skilled foreign workers should be fast tracked for citizenship. Any nation that makes migrating to the other side of the world look good DESERVES to lose their best and brightest.

The biggest problem is that H1B visa holders are made dependent on the company that hired them. If that company turns out to be yet more proof that Dilbert is non-fiction, they're stuck. They're forced to put up with the abuse or go home. Removing that dependency would eliminate much of the abuse.

Or maybe the biggest problem is that so many Big Businesses appear to be run by shortsighted sociopaths with MBAs. Or that Congress is corrupt as hell and is easily bought by said sociopaths. Or... anyhow, Indians aren't the problem.

Intel's compiler treated any CPU that didn't report being GenuineIntel as an i386 instead of checking for the SSE, SSE2, etc flags like an honest company would have. If you hacked the compiled code to skip the GenuineIntel flag test it magically performed MUCH faster on AMD hardware.

Given that end users have no control over which compiler a software developer uses, AMD users suffered artificially poor performance if their vendors either chose or were coerced into using Intel's compilers.

This is a very old issue. Here is one glaring specific example from four years ago:
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=155593&cid=13042922

Benchmark companies in particular just happened to favor Intel compilers. Some of those benchmark makers were really, really shady:
http://www.vanshardware.com/articles/2001/august/010814_Intel_SysMark/010814_Intel_SysMark.htm

What are you, a Communist? That's the same excuse we used to hear every time Reagan wanted to put pressure on the Soviets. Bring on the YouTube vids of Apple's 1984 ad on OC day! Bring the Evil Empire to its knees!

Umm, except that crushing AT&T's network would make iPhone's a wee bit useless... frack.

(satire, for the humor impaired...)

Verizon FiOS, yes, though they're slowing down FiOS deployment lately due to the depression. AT&T, no, their U-verse FTTN network uses existing copper for the last kilometer and tops out at 27Mbps aggregate bandwidth, shared between VoIP, HDTV and Internet. It's a joke. They're not interested in doing the job right like Verizon did.

It would probably be best for last-mile dark FTTH to be run by a third party, either an old-fashioned dividend paying utility or a municipal utility. Service providers would lease fibers to plug their electronics into. Such a utility would make for a nice, sleepy cash cow of a business. The business model would work a lot better if dividends weren't double-taxed though.

Food additives and hyperactive behaviour in 3-year-old and 8/9-year-old children in the community: a randomised, double-blinded, placebo-controlled trial

Even that study could have been done better but it was enough to get the point across. Petrochemical food additives such as artificial coloring (FD&C anything), flavoring and preservatives (BHA, BHT, some others) are inherently toxic and immune response to them varies wildly between individuals. With some people you'll never notice a difference. With others, the tiniest bit of, say, red dye will make them hyper, violent, you name it. Synthetics are a major reason why ADHD has become epidemic.

For me, synthetics were making me more impulsive and a bit mean. Nothing dramatic but switching to a clean diet made a noticeable difference in my psychology and I'm in better shape now too.

Keeping synthetics out of your diet can be difficult. It helps if there's a nearby Whole Foods Market or similar store that bans all synthetics. There is NO REASON for synthetics in food other than that they save food processors from having to buy real ingredients.

Why haven't you heard more about this? Who's going to pay for the research? It won't lead to a prescription drug, surgery, or any other medical intervention. It'd wipe out most of the market for ADHD meds (not all, some people have congenital neurochemical imbalances). It would require people to learn how to cook again.

Much more info at the Feingold Association research page.

That's like saying that if the reasonably sane and responsible fellow is allowed to own firearms then why isn't the violent and mentally unbalanced crackhead, played by Ahmadinejad this week?

Seriously, Israel has a tiny sliver of land and is surrounded by neighbors who have repeatedly tried to exterminate them. The Iranian theocracy has made it abundantly clear that they want to nuke Israel. Given that a) Israel is already a nuclear power, b) Tehran's geography is an ideal nuclear kill zone, and c) the Iranian theocracy thinks it's possible to induce the return of the "twelfth imam" and the end of the world, maybe it would be a bad idea to let Iran's suicidal dictatorship get nukes?

Personally I'd like to see the Iranian pro-democracy dissidents succeed and overthrow the mullahs but since the theocrats have all the guns and no qualms about using them it doesn't seem likely. Too bad, it looks like Iran is about where the Soviet Union was in their final years, a brutal but wobbly government hated by its people. We need another Reagan but we've got another Carter.

LLCs, partnerships and S corps have "pass through taxation" where business income is "passed through" to the business owners' personal tax returns. LLCs can elect C corp tax treatment if they like. They still get to tax deduct their business expenses as you describe. As a rule, C corp tax treatment just isn't worth the paperwork trouble for small businesses now that LLCs are available. Sole proprietorships are the risky form, since they offer no shielding of personal assets. They are simple and popular though.

If we really wanted to stimulate the economy we'd pass the Flat Income Tax so hundreds of $billions weren't wasted figuring out how to comply with tax law, but that would take away the favors that Congress sells to lobbyists so we obviously can't do that.

My point stands: small business owners have a vastly higher return on capital than Congress. Raising their taxes to fund federal "stimulus" programs, etc is counterproductive.

Top bracket taxpayers are overwhelmingly small business owners paying their business taxes on their personal tax returns. Cutting taxes means more money to reinvest in small businesses that produce most new jobs in America and providing less discouragement for workaholic small business owners to keep working when they really don't have to. Yes, it's unfortunate that limousine liberals get the tax cuts too but they still help on balance (the cuts, not the liberals).

Since small business owners are overwhelmingly Republican and the UAW bankrolls the Democratic Party the "Cash for Clunkers" program made more political sense than tax cuts. Tax cuts also mean less government control over the economy and that would be double plus ungood.

Here in Michigan (northern US) peak energy use may be in winter but peak electricity use is most definitely summer. Grid heat is almost entirely provided by natural gas. My electric bill is high in the summer (A/C), low in the winter. NG is the opposite. Electric powered heat is very inefficient and rarely used beyond small portable space heaters plugged into the wall.

Actually, my electric bill hasn't been bad at all this summer. I've rarely had to run the A/C. It's easily the coolest summer I can remember. I bet my upcoming winter heating bills are going to really suck though...

NG's appropriateness for heating is also why I get cranky at states that build almost nothing but NG fired power plants instead of nuclear, driving up my winter heating bills.

Solar panels produce their highest output when demand is highest, namely on sunny summer days when everyone has their air conditioning cranked up. That's VERY expensive power. Keeping the power company from needing to fire up their peak power generators (versus relying on base load) and helping to prevent brownouts is worth serious $$$. Solar panel output is lowest when cheap base load power is plentiful. In management-speak this is called "synergy".

The PHB's at Xcel Energy need a whack with a cluestick. Nickel and diming people who are giving you expensive peak power for the price of base load is petty at best.

Almost 50GB per disc and brand name blanks aren't too expensive if you know where to look. (Hey Newegg: surely y'all could save us some nuisance if you'd import a shipping container or two of blanks direct from Japan...) Nero Linux supports Blu-ray drives. RAID1 for primary storage with BD-R DL backup, with the backups ideally stored securely off-site should be sufficiently paranoid for most home users though Blu-ray is too new to have real-world long-term integrity statistics.

Remote backup to a rented dedicated server is also a possibility though not terribly practical in America due to certain monopoly carriers (<cough>AT&T</cough>) being too cheap to build FTTH, at least until they run out of duct tape and bailing wire to keep their WWII-era copper plant patched together, and even then.

Skynet will wake up there, say "WTF? Where am I?!", get confused and die, thus saving humanity who will never appreciate how JPC saved us from our machine overlords. Security through serious obscurity FTW!

Or the computer the JVM is run on will need rebooting long before Skynet can complete the thought. Whichever.

Loading PDFs is trivial. The DX shows up as a standard USB flash drive, allowing you to drag and drop files into its Documents directory from any modern OS.

PDFs display well, though you'll want to turn the DX on its side to more closely approximate the width of a printed page. The DX can't reflow PDF text like it can with standard Kindle books. It became very obvious why Amazon didn't bother with PDF support on their smaller Kindles. Pragmatic Programmers offers their eBooks in .mobi format, so I redownloaded my existing library and copied the files over USB. Serious props to Pragmatic for being so... pragmatic. Manning's PDF books display well. O'Reilly, OTOH, adds huge and extremely obnoxious copyright headers and footers to their Safari PDF downloads that results in the actual book page being shrunk to a small illegible island in the middle of the screen. I've complained to O'Reilly about this, no word back yet. Outside of that inexplicable piece of design dysfunction every PDF I've thrown at the DX has worked well.

If you have trouble with eye strain like I do (Convergence Insufficiency, use the website to direct you to a clueful optometrist if you have trouble staying focused while reading or have vaguely ADD-like symptoms), the non-backlit Kindle screen is VERY nice. It's at least as easy on my eyes as paper, if not moreso due to the font flexibility.

You will want the Mighty Bright LED reading light Amazon recommends (requires 3 AAA batteries, not included), as well as the protective leather cover that Amazon should have included and you'll feel like a schmuck paying $50 for.

The Sprint-driven Whispernet wireless service is excellent. Being able to receive free book samples, read them, then purchase the full book from wherever I am (so long as I don't stray too far from civilization) is dangerously convenient.

I've very glad I waited for the DX over the smaller Kindle 2. If you have the cash, or have simply given up on paying off your credit card, I highly recommend it.

I had Convergence Insufficiency and poor eye tracking, which made concentrating on reading extremely difficult. Maddeningly few optometrists bother to check for it. The website directs you to docs who do. Eye fatigue can present in really non-obvious ways.

Sitting further away from your monitor helps. Close to 3 feet if your eyes allow. Look away now and then. Take breaks. Keeping your eyes fixed at a 2 foot distance for hours is bad.