spun skoke: I mean, seriously, who gives a fuck if it is or isn't the best country ever? How does that impact you? If it is a suck-ass country, does that make you a suck-ass person? If it is an awesome country, does that mean you are awesome? How immature, who bases their self esteem on what they think of their country?
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I will try and be brief on this reply. I was stationed over in Germany in the early 70's. I was lucky enough to live off base. My landlord was a elderly German lady, who when we first met she found out I was from Chicago. She was SCARED!!! She thought I was a member of Al Capone's gang and would go around pretending to shoot a machine gun. No matter how nice I was to her she was sure I was a gangster and made sure that somebody was around when I was there. I could not have a pleasent conversation with her as she was always bringing up Al Capone. I was just trying to be friendly and brought her some biscuits or cookies from time to time and be friendly. I was getting discharged and was she happy that I was leaving. She was a sweet old lady and I hated the fact that her idea of all chicagoans belonged to Al Capones gang. Ever since I have been
less than eager to watch the Untouchables or any other gangster type shows as I know it eventually gets to the other countries of the world and people percieve some Americans are gangsters.

Trying to hold up the south's use of slavery is well known *AND* should be fogotten as much as possible. If you had suggested this after say 40 years say 1900 you might get a valid discussion. 150 years is just way out of the question as by now records have been destroyed and I am pretty sure that all slaves have died. That would mean trying to figure out 2nd 3rd and possibly more generations so how could you possibly compensate them? I submit it would be impossible. Unless you are suggesting to give money to every black person in the US for compensation. Then you have the same problem "who" and how much.

Hands down (in the US) is FEDEX. I have at least 3-4 packages delivered weekly to my home. FEDEX has never delivered anything broken or mishandled. UPS & USPS are down on the later USPS is the worst and the slowest. Example (UPS) I order memory or whatever from a dealer in the suburbs and it is here the next day (without special handling). With the USPS first class envelope takes 3-4 days to get here from the suburbs.
I will only mention FEDEX in this context. I ordered an IPAD and I tracked the shipment and it went 4 or 5 places in SE Asia before it hit the US and then one bounce it came.
FEDEX is pretty good in the US. I had a computer monitor sent to me from CA and it arived the next day again no next day service was requested. The damn thing weighed 70 pounds.

I agree with you generally however I can just see it now. Say a Terrorist lets the people know that he is going to bomb say somewhere in Chicago. Then instead of Chicago it hits a suburb right outside of Chicago. Then we will have people suing the government for giving out wrong information. I do not agree but that is how the legal system works. The people in Evanston will say why didn't you warn the suburbs? Its a no win as if you say midwest then it becomes meaningless warnings. I do not know if there is a solid way of warning people. Plus the terrorist might aim for say the John Hancock building and hit the Tribune building. Or if the weapon is defective it could hit the Chicago Sanitation site.
So even if you have the "correct information" you could mislead the public then you will have finger pointing. It's not the same as the A******* TSA people groping peoples bodies for the fun of it.

Two comedians brought in to the forefront like this:

Conan O’Brien joked, “Champagne-fuchsia means we’re being attacked by Martha Stewart.”

Jay Leno said, “They added a plaid in case we were ever attacked by Scotland.”

IBM has work in several areas about write protection, so it is not clear which one you are refering to.

The ones I am familiar with depend on a hardware feature that I am not sure that INTEL has. In fact (from a iffy memory) almost all IBM's write protection methods depend in hardware and software feature that I am sure INTEL does not have. So if you are talking software I am guessing its not the same. The hardware has to be there before the software can take advantage of it. So without seeing your code I doubt that it is the same. The differences between IBM's hardware archetecture and INTEL's is dramatic (from what I have been told since its difficult to to find out exactly how INTEL's arcitecture really works. IBM publisizes their in several books (free to everyone) but just knowing how the instructions work does not help you have to get into design of the OS. IBM also publishes most of that (exceptions do exist).

I seem to recall a paper (sorry no citation) that stated anything above 75 "cores" runs into issues about performance due to storage serialization and the amount of time it takes to serialize internal instruction buffers. The paper was done by a well respected author and has not (to the best of my knowledge been proven wrong).

That does sound intriguing, how ever hindsight is never 20/20.
People do not always record things honestly and interviews (or biographies) are far from perfect. Also, the way journalists are today you can not really trust them to tell the truth.

Prime Example: Fox News.

Now I know you just about to say well we know that, but what about 50 years from now when all that left of them is electrons floating around the future Internet (what ever that might be).

I think its a fair assumption that in reality those awards would be much the same as it is today. It would be fact checking with no live person to remember what really happened as minds do forget things.

I am suggesting that any future awards will be more flawed than todays awards.

Really? REALLY? Just because it happens and people can get away with it doesn't mean it's legal.

Well the problem is that when you go into arbitration it *IS* a joke. The company gets to pick the people on the panel *AND* the panel knows if they return a favorable ruling to the company, the company can (and does) hire former arbitrators because they gave a favorable ruling.

That is a stacked deck against the employee.

Yet it is legal.

Just goes to show that having money means you could be as dumb as Sarah Palin.

Better not let the Tea Party hear you say that they might become upset and threaten to have you tea bagged or Joe Miller'd (take your pick).

No, I thought it was called Arthur Anderson.

Well Apple will not be getting anymore money from this person.
I will not buy into the INTEL crap.
The IPAD was a waste of money and a big zero for usuability from me.

Does that mean we have to ban the girl scouts from our streets? Or have they developed anti virus for the cookies?

I can name at least one (US/Dutch) bank that moved their Data Center to India, that cost over 500 jobs in the US alone, most of which have still not found work and that was 3 years ago.

I also have a friend that works for a major consulting company and he is traveling to/from INDIA most of the time. He is a full partner and his full time job is outsourcing IT companies to India and he is making mega bucks from the outsourcing deals. He looked at a major brokerage house in NYC but that did not go as planned.

On this specific instance Obama just does not know what he is talking about. People are loosing their jobs and they just cannot find other jobs in the IT industry. One guy dropped out and went to work for Obama's election. I have not had the nerve to ask him what he thinks of Obama's stance, now.