Slightly off the point from this, but related: QoS mechanisms will probably just default encrypted traffic to a lower service class. That's the quick and easy way to handle it.

I believe what you mean to say is "atheism is the only religion you can have if you want to claim to be an expert in science. That's both ignorant and naive.

Let's face it- "green" is a buzzword that forces far too many people to act irrationally and think extremely myopically.

This is a very cool idea, but the stakes are a bit higher. I'd think there's going to be significant push-back getting used to the idea of drugs coming from a bunch of guys in their garages. It's sort of like if open source software started designing software for nuclear power plants.

Then again, maybe people are just so sick of drug prices...

"Critics say the carriers will simply pass these fees through to consumers."

What we have here is a stealth tax. There is absolutely no way these costs will not be born by the consumer. This is the nature of business. If your costs rise, you need more revenue to cover them. Revenue does not come from fairies but from customers. In this way, Obama gains credibility only from those who want to stick it to the "big companies" and don't think deep enough to realize where this money actually has to come from. *sarcastically* Thank you President Obama for increasing my contribution to the federal budget. I was looking for another way to funnel you my money.

Profit? That's funny. There should be a massive loss here on account of the horrible flop of Vista. Taxing XP loyalty (I use loyalty loosely) makes the loss less horrible. If Microsoft wasn't a giant, it would get thrown out of the market for making customers pay for its mistake. As it stands though, we have no choice.

So you're basically paying full price to rent a digital song from MS. The term is determined by how long MS wants to stick with a given technology and the bonus is that the music you're renting isn't even CD quality. I believe I've already gotten screwed over by MS DRM on some of my older music. never again.

This only takes into consideration one of the potential pitfalls in rolling out OO.o. If training were the only problem, it would be

pretty easy to justify I think since the new Office is so different from previous versions. It would almost be a logical point to switch from Office.

However, another issue that can't be overlooked is the compatibility with existing files. There are kinks to how OO.o presents files in the Office formats. The ease of switching may depend largely on how many existing documents you have and the complexity of their formatting. I think I would identify this as the primary issue given that training will need to happen with the new Office or OO.o.

I don't think visually appealing documents can so easily be dismissed, especially in marketing and sales as you mention. The world we live in is obsessed with visual/multimedia stimuli and to not utilize these tools would result in an almost certain loss of effectiveness.

I do, however, agree that the vast majority of people spend far too much time on these appearance things. I would also say that the majority of people overrate themselves in their talents in this area.

Here's a thought: cut government expenditures.

Why is the solution always "let's get creative and find a new way to extract money from our citizens?" Much more useful would be a someone who has enough real world experience to know what to cut and enough balls to do it even though 0.0001% of the population whines (they will anyway- they're victims of anything they can think of). Where are the real leaders who can actually help our economic situation?

Those Chipmakers should pay attention to IEEE's opinion. Dealing with memory is a significant problem for processors as the number of cores increase. That sounds like a hardware problem to me.

Shoving responsibility from software to hardware or from hardware to software isn't going to solve anything. There's things that have to happen on both sides before we can go nuts with the number of cores we put on chips.