It sells for 20 million a kilo I hear.

Here's a notion. Why not try to figure out what is wrong with your society that causes so much crime and then deal with it. Then you won't have to put so many people in prison. The U.S. is the land of the free, yet it has the highest incarceration rate on the planet. Surely someone must be asking, "Hey, why is that?"

Keep it simple, mate. Use a telephone. Or Skype. If you want to see pics of the family, have them email them to you. Gmail account is good for this. Having dad call around dinner time could become a very treasured memory for the family. Also remember, you're the one who's taken the remote job, you didn't have to do that.

Now, if you are thinking surveillance, that's a whole different ball of wax. Might want to have a chat with the fam about that.

You're on glue mate. Selling AMD is a ghetto.

Don't misunderstand, I used to build and sell OEM AMD based systems religiously for years and what did it get me? I've had more dead boards and more dead CPUs than I ever had with Intel stuff. And it's not like I was using crap mobos either, I was using Asus and MSI. I was using Kingston RAM, Antec PSUs and these things were still falling over left and right. I've lost so much money servicing the warranty on their platform it's embarrassing. Intel, out of the hundreds I've assembled, I've seen less than a dozen back. They just work, no complaints, no problems.

I'm not sure what 'customer experience' is supposed to mean, but me not going out of business matters to me somewhat more. There is a reason why they sell their CPUs for $99 these days: because they are slow and shitty and no one with any brains wants to buy them.

...can be a real bitch, especially when everyone wants to drive a car.

"It is so boring and un-stimulating that I usually skip it entirely, pass the testing off to someone else, or even worse, if I absolutely have to test, I do a very poor job at it."

Which sums up why software is so shitty today. I seriously hope that you don't write software for the areospace industry because I don't feel like falling out of the sky because you were too bored to test your code.

Every job has its boring moments, testing your code is one of those things that programmers must do. Should do, it encourages discipline and discipline is what makes good code. You can automate the testing to some degree but at some point you've got to poke it and prod it yourself because computers are stupider than even we are. If you can't hack that, find a different line of work.

Would be my first pick. You're in a fairly enclosed space with hundreds of other people who have any number of diseases. It's not like they sterilize the desks after every class. Even in a typical office you tend to sit at the same desk; school kids are all over the place. A public school is like a virus playground.

Having said that, maybe someone should do a big study on exposure to non-natural electromagnetic fields. Humans evolved exposed to the sun and the planet, etc... it makes sense to me that we evolved to deal with that. But it's only been in the last 100 years or so that our technology has exposed us to high power radio stations, wireless access points, even keeping a little radio in your pocket so you can call your friends. Who doesn't have a cell these days? High tension power lines have only really existed for 100 years too, the tin-foil hatters say they cause cancer, but the reality is that no one really knows.

It comes with a mix for a caffeinated meatloaf LOL.

The problem with freedom is that it never seems to involve corporations or governments.

The the solution to this particular problem is easy, simply let the users run their own encryption with their own software and own keys on their own hardware. I'm surprised such a thing doesn't exist now for the Blackberry. Oh wait, it does. All RIM has to do is tell these dumb governments that "yep, you can read the stuff on our servers," while at the same time paying bloggers under the table to spread word on how to install third party encryption.

If these governments are still really pissed off about it, they can start arresting users for having encryption software and they can keep on doing that until people finally get the notion they are living in a police state and maybe want to do something about it.

Let's nuke the bastard. That'll take care of it. It worked in Armageddon.

"Where do you back it up?" is what I ask my customers. If you buy a terabyte sized hard drive, what's your solution if it fails? Presumably you bought it so you could store zillions of pictures, MP3s and movies on the thing... how badly will your day be ruined if it fails?

Drives that big, you buy them in pairs, one mirrored to the other.

Yeah, but it could still make for an interesting movie plot, you have to admit. People were all over the Bourne movies, yes?

I happen to have the phone number for a Mr.Les Grossman and I'm calling his office right now.

Not wanting to be captain obvious here, but there is a mostly covered pile of radioactive crap at the centre of it all. Humans don't live there, maybe the animals figured that out too.

As far as I'm concerned COBOL is the perfect programming language. I'm a little biased as I worked as a COBOL programmer for a time, but you have to admit the syntax is very easy to read.

A well written COBOL program is like reading a little battle plan. It tells you, in plain English, what it intends to do and the ruthlessness of a COBOL compiler forces you to create readable, structured code.

Every COBOL programmer knows where the period is supposed to be. C programmers still haven't figured out where the braces should be. It says a lot about a language when you have decades-long debates about punctuation in your code. It encourages a lack of programming discipline which I feel is the leading reason why software is so buggy today.

Yep. I'm sure feeling a bit of heat is really going to work on a Taliban fellow who grew up in a desert. When guys like that are picking a fight, there are two things they understand: dead and not dead. If not dead, keep fighting.