Actually, this explanation makes so much sense. My assumption about Cisco stock has nothing to do with Cisco specifically, but just that the indexes have been hitting all time highs. I'm expecting that a significant correction will occur in the stock market in general...

I don't get it. You borrow money for free and buyback your stock at its top. How are they going to pay back this debt, especially if/when the stock tanks? Issue double the amount of shares at half the price? Why not just buy treasuries with the borrowed money and earn risk free interest? Then buyback stock when the stock market tanks.

I've become skeptical about the cost calculation of Nuclear power. If you include the long-term storage and disposal of the nuclear waste, I'm almost certain nuclear power is more expensive. But good thing the tax payer will pick up that tab.

If this is how people from India are using the H1B program, then it makes sense that wages will be driven down. I think people from other countries like China want to stay in the US. Another problem is the H1B basically makes you a slave to the company. If you get laid off, you have to leave. Also, switching jobs is really hard. In Germany, you have one year of unemployment, then you may have to leave. This one year also gives you enough time to find another job.

The other great thing about Windows 3.11 was that if you calculated 3.11 - 3.1 in the calculator, the result was 0.

I made the mistake of buying an LG Optimus 2X, supposedly a flagship phone. My best uptime was 200h, at which point it was so slow, I had to reboot. I'm almost certain LG has a thousand monkeys writing their software. CyanogenMod was my saviour. Unfortunately, not even CyanogenMod could not fix everything. Also, NVidia was apparently a huge part of the problem. So my rule is, no LG Software (I have a LG Nexus 5 new, it's awesome) and no NVidia CPU (stick with Qualcomm).

In Germany, where there's no minimum wage, there are people who earn less than 5 EUR per hour. This is ridiculously low. These low wage workers then get topped up by the state so they're not homeless. Essentially the state is subsidizing cheap labour. In this case, I would say a minimum wage is necessary so that the employers have to pay the full cost of labour. Sure prices will go up, but I see that as a necessity. I don't understand the argument that any minimum wage is bad 1EUR/h is clearly too little. No one will work for this. 100EUR/h will destroy the economy. I suspect there's a sweet spot somewhere.

Not going to happen. The US bases bring in a lot of money to Germany. Also, the Germans are in on it too. This is just a dog and pony show to pretend they're doing something about spying.

And what is the actual situation? The searching for terrorists is probably not the only thing the data is used for. I'm sure the data is used for various nefarious purposes, such as industrial espionage, political espionage, blackmail. Maybe figuring out the sentiment of the population and their likelihood to breakout into mass protest. I'm sure they're doing some non-evil research too. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a database identifying people who are against the status quo of the Democrat/Republican duopoly, and feeding that data to the media outlets so they run stories smearing any third party candidates. That's a bit farfetched, but everything the NSA was confirmed to be doing was also farfetched before Snowden leaked those documents.

While I agree, the problem is power. Unions gain too much power and they abuse their situation, and become just as corrupt as the government. There always need to be a balance of power. I find unions in Germany operate far better. They actually work with the companies to make things better for everyone.

And how much music have you downloaded? You've done even more damage. No wonder the financial crisis happened!

Most of the Canadian population isn't that far north. Toronto for example is at 4342N, which is about the same as Florence, Italy (4347N), and southern France (Marseille, 4318N). Calgary is at 5103N, which is around London, England (5130N) and the middle of Germany (Dresden, 5102N). Stockholm is much farther north, at 5920N, similar to Whitehorse at 6043N. It's really interesting to compare the latitudes between North America and Europe. Europe has great weather considering how far north it is.

As far as I know, the Russians didn't buy an entire fab, maybe bought a bunch of used equipment from the Qimonda bankruptcy. You might be referring to AMD spinning off its fabs into Global Foundries, which is now owned by investors in Abu Dhabi. Building a modern semiconductor fab is extremely expensive. The cheapest piece of equipment costs a minimum of $1M. Lithography tools costs over $20M a piece (and you can't just buy one). You're looking at dumping at least $3B into a new fab. The operating costs are also really expensive, like maintaining a clean room, equipment maintenance. Before its deminse, Qimonda was losing 100M Euros a month! The only way chip making is economically feasible is to produce huge volumes. If you're not producing huge volumes, then you have to go to a foundry like Global Foundries or TSMC. If Russia is really going to do this, they would probably go to a foundry.

There's an exchange called IEX that has implemented a technical solution by adding delay via a really long spool of fiber optic cable.

There's no reason why the F-35 shouldn't work well. Just drop that stupid vertical takeoff requirement and tell the US Marine Corps to work together with the Air Force. That would have dropped the development costs significantly.

The real question is, what are actually the Canadian Air Force requirements? I seriously doubt that Canada needs stealth strike fighters to patrol the remote north. Who's radar do they want to evade? What really irks me is that the so called conservative government wants to blow a shit load of tax payer's money for some military toys, and without properly evaluating all the options. I'm pretty sure the Super Hornet is better suited for the Canadian Air Force, and is half the price! Win win right? I thought the conservatives were supposed to be conservative with money too? I guess conservative now means, cut spending on social programs and science, cut taxes for the rich, reduce environmental regulation, increase military spending, increase the deficit. I do realize there might be some political pressure from the US to buy into this disaster. Harper should just grow some balls and tell them to fuck off.