Yes and no. I mean, no one wants to buy a crummy product. On the other hand, producers need to be able to sell the product with specific volume and price points to make the profit margins that they plan years in advance. There are some very careful trade offs involved in that kind of work. In business, it's possible to launch and sell a profitable product line and still fail because you came in at a profit margin of 10% instead of 30%.

Isn't that sort of the core of the discussion over HP's WebOS tablets? They can make and sell them, but their desired price point didn't produce the volume of sales that they needed. The product that was crummy at one price point became awesome at another. Can HP find a price where they'll get the sales that they need to make enough profit to make it worthwhile? Even if they can sell the tables for a tiny profit, HP may prefer to focus their time, people, and capital on other, more profitable businesses.

Compared to some other companies, I'm actually impressed with the length of Cisco's technical track. It's possible to a long technical career within the company with regular pay increases and promotions without switching to the "business" side. In many companies, promotions quickly push technical people into management or technical sales or something. I haven't seen that at Cisco.

Of course, I still expect that the people who are closer to sales and major product decisions (VPs and SVPs) to make more than the senior engineers. Fortunately, I've also seen that Cisco is willing to fire upper management if they make too big or too many bad decisions that hurt margins, product quality, etc. Listening to the message Chambers has been putting out, part of the restructuring seems to be aimed at increased accountability in upper management. It's no use to build awesome products if the company can't sell them or can't sell them at a profit.

I believe that smartphones with video overtook the Flip faster than Cisco expected. The Flip was a good little device, but it was too expensive for a single purpose device once smartphones started including HD video recording. Cisco would either have to drop the Flip prices and work for much smaller margins, or it would have to kill the division. It chose to do the latter so that it could use that money on its core products.

Cool! You keep your irony in a queue so that you can easily dequeue it when you need it later?

(Yes, yes. I know that you meant cue, not queue.)

I'm always surprised by what information is accessed when systems are compromised from the Internet. Isn't the purpose of SIPRNet to keep classified information off of machines that are connected (in any way) to a public network?

TFA is talking about the residential white pages. Not the yellow pages.

What editor are you using that doesn't generate your getters and setters for you? In Eclipse, for example, that would be Source > Generate Getters and Setters...

Just don't watch the movie too many times. Eventually you'll forget, and you can go back to imagining whatever you want. This infection of someone else's image isn't a new problem. People have been making realistic paintings and drawings for centuries.

And instead of just bemoaning the lack of imagination, we should think about what is missing when the consumer doesn't supply something himself. I think that it's neat that the technology is advanced enough that Mr. Jackson can show me what he was imagining. But there are things that are difficult to show, and I think that Shelob is a better example of that. After they did a pretty good job with the Nazgûl and the Balrog, I was hoping for more with Shelob. I was disappointed that they just seemed to present her as a big spider. I always wondered how they'd try to convey a sense that she was the "last child of Ungoliant to trouble the unhappy world....who was there before Sauron, and before the first stone of Barad-dûr; and she served none but herself, drinking the blood of Elves and Men, bloated and grown fat with endless brooding on her feasts, weaving webs of shadow; for all living things were her food, and her vomit darkness."

I think that's really hard to convey in a movie, but it didn't seem like they even tried. It's hard to show someone what a complete, oppressive, and malevolent darkness is like. Something that makes your mind forget what light is. Shelob isn't a big spider. She's more like a demon in current terminology: the embodiment of an ancient evil. With good writing and a good imagination in the reader, Shelob becomes much more terrifying than a big spider.

You may want to look into Tasktop. You can connect the task list to one or more task system back ends or just use local tasks. The advantage of Tasktop is that it can track context for each task. That way, when you want to return to a task that you haven't touched in two weeks, restoring the task in Tasktop can get you right back to the web pages, e-mails, etc. that you were accessing while working on the task last time. It also has integration with Eclipse if you do your development in Eclipse.

I'd add Adams's The Knot Book to your list. I've been out of the field for some time, but I remember that this book gave an accessible introduction to knot theory and some notions of topology, presented at a high school level.

It's not exactly a new book, so some of the unsolved problems listed in the book may now be solved. In any case, it's one of the few I know that help a younger student go into more depth in an area where there's still active research going on. It's a difficult subject where many of the theorems can be proved without resorting to higher mathematics.

I'd imagine that there are probably similar texts for some areas of number theory and game theory, but nothing springs to mind. Non-Euclidean geometry may also be an option if the students have already taken geometry, and there were some text books that I found at least partially accessible in high school.

The Mathematical Tourist is even more out-of-date by this time. Since it's really a survey of many areas, it doesn't really meet your need, but you may find it useful yourself for looking into other areas that may be accessible to your students.

Finally, contact your local mathematics and math education departments. The math education folks may have some good suggestions. Many mathematics departments also do some sort of outreach to high school students, so there may also be some faculty there who could offer ideas.

I found that last comment from the article a bit odd. They've dropped the rating on the Prius to 48/45/46. I suppose that I do a mix of driving: some local start and stop around 35 MPH, a lot of commuting on interstates (65 - 80 MPH) and state highways (50 - 60 MPH).

Over the past two years, I generally average much closer to 50 MPG. During the winter (worse battery efficiency), it's closer to 45 MPG. During the the rest of the year, it's generally more like 52 MPG. I don't drive like a maniac, but I'm not super careful about squeezing every last bit of efficiency out of the car. I'm not sure what you'd need to drive like to pull the Prius numbers much below the new figures.

But, yeah, the new numbers look more realistic than the old numbers. :-)