And I'll follow it up with why businesses don't upgrade... 7 was released less than 4 years ago. Big businesses keep a PC for 4 years. Now a system built 3 years ago may not be compliant with everything on Windows 7. For lower support costs systems should be mostly interchangeable. It is a problem to have half your users on one OS and half on another. The safer bet is to run Windows XP for another 2 years while PCs that are non-7 compliant get phased out, then introduce 7 on all PCs.

I held back because XP worked great. I knew how to use it, used it for years, the graphics were decent, the software worked with no problem, there was tons of software that worked well. Also, I did have an older system, and support under Win 7 for the older components were an issue. I knew it would mean replacing my cam. A huge stumbling block was dealing with all my files. My hard drive was nearly full. Despite having a backup drive, there are still logistics, making sure firefox is backed up, do I have passwords for all my other programs like Skype... nothing was a huge deal breaker, but everything together just outweighed the benefits and by a lot.

Finally I found my games just weren't working well. I had made some hardware upgrades that would allow me to take advantage of Win 7 features. I had a few reinstalls to do that kind of pushed me over the edge. Might as well do the whole thing right then.

Now that I have it, 7 is great. I worried about it taking up more resources, but it uses them so much better it feels like my system runs much better with the new OS than with XP. But for home users there are a lot of reasons to hold out if you already have a decent enough system.

HP Touchpad. You enter a code in the search bar and you have developers mode. Mess with it as hard as you want. WebOS doctor puts everything back the way it was. Screen is bigger than what you are looking for though.

They are citizen surveillance cameras. They are used for domestic intelligence. That is only bad if you consider that your government spying on you, keeping tabs on you in secret, and holding records to be later used as evidence for what they might find later... to be a bad thing.

I love how the article quotes that they knew there would be other "side uses" but also the guy states that of course the "side uses" would be more common. I'm not sure that Mr. Browne has a strong grasp of the English language.

Maybe the parents feel they need to go on the offensive to avoid problems, but I'd be seriously grateful to get out of it without getting sued for slander. I work at a school and I've always worried about this. Even completely baseless, those kind of accusations can ruin someone. I'd be beating my kid over that kind of stupid behavior. Of course, if the parents cared enough to raise their kids right it wouldn't have happened in the first place.

It's hard to believe this still happens. Teachers are outraged when students look-up info rather than memorize it. For the last 25 years I've been looking up information on the computer, whether compuserve, qlink, aol, irc, ftp, or www. The last 10 years has been trivial to find anything. When teachers prioritize memorization of facts for 8 hours a day when those details could be quickly found in 30 seconds on the student's cell phone, then the student is rightfully insulted. They don't value it, because it truly isn't that valuable to memorize a large quantity of trivial facts. I'm not saying that there's no place for memorization and learning by rote, but that should be a smaller piece of the puzzle, not the biggest. Multiple choice tests are easy to cheat because they are simple. That's not good teaching or good assessing.

Exactly so. RIAA doesn't act to stop piracy. It acts to preserve their distribution model. Regardless of ethics, it campaigns politically and files suit, in order to destroy other distribution models.

I feel ya. I was marked down on my evaluation this year because I was too important. They marked me down on dependability because whenever I had a sick day, the company had no back up plan in place, and they have me in charge of about 5 or 6 critical jobs each day. Honestly, there's only time for about 3 of them, so they are all half-assed. But compared to everyone else they think I'm the messiah when I can switch the blown circuit breaker. I'm clever, but it's honestly about 50% just having experience at the job.

I keep telling myself I'm going to walk out one day and let them hire me back for double. Waiting to have anything else lined up. It's that other side, we're lucky to have jobs, but they are damn lucky to have someone who knows what they are doing. Based on what my colleagues are doing at the other job sites I figure I'm saving them about $10,000/year on the conservative side.

Absolutely. Look at the people who create OSS. Look at the people creating fanfiction for free. Given a society that allows for plenty of food and entertainment for cheap or free, people have free time on their hands. They create content for nothing other than the recognition. Most people love to have their work copied, as long as credit is given.

Now, I won't say that people love to have their work monetized and used for profit without getting something back. But that is a very different scenario than coming up with the perfect desktop theme and posting it to some website where everyone can see that you're #1 with 100,000 downloads. When we have replicators that allow us to copy, with no cost to the designer, we'll be doing to cars what we do to videos. Creating, sharing, downloading, modifying. And that will be a glorious day.

Using Slashdot over the years, this has been a recurring theme whenever technology and healthcare come up. Doctors don't know the side effects, prescribe whatever the free sample is that week, and cause medical problems by mis-prescribing medicine with serious side-effects or bad interactions with other meds.

Numerous anecdotal stories tell of lives saved by patients doing their own research. I doubt doctors like it, but we really need to be doing our own research and not completely trusting our doctors. Example after example on here indicate a smart guy with no medical training can pick out better meds than their doctor.