Wow, I am glad I do not live in the UK. When will politicians realize that the more you try to regulate and squeeze something out, the more it oozes out around the edges. And, how exactly are they going to block porn?? Heuristic image recognition?? Banning all torrents, usernet access, or file shareing sites such as Rapidshare, Uploading, DepositFiles, etc??? How would they do this without killing almost all of the internet??

You should bother to look where IBM is hiring. They are looking for a lot of tech people in a large Dubuque Iowa call center that they run. Evidently staying out of the coast corridors and huge cities is a good way to save money on facilities and employees while still getting employees where English is their native language. $15/hr in semi rural Iowa gets you a house and a car, near Chicago that gets you a hole in the wall.

As a person with Celiac, at McDonalds you can have a salad with no croutons, ice cream, and hamburger patties. That is about it. The worst part about it is the absolute pain of eating out (I normally just eat at home even when the family eats out). Most fast food is off limits except for similar items. I desperately miss good pizza and Chinese food.

I was diagnosed after having intestinal cramping that was incredibly painful after I ate. I could not sleep through it, it caused me to buckle over in pain, and even the max strength of Vicodin barely got rid of it, though I was feeling a lot less pain on that. Luckily, I had an ulcer about 6 months prior, and was still in contact with my GI person. He diagnosed me the day I came in. That was about 6 years ago at the age of 38. After that I learned just how many things had gluten in them. Even gluten free, the pain took about 3 months to go away totally. 10-12 hours a day of hard labor level pain for 3 months really left me stressed out.

You are aware that Windows support junctions (think symlinks) and with proper traverse permissions you could map out a shared folder for a department into a users home share.

You are correct, not quite awake yet!

I guess you have not used OWA on Exchange 2007 then. It works just peachy on Chrome and Firefox. Gives all the context menus and looks the same.

As an atheist who lives in rural Illinois, where there are plenty of bible thumpers, I would be happy to have a much faster internet connection. It would also hopefully educate the uneducated masses here about such evil sites like the pandas thumb which would help them become less thumperish.

I do not think that you are remembering things clearly. Rambus was competing with the original DDR, not DDR2. Yes, the original Rambus was slightly faster than DDR, but with horrible latency issues compared to it. Read some chipset reviews for a VIA DDR chipset on a P IV vs Rambus. Also, Rambus was originally shoved down or throats by Intel on the Pentium III (or at least they tried). Rambus was also a lot more expensive to manufacture being a totally new design, while DDR was an extension of standard SDRAM. Much like how HD-DVD was cheaper to make than Blu-Ray being an extension of an existing process.

Also, I believe that Rambus originally went after the memory makers for DDR, not just DDR2. So yes, after latency was taken care of in streaming, it was faster, but it was never cheaper.

Very much agreed. I prefer it right around 68, and can definitely tell when it gets to 70.

I suggest you read the comments from the readers of that article, ripping the author's inaccuracies, before making such a statement.

It is not that corporations cannot take most employee compensation as a deduction, only "excessive"amounts. I heard about the maximum deductible compensation from my CPA. I do not have a year or IRS reference as there are so many google hits on the topic. However, my CPA dealt mainly with corporate and small business taxes over the past 40 years. He probably has a better grasp of the changes than most people.

Then again, I could also be remembering what he said wrong.

That was what I saw happening when I worked there. When they bough in Lenny, from a fast food place, a lot of high profit, but not neccissarily high dollar customers got angry. We made more on a couple of packs of fuses and batteries than we did a computer quite often, unless the service plan was sold.

Yeah, I know, the "when I was a young 'un" thing is probably true, but take a look at their financial history, I think it speaks for itself. And again, go into a store, try to find fuses, transistors, resistors, or better yet, am employee that knows anything about them.

I think a lot of the lack of R&D goes back to decisions made many years ago by the government. At one point all employee salaries regardless of how outrageous they were were a deductible expense. Congress decided they wanted to tax high salaried people. Therefore companies found ways around those laws. In comes stock bonuses and stock options. The problem with that is that a highly paid employee (most likely a decision maker) will do what is best for them, which is kick up the stock price so that they get higher effective pay. Easy way to do that, kill long term R&D. In addition with companies hiring people with business BS degrees who then get an MBA to manage, instead of the engineers, everything is looked at on the current P&L statement, not the 10+ year roadmap.

The combination of the higher ups wanting short term profits due to changes in tax law, along with many fewer R&D companies (HP for example) having engineers and technical people making decisions has decimated R&D.

I remember when HP meant test equipment and awesome calculators, not lousy consumer based computers (Thanks Carly). Another example, don't laugh too hard, is Radio Shack. I used to work for Radio Shack in the late 80's and the early 90's. When I started, they actually had R&D (they had a dye based CD-R technology they were working on, but had RIAA type problems with), manufacturing, a lot of electronic components, etc. When the founder of Tandy died, the MBA style management came in. They started off selling manufacturing, as that was not part of the "Core Business", sold off the credit card division, which made a nice one time profit, that then really made customers made because of lack of customer service, and lowered sales because of tighter credit requirements. They stopped carrying a lot of small parts, because of the low dollar value, regardless if they were high profit. In short, Charles Tandy, the leather salesman, ran it better and more profitably than the "business school" people that were bought in because he understood the business. We need to find a way to encourage the people who know the business they are in to get higher up and make decisions, rather than feeding the orgy of MBA's and people with business degrees that now rule most companies. As to how, I have very little in the way of ideas, but I think some tax law encouraging long term and pure science R&D would be helpful, if it could not be bastardized for other purposes (yeah, I know, a pipe dream).

Or, they could do what has been done with more than one song in the game, have the original artist record a new version of the song for the game. Hello There by Cheap Trick on... I don't remember which game, is a newer recorder version of the original song. That version was never released by a record company, just the band. I think that is a great way for the artist to actually get compensated also, cut out the middle man. If that band still has it's chops it is an awesome solution. And as far as the Cheap Trick song goes, the newer version totally rocks out in comparison to the original.