Amen. It's either buy or do without.

Surely VP of SAP doesn't need to be doing that?
Some sort of mental illness of thrill-seeking?

He's just a sophisticated kleptomaniac.

There are probably a good number of plagiarized papers out there that have launched careers. No doubt some of their authors have a pucker factor worrying that somebody with too much time on their hands will examine their paper.

  I salute IBM in cutting jobs ...

I salute them too, but in a different way.

This is IBM's new business model. They make the books look good by laying people off. Go for it! At the rate IBM is shrinking, they'll be gone soon enough and the world will be shed of them.

Let's test that the way they did long ago. The ones who are reporting the seafood to be safe should be required to eat it.

We'll watch them for a few months to see whether they become ill.

what will they want later?

If they are acting like this now, what will they be like later?

The house doesn't like to lose.

This is yet another attempt to talk up engineering careers. There ain't many young people buying it because they see what it takes and what they will make. They've been watching large companies laying off engineers by the tens of thousands in mid-career. They know wages have been stagnant for the past 2 decades. They're doing a cost benefit analysis and concluding that there is too much stick and not enough carrot.

Our best schools are teaching people who go work in other countries...

That's because most of the work is in other countries.

Ah, yes. Perhaps if we redesign landfills to harvest natural gas from then they'll be taken over by Exxon, BP, et al.

"When shit becomes gold, the poor will have no assholes."
  -- an unknown but astute source