Not true. There is a PIN requirement for cards that have a PIN assigned to them. US Banks have switched from the "Chip + Signature" to "Chip + Pin" system in the last year.

All the banks are issuing new terminals that accept chip+pin in the US. Start watching your local markets and smaller shops -- many of them already have the new readers. My corporate card was just re-issued last month with a Chip+Pin -- if I try to swipe it on one of these new readers, it denies the transactions and prompts me to insert it near the bottom.

I'd say 25% of the merchants I've visited in the last two weeks have a chip+pin reader already. Major chains where they have their own branded readers don't have them yet at all.

Because if you block access to SkyDrive, you end up blocking access to being able to run the newest version of Microsoft Office. The servers that it uses to get (stream) content are the same ones that SkyDrive uses.

Well, then your spouse dosen't know how to account for their time very well.

When I was teaching, I topped out at $52k a year. This was in the midwest, and the top-paid teacher in the district I think made near $60k.

We were required to be in the classroom for 990 hours. IF you just count that, 52,000 / 990 = $52/hr.

But I was required to be in school more than just the kids. This averaged to be 1 hour before they arrived, and 3 after. (4hrs*5days*39weeks) = 780 + 990 = 1770 hours required to be in school. Now, the per-hour figure goes down to just under $30/hr.

Oh, and if I don't get my grading, lesson plans, meetings, and everything else done in those four hours (I rarely did), then I had to do that as well. Lets be really conservative and say that was only 6 hours a week. 6*39 = 2,004 hours. $25/hr.

Oddly enough, ~2000 hours is what an average blue-collar worker gets paid for per year, including vacations. $52k is pretty good, but I was also at top-pay. That is what was worked-up to.

The trick is knowing what is happening under the hood -- whether you do it on a day-to-day basis or not. It's good to know why you wouldn't want to send a LONG into a function that requires a FLOAT. It's also good to know what the difference is between a MAP and having two Arrays or linked-lists. These things don't require doing memory management by hand, but being able to demonstrate what and why is the difference between a code monkey and somebody who is architecting code. Because a lot of the higher-level languages will obscure this from you, you can get along without ever learning them -- but you can get yourself into a hole quickly.

IT in Education conferences I would have you look at include Educause, and ACUTA. Educause is the 1,000 lbs gorilla, and everybody is there. ACUTA is much smaller, so you tend to build really good relationships with your peer institutions.

Dude. You are still talking about backbone-to-backbone peering arrangements. This hasn't been the case for ISPs in probably 10 years. Just stop it.

You are already late to the game. Tons of ISPs have direct contracts with companies for direct peering. Things like ESPN360 and the like have existed for years and are ISP specific.

What we are seeing Netflix do here is smart for both them and the ISPs that are offering to host them. They send one data stream to a colo box that the ISP is hosting, and the the massive bandwidth that it generates is moved from their expensive pipes to the "free" pipes they already own. They aren't offering any services that aren't available to the rest of the world (in fact Netflix is doing this all over the place -- ISPs, Universities, etc, and building their own CDN).

But you are under the grand assumption that Level-3 is going to charge Verizon more because of the imbalance. Something they have NOT said. In fact, they have a blog post on their site (quoted multiple times in this thread already) they will NOT be charging Verizon more, and have offered to pay for the equipment to do it.

In the old-world, peering arrangements between backbone providers and ISPs were all about symmetrical data. That day is LONG gone. Now it is all about bandwidth and that is it. It's well known that the last-mile providers are heavy downloaders and that large hosting companies are large uploaders. It's just the nature of the internet as we know it. Peering arrangements between large backbone providers (which is the knowledge you are referring to) are generally seen as symmetrical.

Mappoint did a lot more than Bing does... And the VPs who think Bing is the answer have no idea.

Mappoint is closer to ArcGIS than it is a consumer mapping applications. It had an extensive set of APIs that you could allow apps to push data onto maps, it allowed statistical queries and it allowed complex boundaries. etc... all back in 2004. Heck, they even had some traffic data built in for their analysis.

I remember when Verizon used on-site Mappoint servers to allow dispatchers to use Verizon phones as tacklers (this was before smartphones), so dispatchers could see where certain trucks were, directions they were going, etc.

Since the time that the S has come out, battery technology has gone significantly further... I'm sure that by the time this hits the road it will be far enough to compensate the difference in material...

It all depends on what you are shooting. I'm paid to cover an event (concert, wedding, conference, etc), and don't second chances -- let alone much time to setup the shot -- so I take two or three exposures per "shot". It's easier to discard later than it is to miss the shot. When I shoot a concert, I'm shooting the entire 3 or 4 hours. A wedding, I'm shooting for usually a 12 hour period, at least. A conference may be over 4 days, and a runner's race might be over the course of a full day. Each event usually produces just as many shots.

If I only was shooting a potted plant I might only need three exposures because I can carefully plan the shot, adjust the lighting, and edit the shot thoughtfully for an extended period of time. A senior photo shoot might only need 20 exposures. But when you are working events with moving lights, moving people, and instantly changing emotions, the difference between 1/3 of second between exposures can make the photo while the next one is too dark, missing the person, or doesn't show what I want it to show.

I don't deal with film anymore. Space is cheap. Exposures only cost power. In this day and age there is no reason to not take too many photos and throw out or ignore the ones you don't want.

Not quite. Tried it, but it is still linked back to the App Store. If you copy it to a computer that doesn't have a sub to the app in the App Store, it won't run. It wants you to login to the App Store. When it doesn't find it, it won't run.

I usually only edit about 1/4 to 1/8 of the shots I take -- sometimes less depending on the client. Each one takes at most 5 minutes to edit -- usually closer to 2 minutes. Each day of shooting takes a day of editing. But RAW does chew up LOTS of space with a good camera.

I shoot live events. Typically concerts or conferences, but I've done weddings and other engagements like that as well. It is not unusual to snap between 1,200 shots and 1,800 shots in one evening between my three cameras. My 7Ds stores RAW files sized about 50MB or so each. My 5D-MK3 ends up somewhere in the 35-40MB range per shot. Heck, even my backup 60D takes 35MB RAWs.

I don't delete shots that make my first pass. Blurry ones, or test shots usually get deleted but the rest stay. I edit the ones I feel the client want and store the rest. I've often come across clients that want a photo of person X or a particular moment in time that didn't make it through my 2nd pass, so the small cost of storage is worth it. I have a few 3TB drives that get put into storage after they are full.