I have a long reply to this but will try and make it short.
At one of my previous jobs the VP thought it would be a great idea to log everything I did (I was a sysadmin).
It was fun as right during my mass update of the OS I was getting so many loggings that the system actually slowed down because of it.
I called the auditor and asked him if he wanted to see what I was doing and have me explain what was going on. He was surprised and said sure bring it upstairs. I had three people bring 17 boxes of printout up to his conference room and put them on the table I told the three people to go back to their jobs. So I sat and waited for about 10 minutes and the auditor walked in and asked me what all this printout was from. I said well 10 percent of it is you logging me and the other 90 percent is printout that has to be saved for 12 months. Would you like me to explain what is going on? He says well he only has a few minutes and the conference room is booked. I said look I will give you a 5 minutes intro and just go through some of the output. I had to explain in 5 minutes a high level over view on maintenence and how it is supplied from the vendor. I then proceded to go through the first few pages and I could see his eyes glaze over and I paused. Is this enough explaination to ask you to turn off logging on me? He says he will get back to me.
10 minutes later he calls me up and tells me he has authorized the logging be turned off on me.
About 3 weeks later I was talking with my security guy and I asked him in a round about way who asked to have me logged. He would not tell me directly but I got who it was from they things he said. It was my boss's boss squared.
So the next time I had to run one of my huge jobs I got the three people together and put the paper on some carts and wheeled it in to his office and asked him if he wanted to see what I do for a living (he really had no clue). He said no thanks the auditor OK'd it and that was good enough for him. As I was leaving I could hear him on the telephone to the auditor asking how I knew who asked for the logging the auditor said he didn't tell me (he didn't). He never could figureit out.

I may be in a minority here but I wish they would get rid of the caps lock key forever.
I had a stroke and the control on my left hand is less than good (its poor) so I was forever hitting the caps lock key with out realizing it.
I have to buy an application that actually disables the key.
I wish it had never been invented.

This is similar (I think). Back in the mid 1990's I worked as a systems programmer at a large hospital here in Chicago. I was called for Jury Duty. I was actually selected to be on a jury and then the jury selection started up. I was asked where I was employed and I told them and there was an objection and I was excused.

As it was explained to me later I just so happened to work at the same hospital where the person who was suing was treated for a dog bite. Apparantly they thought I had access to the medical records. I did not and had no idea even where the records were kept. And more importantly no idea on how to look any medical records up.

Fine with me as we have a system here you serve one day on jury duty and if you are not selected you go home.

Or Jimmy Hoffa ?:)

OH SHIT SHE HAS A TIME MACHINE

Even if she had one she couldn't see it because it was too obvious.

Toll roads??!!! You have got to be kidding
Take the toll rode here in Illinois its run by relatives or appointees of corrupt politicians and talk abouty feather bedding I won't go there.
Or take for example the Ohio Turnpike (toll road) It was built in the 1950's and was to be turned over to the public once it had been paid for by tolls. Haha It still costs to take it and it seems that each year the turn over gets put back 20 years (or so).
On an ideal situation both of these would have been turned back to the state but the politicians find ways of making money over it and acrttually do not want this to happen as they will loose their gravy train.

5 dollars off?? More like $25 added to pay for the lawyers.

spun skoke: I mean, seriously, who gives a fuck if it is or isn't the best country ever? How does that impact you? If it is a suck-ass country, does that make you a suck-ass person? If it is an awesome country, does that mean you are awesome? How immature, who bases their self esteem on what they think of their country?
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I will try and be brief on this reply. I was stationed over in Germany in the early 70's. I was lucky enough to live off base. My landlord was a elderly German lady, who when we first met she found out I was from Chicago. She was SCARED!!! She thought I was a member of Al Capone's gang and would go around pretending to shoot a machine gun. No matter how nice I was to her she was sure I was a gangster and made sure that somebody was around when I was there. I could not have a pleasent conversation with her as she was always bringing up Al Capone. I was just trying to be friendly and brought her some biscuits or cookies from time to time and be friendly. I was getting discharged and was she happy that I was leaving. She was a sweet old lady and I hated the fact that her idea of all chicagoans belonged to Al Capones gang. Ever since I have been
less than eager to watch the Untouchables or any other gangster type shows as I know it eventually gets to the other countries of the world and people percieve some Americans are gangsters.

Trying to hold up the south's use of slavery is well known *AND* should be fogotten as much as possible. If you had suggested this after say 40 years say 1900 you might get a valid discussion. 150 years is just way out of the question as by now records have been destroyed and I am pretty sure that all slaves have died. That would mean trying to figure out 2nd 3rd and possibly more generations so how could you possibly compensate them? I submit it would be impossible. Unless you are suggesting to give money to every black person in the US for compensation. Then you have the same problem "who" and how much.

Hands down (in the US) is FEDEX. I have at least 3-4 packages delivered weekly to my home. FEDEX has never delivered anything broken or mishandled. UPS & USPS are down on the later USPS is the worst and the slowest. Example (UPS) I order memory or whatever from a dealer in the suburbs and it is here the next day (without special handling). With the USPS first class envelope takes 3-4 days to get here from the suburbs.
I will only mention FEDEX in this context. I ordered an IPAD and I tracked the shipment and it went 4 or 5 places in SE Asia before it hit the US and then one bounce it came.
FEDEX is pretty good in the US. I had a computer monitor sent to me from CA and it arived the next day again no next day service was requested. The damn thing weighed 70 pounds.

I agree with you generally however I can just see it now. Say a Terrorist lets the people know that he is going to bomb say somewhere in Chicago. Then instead of Chicago it hits a suburb right outside of Chicago. Then we will have people suing the government for giving out wrong information. I do not agree but that is how the legal system works. The people in Evanston will say why didn't you warn the suburbs? Its a no win as if you say midwest then it becomes meaningless warnings. I do not know if there is a solid way of warning people. Plus the terrorist might aim for say the John Hancock building and hit the Tribune building. Or if the weapon is defective it could hit the Chicago Sanitation site.
So even if you have the "correct information" you could mislead the public then you will have finger pointing. It's not the same as the A******* TSA people groping peoples bodies for the fun of it.

Two comedians brought in to the forefront like this:

Conan O’Brien joked, “Champagne-fuchsia means we’re being attacked by Martha Stewart.”

Jay Leno said, “They added a plaid in case we were ever attacked by Scotland.”

IBM has work in several areas about write protection, so it is not clear which one you are refering to.

The ones I am familiar with depend on a hardware feature that I am not sure that INTEL has. In fact (from a iffy memory) almost all IBM's write protection methods depend in hardware and software feature that I am sure INTEL does not have. So if you are talking software I am guessing its not the same. The hardware has to be there before the software can take advantage of it. So without seeing your code I doubt that it is the same. The differences between IBM's hardware archetecture and INTEL's is dramatic (from what I have been told since its difficult to to find out exactly how INTEL's arcitecture really works. IBM publisizes their in several books (free to everyone) but just knowing how the instructions work does not help you have to get into design of the OS. IBM also publishes most of that (exceptions do exist).

I seem to recall a paper (sorry no citation) that stated anything above 75 "cores" runs into issues about performance due to storage serialization and the amount of time it takes to serialize internal instruction buffers. The paper was done by a well respected author and has not (to the best of my knowledge been proven wrong).

That does sound intriguing, how ever hindsight is never 20/20.
People do not always record things honestly and interviews (or biographies) are far from perfect. Also, the way journalists are today you can not really trust them to tell the truth.

Prime Example: Fox News.

Now I know you just about to say well we know that, but what about 50 years from now when all that left of them is electrons floating around the future Internet (what ever that might be).

I think its a fair assumption that in reality those awards would be much the same as it is today. It would be fact checking with no live person to remember what really happened as minds do forget things.

I am suggesting that any future awards will be more flawed than todays awards.