No it's about employing hard-core environmental fascists who push their cause down your throat... even if the course you are doing has little to do with environment.

If only you could. Many years ago I was sys admin for a small company... first thing I did was chuck out all their old hardware, give the staff new machines, install a server for file sharing... and lock it down... the old machines were full of viruses and the owner got sick of the mess... after I did all this work, within a day one machine was down... over night rebuild to fix it, and the next day it was down again.. the problem: just one user who insisted that she must install some apps from the internet to do her job (which seemed to be surfing the internet all day to plan her forthcoming wedding!). Solution: I locked the machines down so hard and logged all activity to see what was going on. Troublesome user then tried to break into the sever to disable the locks... silly woman didn't realize all this was logged. As the owner wouldn't do anything about this, I soon parted company. Yeah, users, especially those with a little knowledge, they're the worst.

You can lock OS X, but this works in conjunction with OS X Server as its more for corporate use

MIT get a donation of non-voting shares and they can live off dividends (if there are any). They are not allowed to sell them. They don't get control of BOSE, they don't get any say in how its run.

You can backtrack through the original submission, etc., and eventually get to it at: http://money.cnn.com/2011/04/29/technology/bose_mit_donation/index.htm?eref=mrss_igoogle_business Interestingly enough, BOSE is a private company, and he's donated an undisclosed number of non-voting stock. MIT will essentially have no running of BOSE and benefit from dividends, when and if BOSE do them.

Having written my own HTTP and FTP servers, if you need several million lines of code, you are doing something seriously wrong. A few thousand lines (in C) is all you really need (plus linking to openssl to provide the ssl/tls goodness)... and of the two, HTTP was slightly more code as a pile of defensive filtering was added to block out the common attack vectors (its amazing how long some worms keep going!)

Why are you surprised? NASA spent millions to develop a pen that could write in space... the Russians used a pencil. Sometimes people look for a really complicated solution instead of going for something cheap and cheerful that gets-the-job-done.

I would find NOT hearing the wife/girlfriend/whatever to be a significant advantage ;-)

For e-commerce the VAT is based on the supplier's country, not the consumers country... unless they've gone and changed the rules again.

Technically, Luxembourg isn't a tax haven... but it does have some advantageous tax, as does Ireland. US companies use Luxembourg as VAT (sales tax) is only 15% so they use this for e-commerce, which means when selling to consumers only 15% is nabbed in sales tax, opposed to say 21% if they were based in Ireland. Which is a polite way of saying they have reduced their (sales) tax liability. Now, Ireland is used by US companies as they are 'tax friendly' in that to encourage US companies to locate there they only impose something like 5% corporate tax (on profits). The cherry on the cake is that when this profit is transferred to the parent US corp then its not taxed again (I can't remember if this was done as a double-taxation treaty of as a specific get out in the US tax system) So, now you know why people like Apple sell from Ireland but specifically base their iTunes service in Luxembourg.

Quite hard. This is stuff that has to work in space, so it has to work all the time and for usually a longer timespan than originally intended... its not like back on the surface where if your cable/hub/whatever goes futz you can simply get a replacement from the local store and swap it.

Instead of reinventing the wheel, per se, why don't they take a (not-so-secure or safe) open system, add a bit of hardness to it, so everybody benefits (apart from the enemies).

Nah... it would be more equivalent to the EU saying to Germany, France, and the UK that "you will now set your VAT levels to 25% and 6% instead of your current levels". In other words, the level of tax would be decided externally instead of by the countries themselves. One of the original ideas behind the EU VAT system was that, eventually, the VAT rates would be harmonized across all countries... but interestingly, Amazon can cope with the current disparate rates and does things correctly, i.e. when I order they always charge me the rate in my country (the destination) regardless of whether I order from amazon UK or amazon DE.

Not only Microsoft... don't forget Adobe as it comes with CS4... and Apple get some love with iTunes (at a guess for use with iTunes U)... you can be sure that any bundled software came at a bargain basement price as companies see this as a way of "getting 'em young, then when they go to work they [want|demand] the same software".

That's just plain discrimination... and also shows your complete ignorance that domestic applicants can be just as stupid, evil, liars, as non-domestic applicants. On a more serious note, why does the CEO want to hire globally... perhaps he's realized that getting in people from different cultures might actually add something new... I've worked in multicultural environments and they're far more interesting than working with a room full of my countrymen.