I've more or less stopped flying because of all the nuisance fees combined with the delay/hassle of security screening at the airport. If I need to get somewhere REALLY far away, I'll bite the bullet, but for the most part I've switched to trains and driving.

At least that's their address...I pass it all the time in Dulles, VA.

http://www.orbital.com/About/Contact/ :)

Re: the value of an education does not reside solely in earnings potential

Maybe for the independently wealthy, that's true. For most people, we borrow money to go to that fancy university and then we've got to pay it back plus interest. Spending years in hock to attend a school that has limited potential to aid me in getting a job to pay off that nut is not particularly useful regardless of how much I might enjoy that semester studying the works of Euripides.

Surely there are other forms of payment that are acceptable to this Swedish VPN provider? Vote with your feet.

Who knows if they're under pressure from the NSA or other bad actors...perhaps it's just related to CC fraud? In either case...see above.

OK, you go first. I hear they've got 3 hot meals, free boarding, and cable TV in the joint.

Megacorps hiring legions of lawyers, accountants and lobbyists to limit/eliminate their tax liabilities. And politicians sucking up to the money bags whilst feigning outrage for the little guy. I'm shocked....just shocked, I say.

...if it hasn't already (in the US) Assuming it's a valid patent to begin with. 1995 was a long time ago.

I haven't bought a copy of office since 2006 or so. Openoffice and then Libreoffice have filled my needs nicely since then. I have friends and co-workers that are content to just use Google Docs. I could see if you're one of the small percentage of people that use some obscure feature only available in the M$ product, but for most people the free alternatives are perfectly fine.

A 10 minute walk outside is all it takes for a thin film of talc-like dust to settle all over your clothes/hair/skin. For someone exposed to it for a long time, I would imagine it's akin to working in an autobody shop spray painting cars without a respirator.

The stench of sulfur from burning coal is prevalent since many large housing complexes (and even individual homes) use coal fired boilers to create steam heat in the winter. The government hacks that are profiting handsomely from this situation don't care. Their children and their cash are safely stowed overseas.

I don't see any sign of improvement over the past 7 years other than the temporary cleanup for the Olympics in 2008.

You don't really need a formal CS degree. Most companies don't seem to care WHAT subject is studied as long as you got a degree. Many of the most competent programmers I've met had no formal CS degree. They had other degrees and sometimes just took a couple of formal classes in programming or other CS-related subjects that interested them and sometimes not. A motivated person can easily learn what they need online these days if the goal is just to crank out code.

The fact that your current gig will pay for your education is good. Take advantage of that, even if the courses aren't directly applicable to your day to day job.

Best,

I work for a large enterprise. We "should" be buying more expensive gear. However...

We had a series of small conference rooms that often hosted meetings requiring WIFI access to one of our "play" networks that's isolated from most everything else. We bought a couple of the SMB Linksys/Cisco wireless access points. I believe they were about $500 each. We immediately had problems with them dropping connections, even with small numbers of users. A call to Cisco resulted in "um...you're at megacorp? Buy our enterprise gear. With your discount, surely you can "upgrade" for only a few thousand". And that was that. There was little effort put into solving the problem other than trying to shoo us into buying more expensive equipment. We ultimately punted them all, returned them for a full refund, and are now using access points from Asus that cost us less than 1/2 of the price and work flawlessly.

Lesson learned.

Nothing is free. Those guys provide a service and need to pay folks and keep the lights on.

Do I like this "feature"? No, not at all.

Would I like it more if Ubuntu dried up and went away? No.

There are ways to easily disable this "feature" that are posted all over the place. If you like Ubuntu and value your privacy, disable this "functionality" and lodge your complaint with Canonical. Maybe they'll find a better way to earn a living without irritating their userbase.

Best,

"Tax avoidance" doesn't appear to phase General Electric. They're definitely not an "internet company," have physical plants around the globe, and they pay a vanishingly small amount of corporate tax by using the same sort of schemes.

Imagine that....large corporations with armies of lawyers using lobbying to help them skirt tax payments to ultimately benefit their shareholders. And I guess it helps to have friends in high places. Guess who is Barack Obama's "jobs czar?" That's right, Jeff Immelt...CEO of GE. In 2010 GE made a global profit of US$14.2 billion. US$5.1 billion of that was attributable to operations in the US. How much did GE pay in taxes to the US government you ask? Well, zero. They actually had the balls to claim a tax benefit (billed against future earnings) of US$3.2 billion.

I'm all for companies being able to make a profit, but c'mon.

Personally, I'd be tickled if GM/Ford/Chrysler/Tesla/whoever could open their own dealer network. That would rid us of the thousands of smarmy dealerships (many with horrid BBB records) that prey on folks who just want to buy and maintain a car. Then consumer complaints could be handled more centrally and dealt with at the source. In theory, this would be financially better for the consumer since you'd be removing an extra profit center between the manufacturer and the consumer.

Bingo. I work at a large fortune 10 company with a few hundred thousand employees and it seems like a monthly occurrence where Sophos actively gets in the way. If it's not flagging benign content, it's causing resource problems on end-user systems. To call their support sluggish would be doing it a kindness. I believe we're actively looking for a replacement.