Also in Canuckistan, the term 'college' applies to several polytechnic institutes - most of which are more profitable (thus attracting better instructors), more popular (with annual enrolments sometimes doubling or tripling local Universities), and with higher graduate placement rates, usually 95-100%. They can also offer "Applied" Degrees, to those who want a few letters after their names.
To your point, the thing I find absolutely remarkable is the smug, holier-than-thou attitude which pervades most University-goers in the country - they have been completely brain-washed by their family and high schools that they need to go massively into debt for not only an undergraduate degree in Basketweaving, but a Masters and PhD before they can be any use to society. Meanwhile, those with a meaningful career or skilled trade after two years of study are somehow inferior.
It isn't even the smugness that bothers me anymore - it's that fact that I will need to undo this brainwashing on my own children over the next two decades. If they legitimately want to pursue a PhD by studying the world, great - but they must understand that there are other ways to support a family, and that going into student debt for 4-8 years of study should not be the status quo.

My understanding of the U.S. Legal System may not be up to snuff, but doesn't handpicking a jury (based upon their personal tastes) defeat the entire purpose? It would be like asking all of your selected jurors whether they or someone they love has been involved in a violent crime, and only admitting those who have into a case where the defendant is on trial for murder. At that point, it won't matter if it's Mr. Rogers on trial - every single person in the jury is now extremely emotionally invested, instead of neutral and supposedly rational. Selecting a random group ensures that there may only be one or two people with such an investment, and the odds of them swaying an entire jury are quite low if the facts presenting are overwhelming.

Cisco is large, but hardly a monopoly or market leader anymore. HP, Shoretel, Mitel, Juniper, Dell, Palo Alto, Aruba, they're all here to eat Cisco's lunch one way or another. There's also Huawei and Alcatel-Lucent on the service-provider and mobility side of things. Cisco's major advantage comes from their roots in education; their certification exams are still the foundation of any networking career, and no other vendor has near as much reach today.

I see you've figured out how things work around here. Carry on.

Must be good business for the local paper company.

I'm not convinced - putting an order in for a service which you don't immediately need means that the provider (Rackspace) has time to plan and implement the change at their leisure. It may only take one or two people a couple of minutes, but it is undoubtedly a change on an appliance somewhere, or maybe even a physical network change if you're just "wired in" to their Internet feed. There may be an outage for you as well, meaning it has to be coordinated amongst yourself and someone doing the work. Then the whole thing needs to be tested as functional, which is very easy to do when you aren't being attacked. So the base price of $1500 seems justified.
In contrast, when you're under attack, you're basically asking your provider to "assemble the troops" on your behalf - it's an emergency change, which needs to be performed the moment you request it regardless of which other customers are being worked on. Not to mention it is significantly more complex to do this while you are being attacked.
So I think Rackspace is perfectly justified. If you want your provider to be at your beck and call 24/7 for complex changes, you're going to pay a premium. At least they have this as an option - most other hosting providers would just terminate your contract because you are now a "high risk" (expensive) customer.

Or in the words of Alton Brown, "No uni-taskers!"
I say this every time someone wants to buy me a new kitchen gadget. If the gadget only does one thing (roast a turkey, peel an apple, toast bread, etc.) I don't want it.

Yeah, I'm getting a real creepy Ender's Game vibe here. Of course, you could never tell the children that they are using real drones - they would start to ask questions, and maybe even attack friendly targets. Just have the game give the most consistently skilled pilots a small chance to pilot a real drone (presented in a manner as to not break the fourth wall), and nobody will ever know. Ugh, it's creepy because it's not that far-fetched...

Not quite - they have used tons (literally) of antifreeze and lubricants to achieve these depths, and then a pool of freon and a heated drill tip to breach the lake. These chemicals froze before reaching the lake, and I can't name too many bacteria which would survive the barrage of chemicals/hot/cold temperatures on the way down. So far so good!

I would agree with you if it were a 12 or 16 week course - but there is a lot to talk about in terms of the physical and data link layers and plain IPv4 before even addressing IPv6. Six weeks is barely enough time to provide a solid foundation there.

I think I found a bigger problem than her diet.

See previous. Carbs = energy = exercise.
It's sad that this notion of less weight = more health has been distilled into our brains. Your body needs exercise, and it needs a balanced diet. Your weight will change depending on what you eat, when you eat it, how much you eat. And for the love of all things, get a better measure than weight. Your weight can fluctuate 5-10 lbs per week, stop fixating on it. Use your weigh scales only for measuring the weight of your suitcase before a flight - judge your fitness level instead by how far you can run, how high you can jump, and how long you can stay on your bike, how much better you get month after month.

That's like saying I'm going to get a free lunch from the soup kitchen down the street instead of paying at your restaurant. The onus is on you, the artist, to prove to me why I should spend the time seeking you out and why I should spend money on you. This has been true since the dawn of time, and blaming your customers for downloading what they like will not help you one bit. Oh yeah, and pick your allies carefully - don't think for a second that the major labels won't go out of their way to marginalize you the moment your business model starts biting into their sales.

One of my absolute favourite space combat games with FTL was Independence War 2 - you could turn on warp whenever you wanted to do micro-jumps in a straight line, and control your speed using a throttle. But you had to be careful - if you opened the throttle up too far, you could collide with something (a large ship or planetary body) instantaneously. There were also some weapons which used FTL - most notably missiles which would target ships warping away, shutting them down temporarily and signalling their final location so you can jump on top of them. And don't even get me started on how you could build up inertia then rotate your ship to strafe a carrier with a mining laser... =)

Neither Apple nor SquareTrade cover theft. If you do a lot of travel or are giving the phone to a teenager, you may want to consider someone else. In fact, most carriers won't even sell their own warranty or theft protection for Apple products anymore, not since AppleCare+ was introduced.

Microsoft's excuse is that they are just starting to break even with the Xbox 360 $99 bundle with $15 monthly subscription. They will milk those subscriptions for a few years yet, as they will recoup almost twice the retail cost of the console from those customers over 2-3 years. No sense in cannibalizing that stream by releasing a new console.