Any built in navigation or entertainment is a ripoff, generally speaking. The people who pay $700 for the upgrade CD are the ones that can afford it. Everyone else buys copies off eBay (or simply downloads them).

I stick with a $80 lifetime upgrade TomTom for navigation and tablets/hones/portable DVD players for kid/wife entertainment.

The RT tablets do not support x86/64 or desktop apps. You need to wait for the full Win 8 Intel tablets (more expensive, early next year) to be able to run everything you might need (and join a domain for that matter). The RT tablets are consumption devices, much like iPads and Nexus tablets.

Disk array manufacturers are dealing with this in a couple of different ways (I work for one).
1) Using different methods to determine when a SSD will fail, and proactively sparing it out
2) Inline dedupe at the cache level to reduce writes before they even hit the disks, extending disk life (example: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/27/xtremio_projectx_unveiled/)
3) MLC drives, which are supposed to be "enterprise" grade. Theory is if you can find creative ways to reduce writes (such as the last line) this negates the expense of MLC drives. Large storage vendors who got into flash early typically used MLC, but expect SLC to become more accepted (cost being one big reason, improved reliability another).
Just remember, when flash drives die they really die. Due to the way files are stored you can't just ship the drive off somewhere and get files recovered. This isn't a bad thing, but something people need to keep in mind.
As far as laptops/desktops go, beware of things that increase writes. Full disk encryption is good, but if the file is encrypted after it is written you've doubled you writes without even thinking about it. That is just one example of things that can cause flash drives to fail a little earlier than you expected. I've seen MLC flash drives that are used for array caching (hot data blocks written to flash for better response, data constantly being promoted/demoted to these drives) hit their write limit in 9 months. Not die, hit their write limit.

1) Quarterly objectives that are only partially tied to company performance. If I meet my objectives but the company doesn't I still get 75% of my bonus, which is 3.75% of my salary per quarter (assuming the whole thing pays out). And the company portion of the bonus has been there for the last 6+ years running without interruption, so they set reasonable goals for themselves too.
2) If you work on something big, or accomplish something significant, additional other bonuses. I've been there since last July and have gotten two of these, ranging between 4% and 10% of my base salary. The 10% bonus takes 4 years to fully vest, but that is reasonable.
3) Workout facility onsite.
4) I have an office, not a cubicle. You have no idea what this means to me, especially since I am usually writing documents for 1/3rd of my time (I build solutions, test them, and write-up my test results and reference architectures) and like my privacy.
5) So long as I am not seeing customers, there is pretty much no dress code (within reason, I wore shorts and a t-shirt from ~April till just last week). This is wonderful because honestly, unless we have clients coming in to meet with my team (rare, since we aren't in sales) I don't need to be dressed up at all.
6) Solid benefits. This means reasonable deductibles that won't kill me if someone has ongoing health issues/medications that are outside of their control. This is huge as well because crappy benefits can cost my family $3K-5K/year, and I take that stuff into account when looking at the base salary of an offer.
7) My boss feels that if you have to work more than 40 hours a week on an ongoing basis, he is likely not doing his job correctly. He works with you to set reasonable quarterly objectives, which he of course fully expects you to meet.
8) Training. We work with unreleased/just released stuff all the time (and write about it), so this is critical.

Yes I am paid well, but items 3-8 on this list are enough to give me serious pause before even entertaining another job offer. I could care less about cake days, or massages. Workout facilities, an office, and a lax dress code help keep the stress down. Good pay and benefits means that I'm not worrying about money, which is important. I don't need to drive a Ferrari, but my family vacations and the occasional hobby are important to me.

Exactly. My company owns a /16 (bought in 1987) and uses it for internal addressing. They also use it for the internal IP ranges on many of the products they sell (storage arrays) and likely for external IP's as well (just a guess on the last one; I've never checked).

We need a +50 here, this is the exact problem with merit based pay. In addition to that, districts want to judge special-ed and Title 1 the same way as regular kids, when those kids will never measure up (wife is title 1 reading).

you want to get rid of bad teachers? Hire better principals and make them do a better job evaluating staff, using multiple unrelated reviews to help avoid favoritism. Teachers know who the bad teachers are, but no one does anything about it.

I'm not from one of those "arrogant" cities (Columbus, OH), but I do know a bit about what you are talking about.

Unfortunately the area does not produce enough tech workers that the area needs so people relocate. Blame us "yankees" (or Californians) all you want but the truth is without us RTP would not have grown as much as it has. I realize the city is suffering from growing pains, but given that you have Cisco (huge campus), EMC (global datacenter, one of only 3 global manufacturing facilities, and multiple offices including sales and engineering), NetApp (huge campus), Lenovo, Epic Games, Citrix, Microsoft, countless biomedical companies, etc, etc, etc I think things have turned out rather well.

Raleigh, NC (RTP) being the exception, which is why a lot of tech companies move here.

Before anyone chimes in with redneck jokes, let me assure you that Raleigh/Cary is full of transplants. I go days at a time without hearing a southern accent. Living in Raleigh/Cary is nothing like the "typical south", as people like to call it.

Sigh, I really need to proofread.

I meant to say: Example: What *if we* started screening for predisposition for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis? We might miss out on one of the greatest theoretical physicists [wikipedia.org] to ever live.

Technically this is true, unless you are comparing it with Win 7 with Aero (3D) disabled. You can't disable 3D in Win 8, and that means your Desktop Window Manager process (DWM) is going to go through the roof when you launch most apps. No big deal for standalone PC's, but I develop/test VDI (virtual desktop) solutions and I can tell you with certainty that Win 8 uses double the CPU resources of Win 7 for the same workload due to the CPU spikes of the DWM process seen under Win 8 (but not under Win 7 since we disable Aero for optimization purposes). This is significant when you are used to running 8 desktops/server core and now you can only run 4.

Can't you import? Maybe I should setup a business exporting US games at $10 over my cost plus shipping (plus cc fees), or would that not work?

Do you have Hulu Plus? I never got confirmation whether that decision affects those of us who pony up the $15/month for Plus. I have no issues watching Hulu+ with my Roku (and I have no cable/sat service).

Roku plus a pc running PlayOn and some good playon plugins. Pretty much everything is out there ready to be streamed. Netflix and Hulu for Roku are good as well.

One would hope that all US political parties can come together against this idea....

Clinical trials are already outsourced by a large number of pharmaceutical companies (google clinical research organization or cro); they have no interest in performing that work.

Why I agree that changes need made, the problem is that it takes a ton of R&D ($$$) to come up with a drug that looks promising (for the most part). Of course it doesn't matter if it looks promising, until you go through clinical trials (or even sell it to the public for a few years) you have no idea what problems it may cause. As that system stands today the pharma companies makes their money by hoping that the revenue they make from approved drugs is more than the money they pay out for drugs that fail testing or turn out to cause problems down the road (leading to lawsuits).

Someone has to take the risk, the question is would you rather it be the government or the pharma companies?