Ouch ("both"). So, after Blag gets out, we should see him getting elected soon after??

Yeah, I just ordered a T-shirt from a Canadian company, paid with PayPal ... and my bank charged me an "International Charge fee" because it went through PayPal Canada. I ordered last year from a company that is in Europe (I think Czech Republic, but I can't remember right now); the shirt was a good price, but international shipping was more than I expected -- but the total was still very reasonable.

So, I've taken advantage of the new worldwide economy, although I try to buy things locally when I can.

And the ones that aren't in prison got sent to Washington? ;-)

False. The sales tax laws are very specifically worded, anything collected (even if in excess of what you were supposed to collect) is required to go to the states. Unless the rules are different since Amazon is out-of-state? I have looked into Florida laws, and even if I were to collect double what I was supposed to, I couldn't keep a penny (legally).

I have done both (daily push, and now once-a-week). The real problem is not CYA versus agile; my current company is publicly traded, and trying to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley means they have to have MULTIPLE meetings about what is going out, what it is going to impact, how to roll it back, etc. The SOX compliance just introduces tons of "process" meaning that there is absolutely ZERO chance of daily changes.

The best way around this is to make as much as possible data-driven, with screens to update the data -- that way you don't "push to production," just go through an interface.

+1. AVG was too much up-selling and "don't you think you need to upgrade?" Having said that, Avast does that sometimes, but they haven't been as intrusive ... yet.

Wait, you have people that actually accept the Windows Updates? Everyone I know just closes the pop-up, and when I show up (virus / malware, or running really slowly) I see "926923798257 updates to install" (yes, I'm exaggerating).

True, no loyalty in business. I've been through enough times where I liked where I was, but through no fault of my own (or even no fault of the entire department), the whole lot was let go -- or the business changed enough that it was like being let go.

One place I was a contractor, hoping to turn it into a full-time position, and all the contractors (there were many) were let go. A mandate from at least 3 levels above our manager. The employees were left with gobs of work to keep doing without contractors, and I'm sure 6 months down the road they were hiring contractors back. Some ploy to make the books look better; show a short-term gain (not paying contractors) by sacrificing the long-term gain (losing their expertise and having to re-train people; having the system basically stagnate while the employees tried to keep up).

Not to say that I haven't jumped ship myself, but I know that my boss(es) are not looking out for just my best interest. They are concerned with their best interest, and whatever it takes to keep themselves employed, and moving forward in their career.

I also loved Takeshi's Castle -- even the Americanized, somewhat watered-down, full-of-corny-jokes version. If they replaced all the reality shows with Japanese knock-offs, TV would be 100% more entertaining. At least I might watch a few more shows than I do now. Now I just get ill flipping past the shows, let alone trying to watch them.

I *completely* agree. Human-interest stories are what make me want to tape everything, so I have a way to fast-forward through the BS.

Secondly, the so-called challenges from WO are just impossible. Not impossible like Sasuke, where people get better and can actually do them (rolling thingy comes to mind), but what is up with the punching wall from WO? There is no way to really get past it, you might as well just dive into the muck to start with.

I liked the reality show set in Japan, something like "I'm on a Japanese Game Show!", but I shudder to think what the Americans would do with it if it got really popular. I understand it wasn't really a Japanese game show, but the challenges were at least somewhat believable that someone could do them if they had some skills or learned how it worked.

Ooh, Wolfenstein -- and, since you may not have good arrow keys, you could use the phone orientation for turning / movement? Turn right/left to actually turn right/left? Tilt forward, backward to move ... a little for slow movement, tilt 45 degrees for fast movement?

Sounds like a great use of my phone!

Oh, was that humor? I was expecting you to go in a different direction, and then you put Yahoo, HP, RIM, MySpace.

I was expecting AltaVista, AskJeeves, InfoSeek, Overture.

But, yes, I agree with your premise -- does Bing have a shopping search yet?

You are only "guaranteed" what you are getting. However, I have been in that boat, and there was a physical problem. Just call your provider, explaining what is happening. If they have 24/7 support, wait until it starts happening, then call them -- so when they test it, they will see the problem.

Unfortunately, for me it took three different calls. The first call the technician came out and just swapped out some hardware. Elapsed time for him: Maybe half an hour. The second time they checked the wires from the house to the modem, and gave me different hardware ("that other one has problems with some old wiring").

Finally, with the third guy to come out, he traced it to some intermittent problem with wires. He swapped pairs from the house to the box (or the box to the DSLAM, can't remember exactly), and from then on my downloads quickly went up near the maximum and stayed there.

If you have already called the ISP and you got one of the responses above, you can always call back and complain again. They do seem to track that you called before, and will try something different. I was with BellSouth / ATT, so your mileage may vary. (I keep using past tense; I upgraded to U-Verse when it became available, and the speeds are great).

Standard machine builds with an Admin / root password? When the machine flakes out and cannot connect to a domain controller, you need a local account.

Databases with "sa" account? There are some things that the database will not let an "admin" do, only the DB owner.

... and I love the password generation capability. Especially options like "exclude lookalike characters" for when I have to look up the password on my phone.