I'm amazed how many people on this thread miss the point of the dividend. Apple is looking for new investors and right now many mutual funds can't own apple because they have a policy of owning only dividend yielding stocks. By paying a dividend, those funds can start buying.

The problem is that in most cases, if you ditch cable, the internet price goes up. I have FIOS and I think the price for stand alone internet goes up by almost $30 if you drop cable. Then, savings from dropping cable is not so great. It always seemed obvious to me that this was a monopolistic practice and I'm surprised it's allowed. If I could get high speed internet for the same price with or without cable, I'd drop cable for sure.

So, you're looking for job security by continuing to use languages where it is difficult to code something up? Good luck with that. If point and click programming does the job well and can be done quickly, why would a manager not want to use that style of programming for their projects? I wonder how much C# programming you've done yourself. It's an excellent language and very readable/maintainable when used by software engineer who pays attention to quality.

I run mp3Gain on all of my music to reduce the gain a more normal level, around 89 dB. Almost every album today shows clipping. It's a shame that producers only care about making the music loud. I find it obnoxious and can't stand the distortion. I hope the practice changes soon.

This has been around for awhile. http://aprs.fi/ links devices sending messages via rf and also routes through the internet although the internet link is not needed. Doing it with cell phones is a good idea though.

This exact issue recently came up for me. I had an offer from what I thought was a good company with a pretty good future, doing embedded systems development. However, i was concerned that there was no cohesive software development group, no version control system or codebase with only basic interest in this, no SQA. It was suggested I have a conversation with a higher up, and the conversation proved that there was no knowledge and no interest in changing any of these things and that there was a lot of reinventing the wheel as a result.

The job didn't work out, it's too bad, but things like that can't be changed unless the job you're being offered comes with some authority to make changes and the support to do it.

I bought a 720P 46" LCD rear projection. It looks great to me from ~10' away and I don't think I'd see a ton of difference with 1080i at that screen size.

What I do see is all the image artifacts from compressed channels and it pisses me off. There's a big difference between the good ones, like HD Theatre and the bad ones. I have FIOS, but I don't think they are the problem, I think it is compressed by the source carrier before it gets to them. FOX seems to be one of the worst offenders. It makes me feel that I am not getting what I paid for.