I can't site a source but a visit to Germany would make it obvious how they do this. The strong labor unions make it too expensive for large businesses that want an army of interchangeable meat puppets to work for pennies. This gives the small local businesses an strong advantage so you get many more small businesses. There are extremely few chain restaurants so the minimum wage unskilled jobs just aren't there. This results in people working in family owned businesses and often making a career of it. The food is far more expensive, but you're being served by someone who is proud of a restaurant they feel responsible for.

Unfortunately, all of this results in a much higher cost of living. Germans are culturally accustomed to this and the system works for them. Most Americans would claim poverty if they had to live as most Germans do. Americans have a vastly different idea of what's "necessary" for living in comfort.

Most IT services and applications have gone to extremely complicated price models now. The purpose is to confuse upper level management so that they just decide to buy the highest level of service because they can't figure out what any of the levels mean.

Try reading the MS SQL Server license guides. It's more complicated than the software itself and even has quick reference guides and instructions on how to read the guides. Most managers just say to buy the most expensive so they know they're covered.

This is why, on my recent trip to Germany, I was unable to find WiFi ANYWHERE. Not even coffee shops had WiFi for customers because the shop would be fined for anything a customer did on their network. Hotels gave out individual logins for each customer so that usage could be tied to a person. Prosecution like this is bad for everyone because it severely limits access to the internet. Without access the very companies that are prosecuting will also lose more money than they ever gained through their supposed fight against piracy.

Agreed. Neal Stephenson already fully covered the birth and development of encryption in simple terms for the non-mathematician.

Not only is it an extremely bad comparison but it's absurdly shallow in estimating jobs. Instagram is generating countless jobs by creating a new market niche to be filled.

- New cell phones to make uploading to instagram easier and faster
- New cameras to support communication with cell phones
- New cell phone towers so that photos can be uploaded anywhere

It may take fewer people to do a single job, but that makes the product cheaper and more available. Greater availability increases the need for all related services and products so the jobs just move to new areas. The key lesson is that job mobility is the most important skill to have for the future. All jobs will require computer skills.

Exactly right, this is just a way of repairing damage already caused by MS and does not "cure" or slow the disease at all. Still an important step though, since damage is permanent for most people.

It's easiest to think of MS as mice chewing the insulation off the wiring in your car resulting in short circuits and lost signals. Curing the disease would be getting rid of the mice. This treatment is like taking your car to the shop to have the wiring replaced, but the car is still full of mice that will eat the wiring again. The current treatments for MS just put the mice (mostly) to sleep, but they're still there and could awake at any time and some people's mice are more resistant than others.

Exactly.
If you chose to be your own boss, then there's only one person to blame when your boss treats you poorly. You do work for customers on your terms at a rent-a-coder site, not forced labor for a slave driver.

Absurd is an incredible understatement of the idiocy of the article. The light bulb was every bit as dependent on previous technology. Without blown glass, methods for extruding wire and countless tools it could never have been created. For Edison the tools were wire and glass. Now the tools are silicon, advanced alloys and software but they are no less of an invention because of it.

Obviously false statements, like calling the iPhone the first touch screen phone, show the ignorance of the writer. There are plenty of brilliant people inventing amazing new creations that are clearly beyond the comprehension of the writer. I've witnessed the invention of new molecules that bind pharmaceuticals and give them new properties and delivery methods. A new molecule is obviously an invention since it's parts are only atoms, but the advanced tools allowed the construction of the molecule.

This article certainly does not qualify as a new invention. It's just another version of Obama's "You didn't build that" ideals.

Yes, it would most certainly be those right wing religious gun owners leading a revolution. The world has certainly never seen a revolution and dictatorship created by a party claiming that oppressed workers should take back the money from the rich oppressors. Revolutions start by convincing a majority that everything is someone else's fault. Revolutions often end with a single person seizing power during the chaos. It seems that Dryeo already believes the straw man arguments and there are likely a great many more.

I felt the same way about fixed width. Then I tried to open my website on a cell phone... Unfortunately, most current web CMS require fixed width to work properly on smaller screens. Fortunately, in Windows all you need to do is hold Shift and scroll the mouse wheel up to zoom. In some browsers the zoom ratio is even site specific so all pages on the size use the same zoom.

Leave it to /. to come up with a bunch of ridiculously overengineered solutions.

Try this DC/DC ATX power supply which is designed for exactly this purpose: http://store.mp3car.com/M4_ATX_250W_Intelligent_DC_DC_PSU_p/pwr-031.htm
Why should you install a battery backup? Your van already has one and it's called a "car battery".
Inverters are horrendous. Why go from DC to AC to DC introducing noise and failure points when a DC/DC supply is cheap and reliable.
Forget the full size computer monitors and get a Lilliput that's designed to run on 12v DC
Build a Mini ITX computer with a fanless mobile Core 2 Duo like this: http://www.stealth.com/littlepc_625_fanless_print.htm
Spend LOTS of time reading the forums at MP3car.com
The key to any carputer installation is simplicity. Failure is garunteed so follow the KISS method to reduce the frequency. Also, feed the sound to a car stereo instead of directly to an amp. When you cross a train track and the carputer dies, you will be happy to be able to tune in the radio instead.

No I block cookies and avoid linked accounts that pass my browsing habits back to Facebook. Since they can only base ad targeting on my Facebook profile it sees single male and that ranks highest.

My facebook is always covered in ads for young hot single women in my area. If they're generating that much revenue then they must be incredibly wealthy young hot single women and it should be easy to find myself a sugar mama.

Except that they selected their own wealth and standing on a scale of 1 to 10. I think it's more likely that some people lied and put themselves in higher income brackets then continued to lie and cheat throughout the test.

No, the D's weren't compromising any more or less than the R's. They want to do it all with tax increases and agreed to lower the amount of the tax increase by the amount of the Bush tax cut. However, this is only with an amendment that the Bush tax cuts would not be renewed. That's not a compromise at all, it's just saying give us 100% of what we want, but we'll wait a year to collect the last 10% right before elections so we can throw it back in your face.

The root of the issue here is that neither party has decided that a solution is more important than political posturing.