides to the projector, and my presenter screen on the laptop has the slide, the next slide, presenters notes and a clock." Powerpoint can do that (at least the Mac version) as long as you don't setup the projector as a mirror of your desktop.

You can get the kernel source code. Once upon a time I was developing a kernel extension for a research project I was working on (very specialized memory manager). We were trying to figure out how something worked, so we took a look at the kernel source code. We ended up finding an Apple engineer's email address in one of the comments, we asked him a bunch of questions. He was a ton of help. We also discovered a bug, which he entered into their bug tracking system, and he offered a work around.

those posters came from fbresearch.org, but I'm not sure if they are still available.

We have one hanging in one of the hallways here at work (I work at the laboratory founded by C.C. Little, who was mentioned in this article...)

trust me, we're far better off with animal testing... without the genetics work done with Mice we would know far less about genetics than we do now. Almost every human gene identified was discovered after a homolog was found in a model animal first. There is no way to perform the conrolled breeding experiments we can do with model organisms in humans...

I live in Maine and some towers have been coming from Canada (but through the Jackman crossing), even some parts destined for the northeast part of Maine. I think those towers were made in Canada. I'm sure companies wouldn't be shipping parts into Searsport if they could do it cheaper some other way (like ship to Quebec City or Montreal and come through Jackman or Coburn Gore).

America has more research universities than any other country, most of that research is government funded (along with some privately funded research). We have national labs. Even private non-profit research labs that compete with universities for research grants. I work at a 1400 employee private non-profit biomedical research laboratory. Much of our funding comes from National Institute of Health grants (we also sell genetically defined laboratory mice as well as research services to help subsidize our research programs).

The original poster is obviously an idiot. Just because a private company is investing in research TO GET A COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE does not mean the government is not investing in research. I'm sure most of the basic research that lead up to GM's own applied battery research was done at University and government labs.

not once you cancel your plan. When you cancel your plan you are giving up the phone number. You can transfer your phone number to a different carrier, but to do that you have to have the original account active when you initiate the number transfer. The process of transferring the number closes the original account.