I understand the environmental and health risks of building tech. Just as I am aware of the same issues surrounding automobiles and just about everything else that goes into modern living. However, I do not have any sort of twinge of conscience when buying. Why? Because I am much more concerned about other social ills such as genocide, wars, starvation, and slave trade.

While I would like to focus energy on cleaning up tech, there are much bigger concerns that we really should be addressing first.

The HP DV6T seems to fit your criteria and is about $1100 and has an option for a 160GB SSD drive. Most reviews seem to rate it high. They also seem to be rated well on Amazon.

I have a HP DM4T that I haven't had any problems with...

David

HP laptops are NOT junk. They are actually quite good. I have an HP (DM4T), my sister and my two nephews have HPs and we have not had any problems with them. As for support, support is always hit or miss in this age of cheap call centers. Then again, we have never had to use their support.

The only company that seems to offer decent support today is Apple. At the very least you can bring your computer into a local Genius Bar. But, you pay for that privilege through higher prices and a much smaller offering of apps and games.

Speak for yourself. The sweet spot for me has always been around $125. Of course, I learned long ago that finding the sweet spot, within a hard-drive category (i.e. 7200 RPM drives), is a matter of dividing the price by the amount of space and buying the drive that gives you the most bang for your buck. This works for memory as well.

Of course, my setup is not common as I run a RAID-5 array, plus spare, on my desktop system, so I can make use of cheap disks and add storage space as the "sweet spot" moves to larger capacities. I replace one disk at a time, letting the RAID-5 rebuild, eventually I have added space that I can either use to expand an existing partition or add a new partition.

Meant to say WAN non LAN for the last sentence...

It sounds like they are studying the effect of having intelligent nodes in a network that not just forwards a packet, but also performs error correction, has some basic path intelligence, and sends the packet out multiple interfaces. The end node then receives these hybrid packets from different directions, some coming faster, some later, developing a map with the most efficient path.

One could argue that this could be used, for example, in a mesh MPLS cloud when a path through a specific hop (i.e. office) may be more efficient, because of network conditions, than going straight to the end node. However, this would require each node to have enough bandwidth to support the added traffic, over and above the normal location traffic. Which means requiring a larger budget for bandwidth that is only used in certain degraded conditions.

Basically, it's a study of the Internet and, in my opinion, would have little application in a corporate LAN. The reason why I say this is because a Corporate LAN is more deterministic in path selection and is limited by cost.

I have a quad core i5 desktop and I rarely use it now except for home video encoding/decoding and editing and to stream media to my TV, and most of that is offloaded to the GPU. I use my PS3 and Wii for game playing. Even my relatively new HP DM4T (2010) laptop has been gathering dust lately. I've been spending most of my time, like most people, on my tablet, a HP Touchpad running CM9 android.

For personal use, CPUs simply do not matter any more, just battery life...

For corporate use, CPUs matter as we keep trying to pack more application servers on VM machines.

I'm in my 40's and just completed a Masters degree in IT Management from Brandeis University, I already had a Bachelors in both Business and Computer Science. The degree spanned two employers, both of which offered employee education reimbursement.

I guess you could say that I am now three degrees above zero... ; - )

A Masters degree is 10 courses and can be completed in 3 to 5 years when going part-time. For most Master's programs, if not all, you first need a Bachelors degree. Some educational institutions will recognize work experience as an equivalent.

It sounds like you have not completed a Bachelors degree. A Bachelors degree takes 120 credit hours or 30 per year over 4 years. It's a lot of work and time which is why most students go full time. Basically, you wouldn't be completed in time for it to help your career.

The first step to get a Masters degree, assuming you are working full time and are not a contractor, is to determine if your employer has an education reimbursement program, what their limits are per year, and what you need to do to apply. If they do, you next need to research the type of Masters degree you want and the schools. Narrow down the schools to your top 5 and begin calling their Admissions department to determine if you can use your work experience and what, if any, additional courses you will need to take. While doing this, talk to your manager and let him/her know that you are interested in advancing your career by taking a Masters degree. Go into how it will prepare you to take on a greater leadership role, in project management and as team lead. Once you have all of the information about the school, put it together in a package with your employer education application and begin the employer approval process. Once approved at work, you then need to apply to the school and get accepted. The rest is just a lot of hard work...

David

The reason why most drivers do poorly on distraction tests is because most drivers do not know how to drive in the first place, they just know how to point the car and make it go. In this case, "knowing how to drive" means knowing the capabilities of your car, how it handles in various weather, how to read the traffic in front of you, how and when to be aggressive vs defensive, etc. On top of that is learning how to do stuff without taking your eyes off the road.

The solution to most distracted driving is to implement hands-free features such as bluetooth, voice control, collision sensors, backup cameras, etc. The problem is that these features add to the cost of a car and, as such, are slow to filter down to the more basic models.

However, distracted driving has always been with us in one form or another (i.e. make-up, cute girls, spilled coffee, dogs, etc...). No matter what you do, there will always be that one idiot who does something stupid while driving.... There is no way to legislate away stupidity...

If you have a Ritz or Wolf Camera nearby, I find that their prints are high quality. I used to take my film to them for processing and still use them for digital prints. They are more expensive than most, but if you print in bulk (100+) the price drops to be comparable to the other services. I share most of my photos online now, so I only print when I am updating my photo books, maybe once or twice a year. I have never had any of their prints fade and they have always reprinted bad prints, no questions asked.

One thing to keep in mind is the equipment that the photo shop uses. If they use Kodak equipment, your photos will turn out on the warmer side (oranges and reds have a little more contrast) whereas Fujifilm equipment tends to be on the cooler side (blues and greens have more contrast). My local Ritz uses Kodak equipment and produces warmer photos, which I prefer.

I've tried the local Walmart and Pharmacies, but the quality just isn't there. I just joined Costco, so I haven't had a chance to try their services.

You can find a roundup of photo services here: http://digital-photo-printing-review.toptenreviews.com/