Whether that's an improvement is not for you nor me to decide. Unless you're an Egyptian.

I can tell you Android runs on x86 already, albeit in an unstable state. I expect with Intel behind this, things will develop faster. Regarding the compatibility issues, Android is bytecode with only specific libraries compiled natively, and they're being ported. I imagine we'll see some sort of fat binary support for both architectures on the Android Market.

Actually, I am running Android on my x86 tablet. The speakers and touch screen don't work so you have to plug a mouse, and it's unstable, but it does run already.

I imagine that, since Google is partnering with Intel on this, we'll have a sort of fat binary like during the Mac's transition era from PowerPC to x86. An added benefit would be that developers stick to bytecode libraries if they want to be able to run anywhere, and everyone will benefit from the added portability.

I imagine they've tested Android on x86, since they've had it running for a while now and that's the main target for 2012. iOS does NOT run on x86 at this point. The stated goal is to double the pace of Moore's law for mobile processors in the next few generations. They have the room to do this for 2-3 more cycles, which would imply intercepting ARM pretty soon.

That's something I found really odd when I first moved to the US from Spain. In Spain, apartments are generally fully furnished, and only bedding and personal items need to be brought over. It makes it much easier to change places if you want to be light. On the other hand, most people own or aim to own their place (this might be changing due to the size of the housing bubble that's still deflating way too slow to make things affordable), so in general college students are the bulk of the market, which explains a lot.

If you have to go down that path, I'd go with TAT. Simple to measure even over old data, hard to game consistently, and closely related to customer impact. If you want to, weigh it by customer-perceived severity of each request so that people don't boost their numbers by cherry picking easy tickets.

4 dictators fallen and counting is quite an impact, I would say. It took the US a lot of sweat, blood and dollars to topple just one, by contrast.

That was $13 trillion. $700 billion was the TARP fund.

I know, you are the original poster I was referring to. :)

Arguably, a layman would take the simple path, which is what the original poster used.

All that is right, but it doesn't answer the original question, which was "if it is headed to a landfill, isn't it being 'composted' anyway?", which of course is absolutely correct. The key here is the waste (pun intended) of valuable resources. Every pound of compost replaces the need for more oil based fertilizers. It also reduces the amount of energy spent hauling garbage, because there is less of it. It's reducing your footprint in a very visible way.

Breaking windows so they need to be repaired is the key to the fallacy. Nobody is suggesting the creation of more organic waste to create jobs processing it. Hence you're wrong.

Try public transport. I'm commuting a good 1:20h each way, but I'm on the train and I can sleep, read or even work. I like it much better than when I was a 20 minute drive away.

I heard of a case of someone at a big tech company that was hired with amazing credentials. MS from Stanford and PhD from CMU, something like that. The guy would always show up late and keep a low profile. Avoiding most contact and keeping quiet in his cube for months. After a while someone ran a background check on him and it turned out his degrees were nonexistent, but he still managed to rack a good half year of top pay, and got away with it. What company would like that kind of publicity?