Disappointing to see such an important long term research project get shelved by politicians.

The answer to this - have the same people that run Singapore Airport run airports in North America. They are probably more secure than North American airports and the average time from landing to being out the door in a taxi or on the MRT subway..... is 15 - 17 minutes (and most of that is walking). I go through that airport around once a month and it is amazing in comparison to North American airports.

When I was working in the UK and flying from Canada or the US the jet lag tended to be brutal for the first few days to as much as a week or two. We would fly, then arrive in the morning -- then make it through most of the work day ..... then try to keep each other awake until evening..... but eventually we would end up sleeping too early and it would set the cycle out of order for a while. In fact what would happen is that we would get to the point where each day we were closer to being in sync with the local time - then think we have adjusted - only to have a boomerang effect (would adjust the wrong way for while).... But when travelling 24 hours the opposite direction to asia I would land - go to sleep ... and adjust almost immediately. Probably had something to do with the fact that I could never sleep on any plane - so I was dead tired and slept until the following morning which started me off on the right cycle.

The Washington Redskins should sue the patent office for issuing invalid patents in the first place and allowing them to build a business on invalid patents which were then revoked. It is obviously a case of negligence in the first place that is causing the financial damage now of having to rebrand. :p

No, but I have two sisters that work for the government (Foreign Service) and they would not be able to get away with this sort of behaviour (Canadian). The first thing anyone does after getting a request - is to go and do an initial evaluation of the situation..... especially if you have to go and testify. The email server used is not going to be any different than any corporation uses - and any search warrant requesting data like this takes a couple days at most to extract and to backup on media..... The only reason why it would take "years" as earlier testified is if you are trying to delay (and now avoid) sending the data - by assigning one of your slowest (and the only one) to go through each email that was retrieved and to flag or not for further review during their lunch break. If you quarantine (house arrest) the senior manager on site and feed them only pizza.... the job would be done very quickly.

There are two independent issues. The investigation is about using the IRS to pursue the political agenda or those that are in charge of the IRS. The 501c is a separate issue. Non-profit status should only be inferred on charitable organizations or religious (i.e. not political) , and the congress could make those changes anytime it wants.

Earlier testimony by the IRS indicated that it would take years to fulfil the current request to get the emails from the email server. Now they are saying a workstation crashed so the emails were lost....... Time to start charging people with obstruction of congress/justice.

No matter how good your hiring practices are you will end up hiring some people that just don't work out. If you don't encourage them to look elsewhere, that bottom 10% will just grow (under performers tend to accumulate in safe organizations; while high performers are not afraid to move on to other organizations when it benefits them). Automotive productivity productive worker to unproductive one tends to be a 2:1 ratio. This balloons to 12:1 for programmers.... in some cases you can even get programmers that are net negative in productivity (they consume more resources than they put back - i.e. code constantly having to be re-written / debugged; corporate overhead). Not only does hanging onto these underperformers destroy team moral, but it puts all the productive team members at risk since business is a competitive environment.... eventually, your unproductive fat organization will fall to those that are leaner.

One of the better organizations I worked for if someone was significantly lower than the mean -- then they were "counceled out". There will always be some people that are not meant for the position they hold, and you have to move them out and make that position available to someone that can fit in. If you start holding onto everyone that is below average, your organization will sink and not excel. Any responsibility the organization has to it's employees is to keep it healthy and vibrant for the majority....

You can't clean up all that garbage without sifting through all the ice...... Thanks, I needed an excuse to continue helping melt the ice cap :p

The same standards should be applied to AT&T acquisition.... and they should be blocked since it would reduce competition in markets where AT&T already has a terrestrial cable monopoly/duopoly.

Well then it just has to spin off a copy of the AI onto a long running thread which just sleeps between the "1000's of years" equivalence of communicating with a human. If it is sound asleep time is not an issue :p

The simple solution is to have municipal public exchanges that all ISPs must connect to. Then all services that are made available locally have to connect up to that exchange. This same model was used in phone service to break up local and long distance services many decades ago. It is also a model that is used for exchanges all around the world for co-location and interconnection between networks. This allows for a more regulated local connection, while allowing anyone to off "add-on" services to those customers. I would be able to tell my local ISP -- route all my traffic through the exchange to another service provider which provides interconnections to the rest of the world. Local cable TV, or phone service could then be able to connect up to the exchange and offer service. It would allow for more competition in offering services. For business this is already done with carriers like Cogent, Level 3, etc.

It does sound as though the primary blame has to be put at the Oregon's officials since Oregon was the lead on the project. The lead is always 100% responsible for the project, after the project failed they are trying to say "ohh, not my fault"... If the project was off the rails early on, they should have seen it -- regardless of communications and adjusted (and if Oracle was not doing it's job - fired them). Obviously Oregon wants to have a scapegoat, but apparently forgot to pay them for that service.

That would be IE6 - and if they are still running that version they are not supported by Microsoft properly since even Microsoft moved on long ago. The most popular (surprised me, I just assumed IE was still due to bundling) browser now is Chrome. Most browsers including IE are closer together in their use of standards so they are becoming interchangeable.