I'm in the US, and I actually have almost exactly that clause in my contract. Honestly, I'm perfectly OK with it. If they company fronts me the money for additional training, then I'm totally OK with having to pay for it if I leave voluntarily. On top of that, some specific training isn't even subject to this agreement - for example, we're getting some Oracle classes completely free of strings (to us, the employee) later on this year, simply because the cost analysis showed the beancounters that it would be cheaper for us to handle some of this stuff in house than to pay for a support call every week.

My sister's partner is a lesbian from the Netherlands. Do you have any idea how often we hear this joke at family events? :D Ironically, it's usually one of them making it.

You need a completely different model with different capabilities (braille) for blind people to access the information. And somehow a kindle that doesn't have voice controls for the menu is less blind-friendly than a normal book? When will people learn that Reality does indeed discriminate?

Because family and friends, who are able to gain regular access to the child anyway, presumably because they either are the parents or are trusted by the parents, now suddenly need to check a website to find the child? Come on now, at least make sense. Yes, most abductions/abuse happen by those the child knows well. Having a GPS trackable watch doesn't make things appreciably easier for anyone in that category.

A statistically low percentage of child kidnappings, etc, does not in any way assuage the grief and pain of a parent who happens to be one of the unlucky few. As someone else above stated, this is probably not appropriate for teenagers, but rather is suited for young children. The fact that the human race will continue without your child isn't any kind of comfort to a parent. If they make a value judgment that the peace of mind and possible benefit of purchasing one of these is worth the cost, then so be it.

Well, first off, a large number of those 100k dead aren't due to US bombing/gunfire/etc. I haven't scoured the site for exact numbers, so I can't give you hard percentages and so on. In fact, so far in 2009, more people are being killed per day in suicide attacks than with gunfire/executions. I know you didn't explicitly say they were all due to the US, but it was implied.

Second, there's a moral difference between shooting at someone intending to kill them and someone getting caught in the crossfire due to literal crossfire, mistaken identity, or any of a host of other screw ups. Sure, the person is just as dead, but we're talking about moral issues here. No, I'm not saying that all civilian deaths in Iraq were unavoidable, but the US military as a whole is not going out and deliberately targeting noncombatants. China most certainly did.

Third, there is a large time/concentration difference. The violence in Tienanmen square essentially happened in one day, though the protests there had gone on for weeks. There are no hard numbers available (though I'm sure they exist somewhere in the CCP's records) but estimates are that somewhere around 2,500 people were killed and another 10,000 or so injured. Concentration of deaths does play a role in whether or not something has an impact. For example, according to the website you posted, approximately 12 civilians per day are currently being killed in Iraq due to violence. At the height of the violence (after the initial push) in 2006-2007, about 60 civilians per day were being killed. In the US alone, an average of 110 people per day die in car accidents. Does that make any of these deaths less horrible for the families involved, etc? No. But from a societal level, it does illustrate comparative actual impact (though psychological impact may differ, obviously).

Finally, can we please institute a Godwin's Law about Iraq, already? If the conversation is about the war in Iraq and whether or not you like it, fine. If it's not, let's keep it on topic. :P

Actually, in this particular case, for the Chinese people as a whole. In fact, if China suddenly went through another cultural revolution of sorts, tossed censorship and government control of private lives out the window, and got some sort of system in place that manged to balance individual rights and national progress, their economy could REALLY take off. Sure, they're a huge economy, but they also have four times as many people as the USA and has about a fourth of the USA's GDP. China beginning to perform economically as well, per capita, would mean the USA would no longer be the largest economy in the world. So that could actually be seen as detrimental to me as an American.

Sure, they CAN do as they please. That doesn't mean they're going to make correct/good decisions.

Saying that something is okay as long as it's not covered by existing international law is saying "do anything you want as long as the rest of us haven't thought of it yet." Indeed, international law barely exists - at core it's nothing more than the various treaties and agreements between states. It tends to have very little to do with individuals. There is no international Congress that can pass a law that affects all nations - don't even get me started on the UN (or as I've taken to calling it lately, the League of United Nations).

If China wanted to execute all couples who had more than two children, they could do so. It wouldn't be against any international law. Does that make it right? Does that mean humanitarian organizations should back off and shut up? Hell no.

Being a sovereign nation gives you the ABILITY (not the right) to do as you wish in many circumstances. It sure as hell doesn't give a "Mandate of Heaven" that says all your decisions will be correct and good for people.

Sure, censoring Google may seem like a small thing, but compare it to the censorship that still exists regarding things like the Tiananmen square massacre - or as it's euphemized in China, the "June 4th incident." It's still a completely forbidden topic in media and print. That's the kind of BS that overarching censorship can lead to.

If that's all you're doing as in IT person, you are failing at your job. IT is similar to a janitorial role in the same way that a good corporate level salesman is to a grocery store cashier.

A good IT department doesn't just 'keep things working,' they actively look for solutions that can make the business run better. This can be from a revenue and customer support standpoint (Hey boss, I think that if we did X and Y, we could tie our database into a front end so customers can view their status online), or from an expenses standpoint (If we get this fax server, we can eliminate the fifty dedicated phone lines that we're paying a thousand dollars a month for, saving us money in half a year or less). Good IT keeps up on the latest technologies to see what might be valuable for different people in the company, and evaluates if it would really solve a problem, and if it is cost effective.

Sure, you don't get the final say in all things - but that's the case in most corporate environments. But if you do your job right, and explain yourself well, then when you tell the CFO or CEO "we NEED to expand the SAN otherwise X and Y and Z bad things will happen," they'll listen to you. Sure, they may be signing the check, but you're the one who decided that an "elevator" was needed in the first place.

Definitely a bit on the unsubtle side today.

While on the flight paths...

AFAIK (Ex biotechnology major here, so I have some minute amount of authority):

You have two potential situations here:

First case, you manage to find a common nutrient (iron, phosphorus, nitrogen) and fertilize a large spectrum of the plankton/phytoplankton population. This is essentially what the experiment did. Note that many types of algae are phytoplankton. There is still a danger of imbalancing the ecosystem in this scenario, but not as much as case 2.

In case 2, you manage to stimulate the growth of only one type of "safe" algae/phytoplankton. This may be able to prevent immediate toxins, but it still has other detriments. That particular species then dominates CO2 supplies and other crucial resources, edging out other species of phytoplankton in the area. That allows much more opportunity for imbalancing the ecosystem in the area.

Unfortunately, I just don't think that the solution to our environmental problems is ever going to be as simple as "Mix powder with ocean, stir."

Because of things like this, mostly: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Massive-Killer-Algae-Bloom-is-Making-Thousands-of-Victims-off-California-53468.shtml

The link you posted looks like an out-of-production model, but the "new" model ( http://www.i-glassesstore.com/i-glasses-i3pc.html ) seems like it might work with a bit of tweaking. It mentions 2D compatibility for Macs, so theoretically it works on a flavor of *nix.

As to how feasible it is to get the Mac-based drivers to work on Ubuntu, you've got me there. I'm not familiar enough with the differences between the two OSes at that level (networking geek, not a programmer).