Wow, I can now dust off my high-speed acoustic coupler! It would plug into the phone line out on a modem, and give you a decent percentage of the 14.4 Kbaud, say anywhere from 40-80%, depending on the phone, etc. I bought it because it meant that I could do support on Unix systems even if the only net connection I had available was a pay phone!

Mr. Anonymous, sorry about your loss - such things are never easy.

I hope you're not overly offended by those of us who make light of the image of crotch-sniffing dogs in women's clinics. I'm not sure of the person who made the "Wanted:" comment above, but for many people (myself included) humor is simply a way of dealing with the unpleasant and often painful realities of life. So, it's not an attempt to be dismissive of the pain and overall nastiness of the disease, but more coping mechanism. At least for some. Others truly are just insensitive clods.

So let's change the rules...create a Kickstarter campaign to fund a patent-bounty system. If funded, the fund pays out $10 per-patent that is squashed. Suddenly, it becomes a game for people to compete with each other to kill off patents. Even if a person can only do one an hour, that is better pay than minimum wage in many US States, or around the world. And once a year, they can throw a conference, and give out awards to the top "sharp-shooters" who kill off the most patents!

Turn killing bad patents into a game where you can make money, and we can have the patent-trolls slain in short order!

What do you mean rudderless? Of course it has a rudder... it's just hard over to one side, and the control cable is broken.

Guess what... a lot of that is probably people on H1-B visas, who will very often work more hours for less pay. It's not that the number of American developers will grow by 25%, simply that the number of developers in the US will grow by 25%.

I am not knowing what is it wrong with that?

Haven't tried one of their new phones then, I see? I just bought a Nokia 521 on T-Mobile a few days ago, and so far I love it. They might be behind, and yes, killing off Symbian as quickly as they did may have been a bad mistake, but I think they've carved out a decent niche with WP, and are very much still in the running. Awesome hardware running a decent OS (and the only one I've seen that doesn't look like Win95 puked icons on the screen), I really think Nokia could've made substantially worse decisions.

Sadly, this is probably the most accurate version of what's happening today. The immigrants cheering this on seem to not realize that the immigration reform currently in the works is merely a way to legalize and increase the exploitation of those already here illegally. This will not end well, for anyone. We'll bring more tired and poor from overseas, as long as they have barely sufficient technical skill to push the right buttons at approximately the right time. We'll displace skilled workers with cheap, barely adequate labor, while working the cheap, barely adequate labor until they burn out and go home with their relative riches.

In the end we'll cheapen the skilled jobs to the point no one bothers to acquire the skills, and bring them down to the pay scale of a waiter at a middle-class restaurant, but working double the hours.

I wouldn't say the Sr. knows (or thinks they know) everything, but that the things they don't know they can either figure out on their own (using appropriate references such as books, internet, etc.), or have to go way above their peers to figure out. As an example, the things I have questions about and can't figure out quickly, I usually have to escalate to T3 product support from the vendor - they're not things that can be found/fixed by simple web searches or a quick question of a peer. Once talking to T3, the cases sometimes go on for weeks, and in a couple cases have resulted in the vendor publishing hotfixes because I had uncovered a bug in the product.

1) Someone else mentioned that SysAdmin is now spelled "Systems Engineer." This is absolute truth - I updated my resume and changed my current title from System Administrator to Systems Engineer, and immediately started getting on average 2-3 calls/emails per week. I think I also put "Sr." in front of it. If in doubt, the determining factor between Jr. and Sr. is "do you ask people questions, or do people ask questions of you?" If your peers are always coming to you for help/advice, you're a Sr. If you're always having to go ask for help from your peers, you're a Jr.

2) Be willing to accept contract / contract-to-hire jobs. Even though I'm currently in a full-time position, it seems the contract / CTH gig is by far the easiest way in the door at a couple companies. And while the job market is fairly tight with a lot of applicants, there are a lot of people who have NO CLUE applying for (and getting) these jobs. If you really know your stuff and can prove yourself, you can go from contract to full-time pretty easily.

3) Network. It's a buzz-word, I know, but get out, get to know people, do favors for people, etc. The more people you know, the easier it is to get in the door. It sucks, but it's the truth. Every job I've held, I've gotten because of people I know. I had one offer once that came as a result of a resume posted to Monster, which I ended up not taking (that one was Amazon), but the jobs I've actually held were due to references from people I knew.

Good luck.

Of course, ebooks being just text, (HTML zipped for the epub format, for example), I would not be surprised if a good spelling and grammar check software wouldn't render this attempt at DRM useless...or will they try to outlaw spelling/grammar check software as DRM circumvention tools?

Ever been in an ICU recently? All that remote monitoring technology was "government science" developed for space travel. This internet? Yup, More government science money. Use a microwave oven? Yup, government money!

Basic science research is needed to develop ideas and test theories that could later be developed into mass use products!

It's the "Blockbuster" mentality...Give Trekkers a good story and they are happy...but to attract the Mundanes (What SF Fans call Muggles), you need flash rather than substance...and this film delivers flash in excess.

And is it just me, but does anyone else read Christopher Pike when the see Christopher Pine's name written?

If I had a big group to feed, I think that whale would do quite nicely, thank you. Any chance you and I could partner to develop a more friendly, targeted, whales-only dynamite? I mean really, we're talking food here, let's leave the small fry out of it, don't you think?

I was speaking about commonly available, modern, 3d-capable hardware. They might be out there, but I've never seen an Intel video card on the shelf at the local Fry's.

Comparing nVidia with AMD/ATI, nVidia has always had more "just works." I left out Matrox, because even though they've always been great solid cards and indeed have/had great Linux support, they're not something I would buy to put in a new machine (though since you mention them, I probably own at least 5 or 6 of them, in various PCI and AGP configurations, and I still use them in some of my older boxes - they're some of the best 2D cards out there).

If you can show me a discrete Intel card in the $75-$125 price range with comparable performance to an ATI or nVidia card in that same price range, by all means, I'd be interested in going that route next time I build a machine (though that will probably be at least another 6-8 years, considering I haven't even bothered to turn my desktop machine back on after the last power outage 3 months ago).