According to the article, France has had a 35 hour work week since '99.

Worse than that, think about a few things. Small companies that need to do "after hours changes" will now have to institute shift-work where they didn't have it before, or at least a 1:1 hour shift for those changes. At my job,. I work 40 scheduled hours, and somewhere between 1-20 hours after that just to get done what needs to be done. Not including the on-call hours when it's my week in the rotation. If this stands, my hunch is that you will see even increasing outsourcing of IT jobs to India, or other countries w/ looser work rules and lower labor costs. How will those French IT workers live "the sweet life" when they are too poor to afford their wine and cheese since they are unemployed?

AMEN! UTC for ALL!

Personally, I'm in favor of eliminating DST, and eliminating timezones all together. Just put the word on a unified time (say UTC) and let people adjust. Instead of working from 8AM - 5PM local time, you might work from 14:00 - 22:00 UTC. The sun's still in the same place when you get up and go to bed as they were before, you just change the numbers. IMO, it would make global scheduling a butt-load easier. (Ok, I'm ready for the "that would never work!" flames.)

AMEN!

Maybe as a Linux guy I'm not getting this but.... Isn't "Windows" without a GUI simply .... DOS?

Forgive me, but I just don't see the "usability" aspect. How is this more "usable" than what I have now? What the author calls "raw" data, I call data. To me, that is WAY more usable than what the author has posted.

I agree. Criminals are criminals because they have no regard for the law. So more laws saying call-phone use/possession by criminals are useless because they won't follow them any more than they did the laws that got them in prison in the first place. Just install jammers through the prison complex (where they will not interfere with guard stations, etc) and be done with it. "What's that Charlie Manson, your cell phone isn't working? Ahhh, too bad."

As long as your wiring is static, I would say only replace what breaks/fails until you choose to upgrade the network. If you go to Gig-E, I would suggest Cat6.