So I should first negotiate to keep the rights (and by that I assume copyright?) to any existing work when I move jobs?

Tozzle on the apple store was a hit with my daughter at 1 and 2, possibly a lot bit basic for a 3 year old but try it out. If nothing else she will master it in a couple of weeks and move on to something else. Apart from that my almost 4 yo is onto Angry Birds!

The old USA continues to get scarier and scarier

My guess, this will be another scheme where the network driver on the client has to respond to congestion control/back-off style requests from the AP, staying off the air for a (random?) amount of time. The AP will just be slightly more sophisticated about who it tells to back-off. Even NTP has this feature.

> Nobody remembers that there was 300 years between Newton and Einstein, and that people 300 years ago were just as smart and just as capable as people today, And less distracted by slashdot, facebook, twitter and other interweb stuff that detracts from serious thought

If you can't code, you're probably a Windows admin.

1st Decade: The 500 Hats of Bartholemew Cubbins by Dr Suess
2nd Decade: Dune by Frank Herbert
3rd Decade: A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram
4th Decade: To be determined..

No single position is best. Movement is required.

85-90 is ok, but 90-100? Why that would have been.. outrageous! Criminal!

"It's true enough that a properly encoded Ogg file (or MP3, or AAC file) will be indistinguishable from the original at a moderate bitrate." Rubbish. Any lossy format but particularly mp3 sounds GRUESOME to anyone with a trained ear. And untrained ears can certainly tell the difference once it's pointed out, usually on a good system. If you want to know how to get 11:1 compression ratio on a pseudorandom source like sound, it's simple - they throw away most of the information ,particularly spatial information in the upper frequency ranges. You can't "hear" some of those frequencies, but you can certainly perceive when they are absent. I personally cannot stand mp3s and never use them. FLAC all the way.

A definite bias in the comments towards supporting academics. My views, based on firsthand experience, are the opposite. Firstly universities are places where the fruitless, unproductive and unrealistic go to wallow in low-demand jobs. Most academics have little experience of the private sector and are not even aware of this concept of personal productivity (yes even in Economics departments!). However universities ARE a massive and sometimes useful pyramid scheme where you take a bunch of students, incline them towards doing Phds, employ most of them, and hope that a handful of them earn your university some respect, and even that one or two may win a Nobel or and bring actual prestige. This is the real cycle of the university business - promote itself, buy in productive academics, publish more (not better) papers, grow funding, get more students, review rankings and repeat. Good "science" (not an all encompassing term for the areas of research at universities) is as rare as good government. A thorough de-weeding once in a while can only be a good thing, and a handy wake up call for those that remain. Good riddance. No one any good will be losing their jobs - not a one.

I spent some time trying to find them myself in the Wollomi. Bloody awesome national park - apart from the dog packs.

..but it's always been at least 90% stupid

The world got stupider my friend, hadn't you noticed?

A bloke round here found a tree MILLIONS of years old and it was still ALIVE. http://www.wollemipine.com/aboutwp.php