As American consumers, we pay less for cheap plastic crap now.. at the expense of our jobs and quality.

Ultimately, American consumers caused this problem, because they sought the best value for money. Nobody forced Americans to by products made in China - they chose to, by taking the money out of their pocket and putting it on the counter.

You probably contributed too. Your computer is likely to have been made from Chinese parts, if not assembled in China. As well as your clothes, white goods etc.

http://www.businessinsider.com/americas-biggest-tariffs-2010-9

You're really shooting yourself in the foot if you think tariffs are the answer. Google for "Economics in One Lesson" and read it.

The should have a redundant network, regardless of whether they use PCs or windows terminals. Switched networks are extremely reliable if you buy the right ones and put them into the right architecture. For example, as the windows terminals are more reliant on the network than PCs (somewhat debatable though because of all the web based apps these days), then a better architecture would have been to multiple 24 or 48 port switches uplinked to two separate aggregation switches, such as Cisco 6500s. If one of the 24 or 48 port switches dies, they're cheap to hold in spares, although if you buy good ones (e.g. Cisco, Juniper etc.) they'll be very reliable, and be able to swap it out in no more than an hour, and only have 24 or 48 windows terminals down at once for no more than an hour (more like no more than half an hour). If one of the upstream aggregation switches goes down the other one will take over all the traffic until you replace the failed one.

Ever read "Reflections on Trusting Trust"?

http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html

Once you have, think about whether it is ever a good idea to have a customer's device decide whether the customer should get access to the Internet (assuming you're saying customers own the router).

Why do the slashdot crowd rally against closed and proprietary data formats like MS Word documents, but not closed and proprietary VoIP protocols?

You could apply QoS policies to outbound traffic such that BT only gets left over bandwidth a.k.a. a QoS scavenger class.

attackers don't only come from the Internet. The "hard shell, gooey centre" security model is doomed now that people are buying laptops, ipads, iphones etc. Mobile devices need to protect themselves, and since everybody is buying mobile devices, upstream network located firewalls are losing their effectiveness.

"If you really believe that tripe you wrote"

You must be assuming I haven't been working for the last 20 years. I've always been rewarded on merit. I've also gained pay rises by threatening to leave.

It's funny that you don't realise that you ultimately create the "mythical" meritocracy by seeking value for money on the goods and services you buy.

Successful companies sell successful goods and services. Successful companies will pay successful employees, and if those successful employees make the company more successful, they'll be better rewarded by the company - otherwise they'll find a different company to work for (done that too).

Completely disagree.

Collective bargaining encourage mediocre performance. It rewards people who should lose their jobs because they perform below the average, and it creates an incentive for the above average performers to lower their performance to the average, because they're not going to receive any rewards for standing out. There is a downward trend in performance and productivity, yet the union typically wants more pay for that reduced productivity.

I'd much rather see people rewarded on their merits. If they do an above average job they should receive above average pay. However the unions won't allow that because it reduces the role they have a vested interest in performing.

Our market system rewards productivity - people (and very much likely to be including you), reward productivity by seeking value for money - you buy the most for the least. With collective bargaining encouraging mediocre performance, how do consumers (who are also include those union members) get best value for money?

There is a place for employees creating group representation when things such as health and safety are involved. But when it is about collective bargaining and "union shops" then it is a corruption of the meritocracy that our market system relies on and that everybody, including the union members, both create and participate in.

So one example shows that every employer abuses their employees? Makes about as much sense as saying all car tires are unreliable because one goes flat.

it'd be far more popular, as it is everywhere else in the world that does sender pays.

(I'm assuming I'm right when I've heard that in the US you pay for the SMSes you receive)

if you gave them free Internet, they'd complain, saying you should be paying them to use it ...