Obviously this figure does not include the time wasted training that person on antiquated buttonology, which for most ERPs runs to weeks of lost productivity.

Of highly intelligent people, how many are in the upper 50th percentile for number of offspring? The distaste of smart people for large families is nothing new, nor is their ability to avoid or limit their number of dependents. Less intelligent people, though, have long tended to be poorer, less powerful, and more procreative.

is abstracted at http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/11/07/1207989109.abstract, with onward links to the fulltext and supporting info. It'd be interesting to see what Daniel J. Levitin ("This Is Your Brain On Music", etc.) at McGill has to say about the paper.

Is this theft? Censorship? Virtual bookburning? We need a catchy name to get the media interested.

... how did the turkey get hired in the first place? Fix the QC process in HR if it was a mistake. OTOH, if a good hire went bad, what did his boss(es) do wrong that sent him wrong?

After we spent years wondering why Vista was such a POS, now we find out Redmond was stoned out of their redwoods.

Yeah, and just where's the added value for the publisher in a product that consumers refuse to buy? Just say no to locked content. Most of it is mass-market crap not worth having anyhow.

Well, "RISC I" was the first VLSI RISC processor, as described in:
D. A. Patterson and C. H. Sequin, "RISC I: A reduced instruction set VLSI computer," in Proc. 8th Annu. Symp. Comput. Architecture, Minneapolis, MN, May 1981, pp. 443-457.
The architectural principle is generally credited to John Cocke, on the IBM 801 minicomputer, though others published first. Some (like me) might argue it goes back to Seymour Cray's designs at Control Data for the CDC6600 PPU but those definitely did not have a minimal instruction set, just a small one with a 6-bit opcode field.

So we have meters that can remotely command thermostat set-back, and others that can romotely disconnect power entirely. If any of these have security problems on the command side, they've essentially opened the door to crooks (or cops) cutting off your power, likely with no evidence trail created. If they shut it off and nobody opens a curtain it's a pretty safe bet that there's nobody home.

Just get the manufacturers the hell out of the retail business. Let the retailers sell whatever brands they want. Without the perverse incentive of proprietary dealerships running repair shops, the makers might have a reason to start building products that aren't designed to maximize repair cost. It's been a scam for decades, and it has to be fixed at a fundamental level.

Of course, the law market^H^H^H^H^H^Hcourts should also be able to assign damages for those affected by any failure to perform in accordance with the service contract ...

There are several existing solutions for this problem. The better specialized postapocalyptech for earthmoving is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ox but for more general usage the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse design is widely preferred. If in doubt, consult the Whole Earth Catalog.

... those rebuilt areas won't have (relatively) inexpensive single-family homes again. Non-millionaires need not apply.

... a few of the more important threats, such as Vogon poetry readings, not to mention the associated demolition "to make room for a hyperspace bypass".