Not quite. They lived the high life for a couple of years off of that money, while pretending to have a business that actually did something. I was with a similar company back then, and contrary to their press releases, they never intended to be successful. Success means oversight and someone has to account for the spending. "Start up" means champaign and prostitutes billed to "miscellaneous expenses."

Bzzt. Wrong. Put down legal marijuana use in the last year, even if you have quit, and you are automatically disqualified from pretty much anything. The point is that the government (national, state, local) have more and more leverage to discount people for their LEGAL practices and viewpoints. In the 70's people would have been up in arms about this kind of thing. Now you quietly accept it as the status quo.

Sad but true. My only friend who made it to being a teaching professor can sustain himself because he was rich going in. He donates his teacher's salary checks to a charity or some such, and lives off his investments. He teaches science and does a bit of research because that is his passion. No way he could make it otherwise.

Great in theory; does not work in practice. Look at Hollywood. Every film ever made loses money for the studio. Their accounting says so. The drug companies would just adopt the same scheme, and never pay a penny.

I'm sorry you bailed on your real potential. Not as a physicist, but the training helps make you a better IT prospect than anyone who learned coding in college. Let's see:

myself - physics major, now a rather well paid systems/storage analyst for a fortune 500
friend 1 - physics major, astrophysics major (ABD), now a systems admin and IT director for a major hospital
friend 2 - math major, now a highly paid database admin and IT director for a major health care firm
friend 3 - biology major, now a high priced coder/architect for one of the big business consulting firms
friend 4 - history major, philosophy PhD, now IT director for a major law firm
friend 5 - physics major, now owns a successful IT consulting firm
friend 6 - dropped out of college, now a high paid systems administrator
friend 7 - physics PhD, now a junior professor at a small midwestern college

With an engineering degree, you are just one in a million. With a more intense intellectual degree, you will be picked to lead, not follow. Friends 6 and 7 buck the trend I guess. :-)

People are looking at this backwards. It is not a piece of tech to wear on your wrist. It is a watch that has tech features. If you do not currently own a watch, then you do not want one. Who own's watches? Guys who wear expensive suits and guys who are dressing up to impress women. They are quite willing to spend several hundred for a nice piece of bling. My wife has been asking me to get a watch for when I dress up, and I'm seriously considering getting one of these.

So which multinational conglomerate is making the over priced pork barrel replacement?

All I get from the comments here is that a lot of people feel entitled. If anyone has something they don't, however trivial, they feel entitled to have it, and it is morally wrong that they do not. I saw this strikingly when I moved from the Midwest to California. I see if more and more on Slashdot. I don't know what this has to do with anything. Just an observation.

But shouldn't this have been part of the design BEFORE you rolled out 500 servers?

More like, "doesn't behave like I think it should." Nothing to see here. Move along.

Before all the bragging about how bad-ass everyone was, I was one of those quiet good kids that read and studied. That's how I got into a top college without being rich. Getting into trouble? Too busy, or maybe too smart, to get into trouble. There's my bragging.

How many times do we have to go over this. College is NOT supposed to be trade school. Yes, you learn things that have no real world application except on an intellectual level. No, all the classes are not tailored for making you marketable in the work place. No, computer coders should not expect schools to be turned into their personal trade schools.

So please set up coding schools where they can learn their trade along side the welders and auto mechanics, and leave the colleges alone.

Proving again that the "geek" community is going the way of the idiocracy. News about Linux will NEVER be more important than impending war.

I guess people still haven't come to the realization that enterprise level stability and uptime are neither simple nor easy.

Are you joking, or have you been asleep for the last decade? Those rights were thrown out right after 9/11 with nary a peep.