One area the US has dominated is all things internet. We don't focus on manufacturing things, so the internet is somewhat important to us. We provide a huge number of great services to the world. We might find that we have done billions in dollars in damage in the name of fighting terrorism. This is self inflicted. We may have already done more damage than any terrorist could ever dream of doing. Governments around the world may start to ban using internet companies based in the US or with US operations for their government workers. Public companies around the world have a duty to keep non-public data non-public. MS 360 is all about the cloud. This product might be DOA. Skype, Linked In, Facebook, etc. You don't want your banking data, business plans, unreleased financial data, etc. being accessed illegally. What is worse, is that this might have nothing to do with terrorism, and more to do with spying:
www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-14/u-s-agencies-said-to-swap-data-with-thousands-of-firms.html

What to do now? Invest as fast as you can in every little internet company outside the US that provides services that might compete against the US giants. Once they get a little momentum, they could take off and make huge profits.

It was for the US to lose. We chose this path. The traitors should be shot for treason (This is slashdot. Irony never seems to be understood. I'm not talking the guy in HK), but that will never happen.

So the Microsoft Studios Creative Director's views have no impact on what he does at work? He has nothing to do with Microsoft. Wow. Then why is he a director? These Microsoft Corp. Comm. people are more disconnected from reality than I expected.

By the way, the new Windows 360 Office for 2013 ( or whatever it is called ) is moving towards always on cloud connectivity. And directors at Microsoft are actually idiots who have no impact on product direction. Give me a break. First, fire the Creative Director for speaking the truth. Next fire the Microsoft Corp. Comm. for regurgitating canned responses that makes the company look dumb.

I think I got a lemon. I know other people with similar Thinkpad models and they haven't had as many problem as I have. I do use this thing 12+ hours a day 7 days a week. The surface of common keys shows all the wear I've put on it in 1 1/2 years.

I agree. The weight is nice. I would have a lot of trouble switching to a machine without a ThinkPad keyboard and red dot mouse. I haven't tried the battery in the ultra bay. Perhaps I should buy one. Speakers on the T420s are much better than the previous generation, but still short of being great.

On my last ThinkPad ( I think it was a T40? ), one of the two screen brackets broke. I wasn't amused. I get 5+ years out of Nokia phones. The damn things would never break on me - even long after I was ready to upgrade. I'd like to see ThinkPads run the same way. I want to retire the machine and upgrade when I'm ready. Not buy a new one because the old one is shot. I'm careful with equipment. I don't think the problems are due to rough handling.

I remember my first ThinkPad. It cost my employer more than 1 month of my salary. Of course I promptly spilled a cup of coffee all over the keyboard. I was amazed how the in-house IT guy had it cleaned up and going again in 30 minutes. The machine was designed with common problems in mind. It was great!

I've been using Thinkpads since 1997. I currently have a T420s. The machine cost 2K USD with Windows tax for Win7 Professional and Office Professional. It is 1 1/2 years old. Here is my list of problems:

1. The side USB 2.0 port came off the mother board. I'm super careful, but ports get tugged on from time to time. Last week I opened up the machine, and the connection had been tacked to the mother board with two tiny bits of solder. I used a solder gun and 10 minutes to fix it myself. Ports need strong connections to something solid!
2. Same with the power cable. The connection is bad. I have to pull the power cable wire to the left to get it to keep the power on.
3. The computer doesn't always go to sleep when the lid is closed. If I don't notice, I close the machine, put it in my bag, the machine overheats and then it blue screens.
4. There is 1 USB 3.0 port on the back. I know USB 3.0 was new when the machine came out 1.5 years ago, but it has never worked. USB 2.0 peripherals that work in the other ports don't work in the USB 3.0 port.
5. The machine occasionally freezes/locks up for 5-10 seconds at a time (random timing, but it happens about once ever 30 seconds). Removing the battery, disconnecting the power and letting the machine site for 10-15 minutes seems to fix this problem. I've run the Lenovo diagnostics program. I've watched the diagnostics program freeze and sputter. Then it tells me everything is 100% good to go. I have no idea where the problem is coming from. Mother board, Video, CPU, RAM (I've switch out the RAM, it didn't help). Once the problem goes away, I have about 1 week before it comes back. This started in the last week of the 1 year warranty.
6. "Access Connections" is a train wreck. When it works, it is ok. If you want to delete a location, you highlight it, hit "delete" and it deletes the record above. At this very minute, "Access Connections" shows no connection. I'm running on Win7's network connection. Tomorrow it might be working normally again. What if you are in a new location and mistype the password? If the log in fails, it should ask you if you want to re-enter the password. Instead you have to go modify the record.
7. Battery life is crazy. I run on batteries about 6 times a year. The rest of the time I'm plugged in. Last time I was in an airport, I had 45 minutes until the machine shut down. That is with a dimmed screen. I would rather have 1 light battery for daily use (so I can get from my desk to a conference room) and a heavy battery for travel. When I know I want 6 hours of work time during a flight. Instead I have something in the middle that does both functions poorly.
8. After about a year, the fan got loud. I think the bearings are shot.
9. Track pad went out two months ago. I could care less. I use the little red dot 100% of the time.
10. (design gripe) The screen is 900 pixels from top to bottom. Once you add Window's bars, application boarders, menus, I'm working in this tinsy tiny window. My cell phone has 900 pixels up and down! Left and right I have huge fields of unused white space. Most documents and websites are much taller than they are wide. Therefore Lenovo gives you a screen that is much wider than it is tall. I've been wondering if I can write business plans(or Java) the same way they wrote ancient Chinese - up to down instead of left to right. It would fit the screen much better. Lenovo thinks their business laptops are used for nothing other than watching movies. I think this shows how well they understand their customers these days.

I am their ideal client. I will happily pay a 2-400 USD premium for a "business laptop". I want to run databases, huge Excel spread sheets, occasionally write a little code. If I could pay a little extra for a more reliable machine, it is worth it to me. The cost of unplanned downtime is higher.

Mod up parent.

It's being tracked that freaks techies out. Not the ads.

I generally think that IT people are hired for their thirst for knowledge and self motivation. If someone can't gain the skills needed on their own with a test environment and a book / youtube / manuals, there is a problem. Actually I would encourage any such person who requires a class to go join a big company that will spoon-feed them, wipe their ass for them and maybe offer them union membership.

Obviously, this doesn't apply to everything. For nuclear control systems it might be a good idea to go to the class. For the latest version of XYZ from Microsoft, people shouldn't need to sit in a class. This was true 5 years ago. Today we have stackoverflow & stackexchange. If you need help, go get it.

The people who bought these should be punished. Publicly. Then they should be barred for life from public service.
Then the people who hired these fools should be punished. Publicly. And barred for life from public service.

Come on people. Firing is easy. It is hiring that is hard.

I live in China. It is the same here. You can buy the crap from Carrefour ( think Walmart, but run by the French ), or you can buy from the local growers. Once you get out of the cities, you can find beekeepers that setup stands next to the highways. Most of them have boxes and boxes of hives with them. They move from farm to farm in the area, helping to pollinate the local crops. The honey they have on hand tends to be what they were last pollinating. If you ever get the chance to try some, do. It's really good stuff. Plus, it is always good to directly support the local farmers ( And Yes. They will try to up the price if you look like a city dweller. Just get back in the car. Start the engine and the price will drop 50%. )

The article should be: "Clueless lawmakers who have never done and honest day's work and are clueless as to how businesses actually operate wrote laws so bad and full of holes that Facebook posts billions in profits and payed zero taxes."

Please. Quit blaming the companies. They do exactly what they are supposed to do. It is 100% the fault of the lawmakers.

When you see wind farm tax breaks, do you get upset about wind power generation companies taking advantage of tax laws? All companies try to take advantage of all tax breaks. That is the way the world works. It is a fundamental truth. The tax code is somewhere in the neighborhood of 70,000+ pages. Larger companies have larger budgets for tax planning and have a greater ability to take advantage of tax breaks.

Simplify the tax code. Life for everyone will become easier. You'll put 100,000 tax consultants out of work. Perhaps they will go off and build something instead of making lots of money helping companies minimize taxes.

You know all the stuff from China is cheap and poor quality. Bunch of lazy communists over there... "best programmer in the building" Oh wait. Never mind.

If it doesn't have at a minimum of 1200 pixels top to bottom, it isn't designed for work. 1440 top to bottom is wonderful!
In an IDE, I can't believe most people can only see 30 lines of code at a time. This is 2013. In an old idea from the last century, I could see more! (these days IDEs all have to have 6 windows in windows with different views/perspectives. Very useful, but they take up a lot of space.) You see people working on average laptops and all they can see are 25 lines of their Excel spreadsheet. I'm talking about accountants and analysts who live in Excel. What good is a super fast processor, video card and lots of memory if you can't see anything?

I have a cell phone with 720x1280 resolution. That is the same as an average laptop. Doesn't anyone else see a problem here?

Go to your average website. cnn.com On most ultra wide designed for a watching a movies screen, 50% of the screen is blank/white space. The site is narrow and tall, but laptop screens are all wide and short. If text does runs from one end of the screen to the other, it is so wide you get lost reading from line to line. Humans don't deal with 60 words per line very well. The worst part is that the screen is so wide you are wasting battery power to light up huge numbers of unused pixels. However, the screen isn't so wide that you can put documents side by side. It's perfectly suboptimal.

Lets look at Firefox. Microsoft has the task bar along the bottom of the screen. Firefox has a helper bar for adblock plus. My "Find" helper bar is usually on at the bottom. Then you have tabs along the top. Then you have an address bar (I refuse to call it a wunderbar). Then some people have the application window's header bar and a bar for bookmarks, ad-ons and such. At 720 pixels top to bottom, there is barely any room left for the web browser screen.
The worst part is most laptops have a 1/2 to 3/4 of an inch of plastic bezel over the top and at the bottom of the screen. Please. The space is there. Use it give the screen more top to bottom resolution.

Why on earth would the state make the list of registered gun owners public?

I live in China. I don't know anyone who has significant problems with the GFW. It is very easy to hop over. Personally, I use a paid for VPN. I used one for about 3 years without problems. It was finally shut down about a month ago, so I switched. Without a VPN, it is only mildly annoying. You can't get on Youtube and Google is very slow. Most things work normally. For instance, CNN works, but the video section does not.

Funny thing. If you are on the phone with someone and say "VPN", the call sometimes drops immediate. Works better in Chinese than English.

When you don't have a VPN, what is really annoying is are all the US sites that pop-up messages saying that their service is not available in your country. Grrr. Then sites like Microsoft keep bumping you back to their Chinese site and hiding "the show me the page in English" button. It is sad how the internet is getting to sensitive to location. The great thing about the internet was that you could be anywhere. Now companies want to figure out where you are based and serve you country specific content. If you have a Galaxy SIII that you bought in China, try going to the US app store. You can't. Even with a VPN or flying to the US, it will not work.

Industry has been pouring billions into research. How is $120 million over five years going to do anything?

Anyone who invents a technology ( and production process to keep it cheap ) to get a 5x improvement will be a billionaire over night. If you are going to do this, do it right and spend some real money. How about 250 million a year over 5 years? btw. The if the US government pays for it, the US government should patent everything and get a 5x return for the taxpayers.

Actually, you can know how good a work of art is in objective terms. Just look at how many people copy it. Take a painting from 1700's. The ones that were most heavily copied in their day were the most influential. The ones that were still being copied in the 1800's could be seen as great art.

How many people have copied ''Revenge of the Sith'. I know I saw it, but I don't even remember it. During Halloween you still see kids copying the first three movies. The 1977-1983 movies.