Which is no different than any system that gets hacked/taken over. There is a cost associated with the intrusions *somewhere* along the way. It may be a 3rd party hosting charge, bandwidth or just your time (which may be considerable) in repairing graffiti, clearing your good name etc.

Means you can also quite without any good reason too. Quid pro quo. And the practical upshot is that the vast majority of companies will only terminate you for a *good* reason (do you really think that there are that many capricious employers that love nothing more than to hire staff only to fire them the next day? Hiring is an expensive process).

Well, as a European living and working in the US, I've not seen evidence of people being scared such that they work "extra" hours. That's the good thing about employment at will; don't like the conditions/management etc, then quit. I've spent plenty of time in Japan (boy, do those guys work long hours - no one leaves until the boss leaves the office) + Germany, and UK and France -- same deal world wide; those that want to further their career either work harder or smarter (and harder is easier than smarter and equates to longer hours). Try telling a prospective Olympic athlete that they only have to put in 40 hours a week and take 5 weeks vacation every year...

Lolz - so if I want to work longer, to complete a project, to beat the competition to make my company more successful and thus make myself more successful I can't do it? Seems kinda dumb to me. Oh, and the times that I spent in Germany, UK, France etc - no one seemed to pay attention to this rule (except the clock-watchers who would do this in any country and who are destined to a life of mediocrity anyway)

The possessive form of the word is spelled "their" ;-)

Walmart has a physical operation in NC and the ability to collect and process taxes. Out of state vendors (Amazon being just one or many, many) does not. Don't forget that this law, if it passes, will impact all out of state eCommerce vendors. Perhaps the large ones will say "we do enough business in NC and will set up a physical presence to process tax" but the many, many smaller entities will just drop this state. That will be painful for them and their customers within the State.

"I'm told that the reason for certification is not safety, but culpability.

Now who told you that nonsense? Of course it's for safety...
Manager giving employee their annual review: "Nice work Bob - the fact that those planes crashed last year and all those people died, well shoot, shit happens. Good news is that you were able to pin the responsibility on those tweakers at Boeing so they could have their asses sued into oblivion. Good job. Raises and promotions all round!"

"That's racial discrimination and should be illegal..."

- Since Europe and the US have citizens from every race on the planet (and perhaps a few off-planet...) I don't know how you can say that. Perhaps you mean "geographical discrimination"?

- "Should be illegal" - why? As an owner, you may decide how your work or art is displayed, sold, licensed etc. Why must you be forced to distribute it in a certain geographic region (especially when you have to cover the cost of manufacturing, distribution, merchandising etc)? Would get us rapidly to the point where nothing would be created as the cost of being forced to distribute it (as it would be "illegal" not to do so...) in every territory that wanted it would be prohibitively expensive.

There were many reasons why Micro Focus' COBOL compilers were written in COBOL - a large one being "eat your own dog food" aka "drink your own champagne". Every improvement we made to the compiler wrt performance and features benefited both the compiler itself and the applications it compiled. Although the Compiler was written in COBOL, the run time system (on UNIX) was written in C. The Compiler back-end was written in COBOL with a bunch of machine-specific assembler for speed. I remember the porting of the compiler to the Convergent Tech system - just recompiled the C run time, copied across the compiler in its intermediate form, generate it using the back end and off you go (oh, after a crap load of testing).

every time a company reports weak growth or a drop in revenue they always say something like this to make it seem nice.
"Every Time" - really? Let's not get too far ahead of ourselves with the absolutes shall we? Amazon's 2008 results will be published in January 2009 - so we have until then to determine your predictive accuracy. Amazon issues a post-holiday press release - has done for years. It's reported revenue increases every year in that press release that have been verified in more detail in it's annual report. It's seeming that your "every time" comment may be a little off the mark...

Yes. Q4 and Yearly earnings for 2008 will be published late Jan 2009. Go back to 2002 and you'll see that Amazon's PR release after the holidays was 100% verified in the succeeding 10K for every year since then.

Nope. I subscribe to PR Wire - nothing, zip, zilch, nada from other retailers (brick and mortar / Online or otherwise). Amazon did amazingly well. Due, on at least two counts, to:

1. Price - they consistently beat the prices of competitors (volume gives you that leverage - there is no magic);
2. Customer Service - ever had to return an item to Amazon? Ever had a problem with *anything*? They ship it back, at their cost with a smile on their faces. Don't get satisfaction from customer support? e-mail jeff@amazon.com and CEO Jeff Bezos will ensure that you are taken care of. Amazon defines high quality customer service.

(and yes, I am a *very* satisfied Amazon customer -- that's why I keep going back time and time again.

Are we sure that they measured the distance in KM - what if it was miles, or furlongs, or rods, or perches....? I understand that this type of mistake has happened in the recent past.

Couple of data points:
1. My kids go to school in the Bay Area. Both have an impressive wardrobe of Sun-logo'd t-shirts (the designs are much better that your average "slap-a-logo-on-a-white-T"). While I'm not complaining, why is Sun clothing my children while laying off 5,000 staff?
2. I've been in the computer business for ~25 years. I've done work with Sun in the past (~15 years ago). I can tell you what business Microsoft is in. I can tell you what business HP is in. Ditto Oracle. Heck I even think I could tell you what business IBM is in these days. I have *no* idea what business Sun is in. Oh I know they own some Open Source apps and once upon a time they made computers around the SPARC processor - but what do they do now? How do they intend to make money and return a profit for their shareholders?

Starting November 17 Amazon.com will off the OLPC http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?ie=UTF8&marketplaceID=ATVPDKIKX0DER&me=A34NLXJLC88VVS. Quite appropriate since it was Jeff Bezos that came up with the buy-two-get-one program.