Exactly right. The "discovery" of this particle was merely a confirmation of an existing prediction.

For the sake of learning the languages, given your background, in your position I would pick up C++, Java, and C# in that order. (That path will provide the quickest learning curve given your experience.) After or concurrent to those, you should also learn PHP. The basics are not that much different from C or Basic, and the object oriented extensions are most similar to C++ and Java. The reason I suggest PHP is that it is not just useful as a web programming language, but is also very useful in backend scripting when used in console mode. However, for the sake of career advancement, continuing with Project Management is the best route to take. You might enjoy a position as a development team manager, where you can still take an active role in programming, for the sake of constructing overall architecture, and then delegate building specific modules to the rest of your team.

In other words, there's a reason for the existence of justifiable homicide.

Perhaps something like the prick-less blood sugar monitors that you just hold against your forearm. If I remember correctly, they work by shining specific frequencies of light through the capillaries in your skin and estimate blood glucose levels by how much gets reflected. They're not as accurate as the standard blood tests, but they do work. I suspect that the same technology could be adapted to looking for other chemicals in the blood stream. Though, looking for too many chemicals at the same time would likely be a nightmare of optical spectroscopy.

Like politicians seeing anything that they disagree with.

No, the love of money is the root of all evil. (Doesn't anyone actually read Timothy anymore?)

on second thought, forget the blackjack and the network.

I counted 2 as being average, and 3 as being poor, with respect to plot development. (Special effects and action sequences were good in both.) My opinion is that if one were to re-edit the footage for 2 and 3 into a single longer movie, the result would make for a much better sequel to the Matrix.

Sounds like the tape in a Turing machine. They accelerate the data in one direction or the other, and can modify it when they stop.

Required by Microsoft.
Example:
While I was working at a medium sized university, we used to buy single licenses for each computer, and charge the cost of the license to the department the computer was destined for. One year, while we were in the process of buying a bulk lot of licenses to upgrade our systems (from NT4 to 2000, if I remember correctly), our MS rep told us that we would not be able to proceed with the purchase unless we went with a volume license agreement. (This became inconvenient for us, since we didn't have a specific key to attach to the charge back, and some departments didn't want to change, but that's another story.)

Most large companies are required to negotiate a Volume Licensing agreement with MS which results in a specific amount of licensing costs based on the FTE (Full-Time Employment/Equivalent positions) of the company, which are adjusted periodically, usually quarterly or annually. These type of licensing deals typically allow any number of workstation licenses to be used, and often end up with a similar cost to a typical OEM license.

Glad to see I'm not the only one who thought that this story should have been tagged "Schlock"

Though, it did start with 5 elephants, but one tripped.

The $30/month price likely includes an enterprise SAN array (~$150k+), a high-end server fail-over cluster (~$20k-$30k), an enterprise tape backup system (~$80k), a network to connect them all to each other and the users (~$200k), and 4 people's salaries (the SAN admin, the server admin, the backup admin, and the network admin) (~$50k-90k each).

Bananas ripened on the tree are truly awe inspiring. Same goes for pineapple, mango, and most other fruits. Whenever I visit family in central america, I find that after I get back to the US I can't stand to eat supermarket fruit for several weeks until my taste buds forget the real flavor.