Because it is easy for VPN traffic to be blocked, especially as people tend to use this to get past content filters, etc.

Not so much the road being designed for those speeds, but more the car being designed, and more importantly the driver being able to cope. Then again, I'm in Europe and am always amazed how Americans get freaked out when we drive at normal speeds on the motorway which to them are "super fast".

Yes, I have. Whilst it's nice, it can't import some Visio files with 100% accuracy... and as I'm throwing these files around with clients they need to be 100% accurate.

I've been on XP as Windows Vista or 7 didnt offer any compelling reason to upgrade... And I only use windows to run Visio, otherwise the other 95% of my OS time is spent in OS X.

No it's about employing hard-core environmental fascists who push their cause down your throat... even if the course you are doing has little to do with environment.

If only you could. Many years ago I was sys admin for a small company... first thing I did was chuck out all their old hardware, give the staff new machines, install a server for file sharing... and lock it down... the old machines were full of viruses and the owner got sick of the mess... after I did all this work, within a day one machine was down... over night rebuild to fix it, and the next day it was down again.. the problem: just one user who insisted that she must install some apps from the internet to do her job (which seemed to be surfing the internet all day to plan her forthcoming wedding!). Solution: I locked the machines down so hard and logged all activity to see what was going on. Troublesome user then tried to break into the sever to disable the locks... silly woman didn't realize all this was logged. As the owner wouldn't do anything about this, I soon parted company. Yeah, users, especially those with a little knowledge, they're the worst.

You can lock OS X, but this works in conjunction with OS X Server as its more for corporate use

MIT get a donation of non-voting shares and they can live off dividends (if there are any). They are not allowed to sell them. They don't get control of BOSE, they don't get any say in how its run.

You can backtrack through the original submission, etc., and eventually get to it at: http://money.cnn.com/2011/04/29/technology/bose_mit_donation/index.htm?eref=mrss_igoogle_business Interestingly enough, BOSE is a private company, and he's donated an undisclosed number of non-voting stock. MIT will essentially have no running of BOSE and benefit from dividends, when and if BOSE do them.

Having written my own HTTP and FTP servers, if you need several million lines of code, you are doing something seriously wrong. A few thousand lines (in C) is all you really need (plus linking to openssl to provide the ssl/tls goodness)... and of the two, HTTP was slightly more code as a pile of defensive filtering was added to block out the common attack vectors (its amazing how long some worms keep going!)

Why are you surprised? NASA spent millions to develop a pen that could write in space... the Russians used a pencil. Sometimes people look for a really complicated solution instead of going for something cheap and cheerful that gets-the-job-done.

I would find NOT hearing the wife/girlfriend/whatever to be a significant advantage ;-)

For e-commerce the VAT is based on the supplier's country, not the consumers country... unless they've gone and changed the rules again.

Technically, Luxembourg isn't a tax haven... but it does have some advantageous tax, as does Ireland. US companies use Luxembourg as VAT (sales tax) is only 15% so they use this for e-commerce, which means when selling to consumers only 15% is nabbed in sales tax, opposed to say 21% if they were based in Ireland. Which is a polite way of saying they have reduced their (sales) tax liability. Now, Ireland is used by US companies as they are 'tax friendly' in that to encourage US companies to locate there they only impose something like 5% corporate tax (on profits). The cherry on the cake is that when this profit is transferred to the parent US corp then its not taxed again (I can't remember if this was done as a double-taxation treaty of as a specific get out in the US tax system) So, now you know why people like Apple sell from Ireland but specifically base their iTunes service in Luxembourg.

Quite hard. This is stuff that has to work in space, so it has to work all the time and for usually a longer timespan than originally intended... its not like back on the surface where if your cable/hub/whatever goes futz you can simply get a replacement from the local store and swap it.