Currently believed to be about 4%, but it does heavily depend on human behavior. To wit, when we need deflation humans do not like to explicitly reduce wages, they would much rather simply not give you a pay increase and let inflation erode your wages away.

Because of this we need 4% inflation rather than the 2% inflation target proposed nearly two decades ago, which had ignored this all too human variable.

Which any reasonable person would say he delivered on, considering that we had nearly a quarter of a million troops there and we are down to about 10K.

If you care about the facts that is. Otherwise keep on voting for those "fiscally responsible" republicans which took the Clinton surplus and converted it into a trillion dollar deficit, all in the name of "smaller government".

This. Say what you will of Democrats, at least they run on the policies they will implement. Republicans on the other hand run on a con job of "free market" and "no deficits" which in reality means "corporate welfare up the wazoo" and "record deficits because of wars and tax cuts".

Wow, Yahoo was there before Google. Who knew. What else are you going to discover next? that Altavista was there also before Google?

And no, Yahoo was not making money in 1995. It went public in April 1996 with revenues of $1.9 million (yes with an m) for the nine month period ending on December 1995. It had a loss of $634K for that same time frame.

I'm deadly serious. Every search engine company before Google lost money hand over fist. In fact as late as 2001 or 2002 Google was still loosing money on the web search engine side.

So you would have told the Google guys, Larry and Sergei, how every single search engine company before them failed, since they couldn't monetize their search. You would have walked all smug from that meeting, having shown the "powers-that-be" how ignorant they were of the past, thinking that search engines or even page rank (independently discovered in Altavista, who failed) would make a difference.

Gosh, you just said one of the things I dislike the most about the old timers. They tried something, they failed at it, and the conclusion they bring to the table is unpossible!

To be sure, by all means yes, I want to hear about what went wrong the last time around, but one failed attempt does not prove much.

As I remind them every time, the real lesson they bring is that, if we were to do exactly what you did, back at that moment in time, we would fail... likely.

Instead I refocus the meeting on whether it really is different this time around: has technology evolved? the market place matured? are we architecting the solution differently? better team? etc. /rant

Normally it would, but this includes OEM installed Windows 7 copies as well as site wide licenses that ran without a hitch for years. Searching on the web one can find reports of this happening to other people. Running the authentication tool is of no use. It really points to a glitch on the Microsoft side.

Bzzt, wrong. The last ANSI approved version of C is C99, which includes // as a comment delimiter.

I don't know about that account, but I do know that at my workplace tons of legit copies of windows 7 have started complaining that they are invalid copies. Clearly Microsoft has issues with their authentication procedures.

Not all beliefs are equal. I believe that when I walk out of the room things are still there, while someone else believes scorpions appear and dance in the light. They are not comparable. In fact if you hold the latter you would likely get some medical treatment.

A movement of 4.2 used to be called a tremor, until news organizations such as CNN and the Weather Channel got a hold of them and became earthquakes. FLASH. BREAKING NEWS. CUE GRAPHICS. CUE JINGLE followed by 48 hrs of non stop coverage.

Before that at least one structure had to topple over for a tremor to be called an earthquake.

Python brought a unique mixture of functional and imperative syntax and semantics. That is a unique contribution, regardless if you liked the end result or not.

Indeed, in most of the countries where supporting your kid in university is the law/common practice it is also the law/common practice to take care of your parents when the time comes.

It gets scarier than that: some parents believe it is their duty to support their much loved kids while they study and prepare for life. They even give them a hug when they come home for the holidays!

What is the world coming to? When I was young, kids were given up for adoption a weak after being born. They were raised in an orphanage and believe me, we were better for it.