TSA agents have been know to do unscrupulous things.

Let's say you are a smart kid. By 10 years old you are ready to ace calculus. You will suffer horribly waiting around year after year with nothing to do but get in trouble, become board and go completely off track. Schools are designed to severely punish the brightest and make them wait for the mean.

This is a way out. It can only be viewed as a good thing.

Working with the NSA most likely comes with a caveat: "you follow this gag order or we will put you in jail for interfering with national defense and releasing classified information." In other words, something almost as bad as giving aid to the enemy.

I hate conspiracy theories, but it is plausible that they are under a secret order from a secret court ordering them to deny everything. This is precisely why in the US we should never every have secret courts.

This is a good thing. This is the way it is supposed to work. This is how things get better. A little late, but it good to see this happening.

Does anyone else think it is strange that Broadwell is on the way, and they have an Ivy Bridge processor in this thing (Xeon E5-2697 V2)?

I know. This is what Intel sells, but still. It just feels "old".

So what prevents Google for closing their Italian office altogether? Simple tell Italian companies, he is a webpage to buy services and an account in Ireland to pay. If you need help, here is a support number in India or some other location. Somehow I doubt Italy can enforce a rule that says companies can't buy an online service from Ireland.
The nifty thing with the internet is that you can work remotely. Or am I somehow missing the point?

Perhaps the only reason you have a laptop is to watch YouTube. Some people do actual work on a laptop.

If you use Word, Excel, Eclipse, etc. you don't get enough lines top to bottom. Even at 1080p. For many applications such as web browsing you have tons of unused white space on the left and/or right with 1080p, but you are constantly scrolling up and down.

The more horizontal lines of resolution, the better. In an IDE with lots of tool bars and debug windows, etc. I have the up down space of a 1984 Mac for my code. It sucks.

Plastic not as strong as steel!

On a related subject. Plastic doesn't hold up to the extreme heat generated by multiple rounds as well as steel.

If you didn't see this coming, you are on track to earn a Darwin.

Microsoft:
3 months ending 2013-06-30:
Revenue: 19.896 Billion USD
Cost of goods/revenue sold: 5.602 Billion USD
Gross Profit: 14.294 Billion USD
Source:
https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:MSFT&fstype=ii&ei=wcBTUtihB8z2qQHI8AE

Out of their costs of goods sold, these researchers got 0.00049982%.
Me thinks their contribution to M$ is more than a few 10,000ths of 1%. They did what the 5.6 billion spent on internal people failed to do. And M$ doesn't have to pay their healthcare.

The cost of the meeting (hourly pay, room, overhead, etc.) for a bunch of execs at Microsoft to figure out how little to give these guys most likely cost more than 28,000 USD.

One can't help but to note that they gave the Google employees just enough to pay for dinner in downtown Palo Alto.

What a joke. Face book should fire the guy costing 150,000 USD a year ( take home pay and all in cost to FB are not the same ) who wrote the offending code.

500 USD for a bug is an insult. How much do their QC people make a month? They failed, and they are getting a lot more than 500 USD.

We can start another war and re-build the data set.

One solar flare pointed in the wrong direction and they will fry before they get there. Without science fiction, there is no practical shielding tech that offers a solution (a room with 6 inch think lead walls is heavier than you think). Keep in mind, if you have a heavy shielding solution and you get that thing up to speed, slowing down becomes a problem. You could end up flying right past Mars. You could bring some big thrusters to slow you down. Oh wait, that is more weight. Or you could use some superconducting magnets to deflect the charged particles. But then you'll have figure out how to get the spaceship to run without computers. Computers and huge magnetic fields don't mix. And superconducting magnets are extremely heavy. Don't worry. We'll just do it the way they do it in Star Wars.

Are they going to land on the surface? I doubt it. The atmosphere makes it very hard to land anything larger than the rover without making a new crater. If you landed, you would have supplies for a few hours before death. You can't do it with parachutes. You need a big rocket to slow you done. Oops. A lot more weight.

It goes on and on. Mars is distraction. Money and energy should be spent on more practical projects. We'll all be dead from a antibiotic resistant super-bug before we have any hope of putting someone on Mars.

China's whole tax system works on a printed documents called a fapiao (fa-piao).
Every company in China has at least one dedicated machine with a special dot matrix printer to print fapiaos.
The software to print fapiaos only runs on Windows XP.

It can not be understated how critical fapiaos are to China's tax system. Big companies use them to pay the 17% VAT (some services and logistics companies pay less than 17%). If you lose the fapiao you get from your supplier, you might as we have lost actual cash. You must have it to offset the VAT you owe. During your annual tax review, you must have fapiaos to keep your taxes low. These are so important, there is a booming business in faking fapiaos. This is mostly done through fake transactions. Faking the actual fapiao is not so easy these days. Each fapiao carries a unique number and can the traced.

If you go out to eat, you can demand a fapiao. For westerners, this can be submitted to reduce your taxes. The top tax rate is 45%, so fapiaos are very valuable. For local Chinese, they submit them as a business/company expense. For people working in restaurants, this is a source of extra cash. If a customer doesn't ask for a fapiao, the employees can print one anyway. On the black market, these can be sold for 5-10 cents on the dollar. The same applies to cab drivers. Many passengers don't take their receipt. The receipt is a valid fapiao that can be used to reduce taxes. The cab drivers will sell them for extra cash. Just ask. :)

Does no one remember Nokia?

Their new strategy will be to strike a deal with M$ and then develop solely for the Windows Phone because everything else is a waste of time.

They would know that people who execute a lot of trades get big discounts. HUGE discounts. If you are doing more than 20,000 or 100,000 trades a month, you start to trade at a fraction of the cost of a normal investor.
http://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/index.php?f=commission&p=futures3

With this fee structure, a HFT can get in and out and make money. A normal trader would lose money on the exact same trade. For the average guy, the trade might be profitable, but the trade commission is greater than the profit. Exchanges give a lot of incentives to traders who bring big volume.

I have a major issue with a system where two different traders make the exact same trade, but one loses money while the other makes a profit.
I'm not suggesting eliminating the lower fees for more active traders. I would like to see the gap between the highest commission and the lowest commission close. This simple change would work wonders to level the playing field. If the highest commission was limited to 130% of the lowest commission, the high frequency traders would lose most of their advantage.