I was thinking this gives a nice overlap with Australia and Asia. In the winter in the UK it is terrible to try and organise meetings with Australia, as they go on DST and become 11 hours different.

Nokia has a great brand name. If they came out with a high quality android phone it would sell well. I think their dilemma is that it would kill off their other product lines. But in the long term would probably be one of the best choices for the company for that segment of the market.

1000 people working for a big business means a lot of extra money is being spent by those workers in the local economy.

This is suppose to be news for nerds. Have you seen what the technology differences are between an iPad and most of the new tegra 2 devices...

Exactly and this technology is already being commercialised over her in Europe. The three big challenges are:

* Built low cost offshore platforms. This involves taking a lot of technology from the oil industry and coming up with designs that don't require huge foundations and can be floated into place.

* VSC - Voltage Source Conversion, this is much smaller (Thought slightly less efficient) than normal LCC HVDC schemes, this technology allows you to squeeze a HVDC scheme into an offshore platform.

* Offshore wind turbines. This technology is basically solved already.

I work in these areas of technology and there has been a massive amount of progress over the last 5 years.

Agreed, I currently pay for subscriptions to several newspapers and magazines (hard and soft copies). The only reason I do so is that the writing is consistently good quality. And the writers that are biased are at least biased in a consistent way (like you mentioned e.g. finance articles). I also like that they have access to high quality interesting photographs related to the stories, and most of the comments on the articles tend to be fairly well written, as having to pay seems to instantly filter out all the youtube quality comments.

Xbox & entertainment accounts for something like 20% of their revenue. I don't know many people who would call 20% of 20 Billion chump change. The biggest strategic threat to Microsoft at the moment is the cloud, it has the potential to steal away small business customers, and this is an area where there is a lot of profit.

Or those who are vegetarian for health reasons..

In Australia they don't even both to call it that on the button, my falcon (4.0L V6) has a picture of a wheel doing a burnout for the traction control disable button!

One of the biggest benefits of torrents is that the fake crap gets weeded out quickly and the real torrents rise to the top with a high number of seeders. So it doesn't matter if its fake because it dies off quicker, than normal as people stop uploading it.

Engineering is not a low paying profession. It is only low paying if you are not good at your job and never advance in your career. There are quite a few people i see who go into engineering with no passion and hence pay little attention to details (which is the key to a good engineer). They fail to garner respect from their peers and hence don't make any career progression, and get stuck in their decent paying (but not mind blowing) job.

Really what most of these articles are about is that there is a decline in manufacturing in the US. What i have noticed specifically to the sector that i work in (High Voltage DC Power). Most power authorities request a certain percentage of the project be manufactured in country (e.g. we manufacture thyristors, and transformers in Brazil for the local market) So jobs are not being lost so much as redistributed across the globe.

I get it regularly at my work, some old bloke will complain as if these markets are stealing "our" jobs. What he is failing to see is that this is just the next development. Its not a race to the bottom, its a race to equalise, and people have only realised in the last 15 years that the US won't be top dog forever and has to accept that it has equals.

The upside i have found these days is that i will attend an event with my mates and everyone takes maybe 10-15 shots. Then me and my mates will swap our photos at the end. So for the 10-15 minutes we spent taking photos during the night we all get an entire collection of photos of the event lived at different angles. Its quite nice to then invite everyone around for Sunday breakfast a few months later and go through all the photos from all the events we attended together.

In the end gadgets are just tools, and it is nice to have the best tools for the job. I do understand what you are implying but i think most people actually use gadgets simply as a tool not as a hobby in itself.

Exactly, i have some cousins that run a farm outside a small country town. They all attend church every Sunday which is basically 1 hour of singing followed by 2 hours of cakes and coffee and catching up on all the gossip. I imagine well into the past that it would have been pretty much the only major social activity for the week, especially during the winter months in most northern hemisphere climates. I've never attended church, but I can certainly appreciate why it can appeal to people.

I would say we are quite good for customer referrals though.

Agreed, the biggest problem i see in most workplaces is lack of communication.