Flying the same expensive equipment for 30 years and more is not unusual if it lasts that long. For instance, look up the timeframes for which military aircraft stay operational. Many from the 1970s are still around.

I agree with GP though that failing to build a replacement in time does not make NASA look good.

Curiously, European employers (in Germany in particular) are complaining about a "shortage" too and have lobbied with some success for easier immigration of qualified workers. It looks quite similar to the discussion and critique about H-1B workers in the USA, see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#Criticisms_of_the_program.

Personally, I think a "shortage" can best be detected from the development of wages, relative to other fields where the necessary education is similarly difficult and time consuming. For instance, does the average engineer earn significantly more than the average M.D., lawyer or business manager?

For Germany, AFAIK the answer is "no" and the complaints about a "shortage" are mostly propaganda. I'm not as familiar with the US labor market but the anecdotical evidence I pick up here and there tends to say "no" as well.

I think operators of all types of power plants should have to pay for the costs they cause to society and which are so far externalized. Even if the payment is only partial, it can make the problematic technology less competitive and help others gain market share.

Mandatory insurance for the risk of nuclear accidents is a step in the right direction, if the insurance sum is realistic. For instance, Germany has mandatory insurance for nuclear power plants but only at a paltry 2.5 billion euros coverage per plant. Needs to be much higher.

For coal and gas-fired plants, I agree that there should be a mechanism for penalizing CO2 and mercury emissions. The EU has introduced such an instrument for CO2, the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Emission_Trading_Scheme. There seems to be no such thing in the USA yet.
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Protocol where the USA, Canada and Russia are the least cooperative states .

At the same time, the USA are starting to do something about mercury emissions while the EU doesn't yet:
http://www.epa.gov/mats/powerplants.html
Not based on taxing the emissions but on emission limits. Emissions below the limits stay free. Still, it is something.

Gas when extracted by fracking probably needs its own regulation concerning fracking chemicals. And so on...

Which would leave renewables in a better position because they don't have most of the usual risks and harmful emissions. Most complains I hear are about birds crashing into wind turbines and turbines looking ugly (matter of taste, YMMD).

The French nuclear industry does not have the very best reputation for diligence and safety. I would not be too surprised if they have a major accident some day. That is the flip side of having no NIMBYs.

To put the whole risk into financial perspective, I suggest mandatory insurance on a level that is sufficient to cover a Fukujima-class accident. Estimated costs of that one are around $100 billion:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/for-tepco-and-japans-fukushima-daiichi-nuclear-plant-toxic-water-stymies-cleanup/2013/10/21/406f4d78-2cba-11e3-b141-298f46539716_story.html

With that insurance requirement in place, by all means let the market decide if nuclear is still worthwhile ;-)

At the moment, lawyers seem to be a bigger cost center in protecting Java market share. See Oracle vs. Google, still ongoing.

I recently had a similar problem with Microsoft Test Manager. With IE11 the content of the administration web page was not visible. I could not find the reason in the security settings (and accessing the web page from the same system suggests that it should be a "trusted zone"). Firefox 31 did the job though.

So I suspect this was another case of IE11 being broken for a Microsoft service.

That is due to the current design of inverters that will switch off/refuse to start without a stable grid. Lets call those type A. They make up the majority of installations today.

I believe this could be fixed with inverters that can be switched to isolated operation mode as needed, but there seems to be no market so far.

Currently solar systems for isolated operation mode exist, but they are typically designed to feed a battery (for instance, 48V) from which an inverter for isolated operation mode generates the 220V (or 120V in the USA). Lets call these Type B. Type B and the related batteries are typically used in houses that are too isolated to be connected to the grid. The whole system is more expensive than type A and therefore not so popular. Usually, it is also NOT designed to feed into a grid..

A type A/B that can do both would be nice. Out of curiosity, I've been searching the internet for a vendor that supplies these systems. No luck so far. But then again, a type A system plus a generator to bridge a few days of blackout may actually be cheaper...

Speculation of course, but I think they were told to push the Metro UI by upper management. The obvious culprit would be Ballmer, but he is already gone.

So you may end up being right about the UI team being fired when someone is needed to take the blame. But I doubt they deserve it.

That might be too much incentive for people to finally switch to Mac or Linux. Early netbooks have shown that the power of Windows to keep users is finite:
Linux gained significant market share in the segment, until Microsoft created the ultra-cheap (or was it even free?) Starter Edition of XP.

But what actually seems to happen is that Windows 9 will bring the start menu back in some form. Problem solved for Microsoft where the desktop is considered.

That will only work if you can get people onto the hated version first. Which works not so well with Windows 8, which seems stuck at 12.5% right now (including both 8.0 and 8.1).

I think it was an attempt to use their dominance in the desktop market to force the users onto Metro. In the hope that said users would eventually buy more mobile devices with Windows Phone, because they are already familiar with he GUI. Now Windows Phone is making some gains, going from 0.45% to 2.49% over the last six months. But I doubt it is worth the poor acceptance for Windows 8.

Microsoft seems to bet that their dominance of the desktop market is a guaranteed thing. I'd love to see them proven wrong.

I think there are levels in between, such as having some older games that you want to play at decent quality but not the latest stuff.

This said, the AMD IGPs tend to be limited by RAM bandwidth. Discrete graphics cards with similar numbers of shaders tend to beat the AGPs in graphics. I think AMD needs either quad-channel memory (too expensive?) or stacked VRAM on the APU itself. Without that, it is only a matter of time until Intel's HD graphics catch up...

If you quit because the employer fails to pay you, you can also get out of the non-compete ($90a III HGB, culpable conduct of the other party).

Again, IANAL and the above is my best guess as an interested layman who has access to online law texts. This said, non-competes have become rare anyway in Germany as the employer has to pay some compensation for them, otherwise they are illegal..

It is a chip for cheap machines without high performance requirements. Sort of an entry level CPU and entry level GPU in one, with a bit more emphasis on the GPU than the i3.
And where you call the AMD "slightly less underpowered" in GPU, the i3 is arguably overpowered for typical office applications. Read, the A10-7800 can do those adequately.

Overall I think the A10-7800 has its market, for home use where you want to do a bit of everything or maybe as HTPC. It is nothing very impressive, but neither is an i3 without discrete graphics card.

Technically (under German law) the employment contract still exists and you could sue them for the unpaid wages. Which may fail if the company is already bankrupt. In that case, you'd be thowing good money after the bad.

But at the same time, AFAIK (IANAL) not paying wages is a bad enough breach of contract that you can get away with immediately terminating said contract. So if you have another job lined up, go for it.

Depends on the audience of the web sites your ads were displayed on. If you were, for instance, advertising for a US company on a site that had lots of viewers from Europe, the exhaustion early in the day might have been legitimate. Europe is a few time zones ahead.

But if adwords does not give you statistics about this, I agree that dropping them would be the smart thing to do.