You should really talk to someone about your connection problems. Can't say I ever have buffering issues on Netflix. The video quality might not be blu-ray, but I'm not watching in a home theater, either.

If you want stuff ASAP after release, Amazon's option to buy digital movies is pretty hard to beat. The business model is completely antithetical to what everyone on Slashdot likes, and it's pricey, but if speed is your absolute only criteria...it wins. Publishers allow sales before they allow rentals. (If it wasn't so expensive, they wouldn't let it go on sale so early, because it cannibalizes box office figures.)

Clarify with your manager who is allowed to give you tasks. In a lot of environments, all requests from higher-up MUST go through your manager for prioritization. Make sure you know where and when this applies but it's probably most of the time, so just tell people "you need to go through my direct manager so we can track the things I need to work on". If you let four different people dump tasks on you, you'll get buried and you won't get your responsibilities done.

This bit me pretty hard my first few jobs and still does to some extent. Make sure you know what you're supposed to work on. If your plate is already full, don't branch out to other tasks. People are really good at overstating or understating the importance of what you need to work on, and you aren't the one who sets the schedule. It might be urgent for task A to get done this week, but maybe it's even more urgent for task B to get done by the end of next week, and if task B takes more work to get done...

It's amazing how big of a global impact you could get, from what seems at first glance to be an everyday iterative improvement to an esoteric technical product. Thank you for sharing!

As long as it doesn't turn into the "History" Channel.

[citation needed]

Untrue? This is from the article: "In addition, the District’s Board Policy Manual explicitly states 'a student shall retain all rights to work created as part of the instruction or using District technology resources.'"

That school's policy clearly states that copyright is retained by the creator even when using school equipment.

Eh, hardware companies have a way different perspective about patents than software ones. If your company's been around for many decades and products take many years to develop and get to market (unlike software), patents are way more effective at their job of "put your ideas on paper and show them to the world". Having a short term monopoly on that idea is awfully brief when it takes so long to build up public infrastructure.

I dunno, I think those of us who are better at blocking ads than you--and aren't bored enough to spend all their time refreshing large companies' press release pages--might find this kind of article useful.

Reading at -1 is pretty unsafe for work, most of the time. I'd love to catch all the not-yet-modded anon opinions, but there's some pretty hideous stuff there too.

Wouldn't spreading out the shots more make them more expensive to administer? That's just fine to me if it's socialized, but it's really not okay if it drives up the price of immunization for poor and uninsured families.

All it says is how hard you leaned on the grindstone fifteen years ago. Totally useless as a predictor by the time you're four years out of university (some would say much earlier). You got the degree, you've been exposing yourself to technologies, you're staying more current than some (not very good) currently-employed programmers and security guys. Put that GPA out of your mind entirely.