That's not radiation, that's because cheap CRTs tubes oscillate at 60 hertz and if you're not deaf in the upper frequencies you can hear them whine. Basically it's noise from the flyback transformer in the CRT. Many children can hear them but people often lose those frequencies as they get older.

I can still hear when a cheap CRT is on but I don't claim to be allergic to wifi.

See http://www.pcguide.com/ts/x/comp/crt/failWhine-c.html for some more info.

While you're right there's a computing power issue here, the issue is battery life not lack of CPU cycles. VMs add overhead, as you add overhead you'll run longer and burn more power on the CPU. If you want to squeeze all you can out of a limited battery you need to optimize your code and in the end that's going to mean native code with very explicit memory management. VMs just don't play well in embedded environments.

I'm pretty sure the real goal is to force you to choose one or the other. In the long term I think they plan to drop or spin off the DVD business and become a 100% streaming company. I think they're hoping that everyone just decides that having both is too much money and choose to just stream. If everyone would just switch to the DVD only plan they'd probably rethink this strategy.

What annoys me is that they don't have a 3 DVD out at a time plan without streaming. My ages old plan is getting a massive rate hike come Sept. They still have too much DVD only content for me to really think that their rate hike is justified.

The money they took is also available to telco's. The telco's are just pissed they didn't get the money first. As it is private industry already operates with millions of dollars worth of our tax money.

Apple's already across the street, I doubt traffic would get too much worse since this place is right next to the freeway. Though at the moment Apple is spread out all over that area and now they'd be concentrating all those people into a couple blocks. Luckily I don't need to drive past Homestead and Wolfe all that often :D.

These have nothing to do with virtual machines. These emulators are more like giant FPGAs than SW devices. Only instead of being implemented out of look up tables the system has a bunch of custom ASIC processors which accelerate gate level Verilog code.

Move to CA they're illegal here already and most companies won't event attempt to make you sign one.

I asked if they would alter the agreement to strike the non-compete terms but he said they wouldn't do that. I know better than to accept some verbal assurance from a recruiter vs what the contract says. That's like believing that guy at BestBuy that your extended warranty covers the battery in an iPod (it won't). While at the time I didn't think I would have left MS very soon I was afraid that if I was a good performer that they'd be even more likely to try and enforce such a non-compete. I'm sure they let it slide if you suck at your job.

The trick here is that he got sued in WA court. I've heard of some companies trying to take the action up in CA first on such contract since CA courts would side with the employee as such terms are considered unconscionable in CA.

I've seen it both ways, but more often than not it doesn't include pay such as in the case of Microsoft. Their draconian anti-employee contract is a major reason I don't work there today.

I had an offer to work at Microsoft just out of college. I was seriously considering the offer until I saw the draconian anti-employee non-compete they wanted me to sign. I told the recruiter that I didn't feel comfortable signing such an agreement since Microsoft works in so many different areas that there was no way to avoid some sort of conflict. I was assured by the recruiter that they don't usually enforce the agreement. Maybe that is generally true, but this ruling definitely proves that they will enforce it on occasion. Instead I ended up with a different company in CA where such draconian non-competes are illegal and most companies don't even attempt to get you to sign one.

I should also add that not all non-competes have to be as evil as Microsoft's. One company I had an offer for had a similar non-compete but it had a clause that if they decide to enforce it as long as it's in force and you're looking for other gainful employment they would continue to pay you your salary until the non-compete expired. I felt that this policy was more than fair since it allowed the company to decide how important enforcing the non-compete was and didn't have such negative consequences for you as an employee should they choose to enforce it. I personally feel all non-competes should include such a clause otherwise I would NEVER consider signing one.