Well, then I expect my check any day now. I've had problems with XP, but everything I've used with 7 or 8 have not had any BSODs, or other major problems. I skipped Vista so I can't say where that compared.

That's not to say everything is perfect with Windows, but these regular and common freeze ups and BSODs do not occur for me anymore.

But it already did stop if you are waiting for a response when the person returns.

Basically what you are doing is common in smaller companies or smaller departments where there is not a lot of (or any) redundancy among employees. In the case of Daimler AG, I'm sure that many of the people that are out of office have a fully qualified alternate contact to deal with while they are out. The entire idea of this is that the person was out on a vacation or other personal time. Whatever happens at work during that time is not a concern of theirs. Email can certainly be used differently and some people would really want to have those emails you send. Daimler AG has decided they don't want their employees to have to deal with them.

This isn't exactly a fair comparison depending on where you live in the US. Compare that London or Tokyo apartment to New York City or San Francisco. I think you're really talking about the cost difference between urban and rural housing.

That's actually what I was trying to get people to do. Think of the actual laws that would need to be done to correct this situation instead of crying, "It's not fair!"

No problem can have a solution found until you accurately describe the root of the problem.

The government already owns the database of passport photos. It's theirs. Every person who has a photo in there gave it to the government. In this case the FBI did a cross reference between 2 databases owned by the government. They did not force or coerce any private entity or individual to divulge private information to them. They weren't using any sort of real time or recent time surveillance. I don't see how you can make any rational suggestion to stop this situation short of abolishing passport photos and the subsequent database of them.

You may not like it. You may think this is another step on the slippery slope, but what specific part of this do you recommend be changed?

Should the government not be allowed to look at their own data? Do you think government agencies should not be able to share data? Do you think passports should not require photos? If you can come up with a way to stop this you can work on changing things. Otherwise, you're just whining about things.

Just employ strippers as border patrol agents. They have an uncanny ability to sniff out money. They might even get the smugglers to voluntarily turn over some of it.

Last I heard, it wasn't a big problem to get the Japanese to have no children. They have one of the lowest birth rates on Earth.

Nuclear is dying? Is that why dozens of new reactors are under construction worldwide and many existing power plants have been upgraded to produce more power?

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/current-and-future-generation/plans-for-new-reactors-worldwide/

It may not be the glamorous renewable energy source, or even the go to source of base power generation, but it still has a solid role in worldwide energy production.

Oh I absolutely agree on the importance of several passwords. I really don't like these centralized authentication systems or password keepers. It may be the height of paranoia, but if I'm going to the trouble of making up all these multiple strong passwords, why would I then put them all in one location? That's one system to compromise to get the keys to all my accounts.

Really the issue is the inability to remember multiple passwords for the average person (or the inability to want to remember them). I like the idea of using a custom, human operable hash function to generate passwords. Take this site as an example, the input would be slashdot (the domain), you take that as the seed and apply some sort of algorithm/hashing function in your head to create the password. It needs to be complex enough to not just be "add '123' to the end", but simple enough to do while sitting at a keyboard. If you can still recognize the domain in the output it's a failure. The beauty of it is that you never need to remember your passwords, just the algorithm. If you want to log in to a site, you look at the domain and apply your hashing algo to 'remember' your password. If you want to change the passwords, change your algorithm. This is of course far beyond the level of the average user, but it avoids putting all your keys in one box.

My guess is that thousands of crappy WordPress sites or something on that level was compromised. Nothing of any extreme value.

Statistically speaking this would work, but it is possible that of all the brute force attempts the cracker tries in that 60 day window, one of them is your password. One correct guess and they have the account. Plus this is a pain in the ass to change passwords every 2 months. Use at least 10 characters.

Buffet is a well known value investor. He doesn't buy things for future growth, but because the current prices are too good to pass up. Most of those banks were screaming deals over the past 5 years. As their share prices come back up from the banking crisis and valuations aren't as good, I expect he will unwind some of those positions.

The fact that some people in some places could go off the grid doesn't make this horse crap Morgan Stanley is spewing any more true. If Morgan Stanley is saying it publicly it is to manipulate share prices and that's about it. Even if this does come to be true, there will surely be another couple up and down business cycles beforehand so there's no need to even act immediately on this information.

I live at ~61N latitude. Solar power here would be of little use. I'd get loads of it all summer long. Tons of summer power to work the lights that I don't need on or the heating that I don't need to use. Then in the winter I would get about nothing in terms of solar power. Not only because of the short days of low angle sun, but because snow and frost buildup on the panels would need to be cleaned off regularly. Winter, by the way, is when I have lights on in my house a lot more and when I need to keep the heat running quite often (the peak power usage season here). And as far as air conditioning using that summer light - no one here has it. You don't need AC when the hottest days of the year are when you crack 80F.

Unless you have some sort of battery tech that allows me to store up a summers worth of solar energy to be used throughout the winter, I'd rather look into wind power.

My house has wires from '52, not quite as old, but close enough. The sheathing around the wires is extremely brittle and will crack and fall apart if moved. If left in place in the wall it is fine. What absolutely does not crack and crumble is the copper wire itself. The plastics and polymers used as sheathing around wires has improved dramatically over the years and would most likely last a lot longer now. The conductors themselves are about the same and last a very very long time.