The implied assumption in the article and in the commentary indicates a deliberate misdirection or a simple understanding of the accounting principles involved in how a business accounts for a BAD DECISION. Every business has the ability to use this 'loophole'. But it's not a 'loophole'. It's a simple recognition that a capital purchase that turns out to not be a good deal should have the loss (cost of the purchase price minus the fair market value of the asset) amortized over the book life of the asset against the income produced by the asset.

Kids, this is basic accounting 301 (Intermediate management accounting). Most accountants will tell you that having good will on your books means you made a dumb decision at some point, and paid more than something was worth. The title SHOULD read:

"Ballmer pays twice what Basketball team is worse, can't write it off immediately, has to wait 15 years."

Because I BUILT my first personal computer in 1976. This involved individual IC's, a wire wrap board, making my own PC boards for power and display, lots of soldering, switches to load and store programs, and LED's. 6502 processor and 1,000 bits of RAM, baby ! I mock anyone who thinks that plugging in a few parts is 'building a computer'.

I keep an encrypted online database of my passwords. Sort of. I use a 'modular' password. One word is different, the other is always the same. So in my will I have the same word (and it's l33t combinations) written down, along with the address of the database. So anyone dealing after my death will know ALL my codes. My wife of 30+ years also keeps a copy of it, and knows the super secret codes.

I started this after being in a coma, and my wife having to deal with my PDA bleeping about meetings to her until the battery died. Which made her cry even more.

Good approach. Making a mortal enemy of the outgoing sysop, or simply his object of scorn, will screw you badly.

Other than to say "you're screwed", the big step is to also ramp up the professionalism and start building a better system governance policy and documentation process. The best way to explain that to management is to ask "Do you fail the Hit By a Bus Test? ".... If your key administrators are hit by a bus, will your systems go dark ?

A stylish wearable using 'cloud' functionality for processsing and storage, with haptic and voice input, and visual / voice output with beyond retina image quality that is projected into both eyes in a maskable area while using optical comparison to detect the ability of my eye to see it (avoiding bifocals, etc..) and projecting what Is actually in front of me based on eye position so I don't fall on my butt.

I'm so right hand dominant that, when I shattered my right arm, my wife was the first to notice it (docs in the ER did not... I had a traumatic brain injury and in a coma... you do the fatality inducing stuff first). I was flailing around with my left hand only. They pooh poohed it. She said "You don't understand. He's so right handed that you could cut his left hand off and he wouldn't notice for hours and hours.) .

Agreed, but I'd go for full E and B field senses... and the neural net to be able to understand intercepted brain waves from other devices and creatures around me.

Sense of smell is somewhat over-rated. I lost mine for almost a decade, and haven't really gotten much of it back. Smell is a warning sense (Don't eat that ! Mate with her !) , not a critical information processing sense. Which is why the simpler part of the brain handles it.

I worked on a much more advanced and ultimately classified project for the Navy SEALS that produced a 'first shot kill' gun sighting system for the SEALs in ... 1993. The sight was designed to go on crew served weapons and sniper weapons. It included aim point calculation, full ballistics computing, sensors, range finder, thermal and optical sighting, low light level, yadda yadda yadda. At the time the sofware was required to be ADA (thanks, DOD).

Just because you put a shiny Linux on something doesn't make it all new and stuff.

At roughly 35 miles high per TB... assuming no compression... My data reaches nicely past the Mesophere.. into Outer SPAAACCEEE ! Of course if those Gazillion punched cards got sucked into the jet stream, the resultant shade would blot out the sun and cause global cooling on a massive scale. Hmm...

Bingo. I can recall being in the research reactor at U Mo in Columbia in the early 1970's. People forget how accessible facilities were before 9/11 . Apparently we're so used to the Police State that we've created that it's pretty much taken for granted.

Which is a great pity. The less accessible cool research is for our children, the less interested our children will be in becoming cool researchers. Big Bang Theory and Mohawk Guy nonwithstanding.

A quite logical extension of such thinking. When it comes to liberty of thought, the road to Orwell's 1984 is paved with 'good ideas' gone wrong.

In the late 1970's I purchased a copy (paper) of "the Anarchist's Handbook". Why ? I was doing research for a story I was writing for a Creative Writing class in college. I already *knew* how to make explosives.. I was an Engineering student !

Criminalizing people for their knowledge would mean that pretty much every Engineer will end up in jail. Yeah... that will definitely not help a modern world.