There seem to be some problems with the cooling paste installed on a lot of cards as well, causing them to overheat and ramp themselves down.

WW2 started in 1939 in europe, but I think you've got the right idea.

Was there some significant event, not necessarily in 2003 but some number of years earlier that effected everyone but the netherlands, denmark and the UK, could they have the same effect but mask it with different immigration policies? Denmark and the netherlands were both occupied by germany, the UK was bombed, but the netherlands and denmark should not be much worse off than France, belgium, or Norway for example.

In 2002 the euro came into being - well that would explain 12 countries but not all of them if it had a one year lag effect.

But there's a lot of years there that could point to some systematic problem. Maybe windows XP and the proliferation of wide speed internet made people more sedentary and the economic crisis in 2009 had them all out protesting (exercise!) but then the protesting stopped, and this is actually a by product of the internet. It gets worse as more people get better internet and run around less.

Maybe we've got a change in smoking or health rules or counting procedures or immigration laws that completely messes with things.

I'm not by the way discounting a 'something to do with WW2' effect, (or WW1 for that matter), but there needs to be something different about the countries in question. The collection of possibilities is quite large.

Post docs are holding positions until you get a faculty position. If you need/want to build a better research history because your PhD resulted in publication delays or issues (mine is facing issues with being able to publish when I'd like because it's a collaboration, so my publication list with the PhD is shorter than normal and a post doc would be a chance to publish the stuff from my PhD that was delayed and do some more).

But in many cases computer scientists don't need to do post docs, nor do engineers. You can get an entry level faculty position at a smaller school. If you're in physics though, you're not getting a faculty unless you've done a couple of years as a post doc because everyone else has done a post doc.

Where I am graduates about 15-20 PhD's a year, about 1-2 a year will do a post doc, the remainder end up splitting between industry-academia about 75%-25% ish, but that's comp sci. The physics programme (program, take your pick), is about 70/30 academia/industry basically all the academia ones have to do post docs.

I did some cisco and microsoft certifications in highschool.... more than 15 years ago. Not for credit.

They were super useful in terms of getting summer jobs, and some practical IT experience so that even if you don't intend to be an IT guy you aren't completely clueless about how all of this shit works. It's not like universities do a great job of telling students what IT resources are available to them or how to use them. It's all well and good to have free access to piles of software (either to use or through academic licensing) but most of the time students, even CS or software engineering students, have no idea what any of the corporate stuff is or could do for them until after they've done their co-op and are ready to graduate.

Being able to go into a lab as a grad student, and know enough about IT to know what the hell ITS was even offering (if only to know vaguely what all these things do) was hugely helpful. Most people have no idea at all, and knowing a bit about networking and hardware and various software options made a lot of difference throughout my years.

And be thrown in jail for violating sanctions rules. Brilliant.

Moving money between places that allow it is easy, moving money to places that don't allow it isn't challenging for the fun of it, it's hard because there are laws in place about moving money in and out of countries. If you're moving money out of somewhere that doesn't allow it, or money into somewhere under sanctions you're going to find yourself in a world of trouble.

The only saving grace is that a flight from LIsbon to Warsaw (which is about the extreme edge of a flight within the EU) is only 3.5 hours. Most of the time you're not going to be stuck listening to someone loudly talking in a language you don't speak for more than a couple of hours.

Where there is money to be made, there will be people willing to take the risk.

Especially when your 3 biggest competitors would suddenly be two companies long established in the console market (Sony and Nintendo), who both have significant revenue they can operate with, and your other competitor is the guy you just bought the division from - Microsoft, and Windows, who ultimately control most of the underlying technology you rely on.

Unless sony or Nintendo wanted to buy it no one with much sense would want to buy the Xbox division. I can't really see Sony or Nintendo wanting it other than to shut it down.

They blocked media hint a while ago.

I don't know for sure about the others, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's exactly what is coming.

of the people that use extensions at all? Probably most of them, as I would think the most popular extensions are things like youtube downloaders and netflix unblockers that let you use VPN services so you can access say UK netflix from the US, and US netflix from Australia.

mediahint, Hola, anything that lets you free VPN into services that you aren't really supposed to be able to access.

Yep.

I'm at a university and we do this all the time. IBM gave us 'millions' in software, that was a burned CD with some stuff on it (not my research group so I'm not really sure what exactly, but something related to distributed computing).

My group got a '4 million dollar' donation which was all of the source code for a project a small company had worked on for 10 years with 5 major versions.

Whatever that MSRP headline number was is what they could claim as a tax break. Didn't matter if it was absurdly unrelated to the actual value or not.

No, it's been around for a lot longer than that. The french even in the 18th century had a national science policy that was essentially what we're talking about here - things that directly benefit the country. The British had a more laissez faire approach to the whole thing with the Royal Society, and never really congealed a cohesive plan. Since the two regularly stole from each other for a couple of centuries it worked out OK. The british did a lot of fundamental science, the french did a lot of practical stuff, and they just copied each other where it was relevant.

Since the dissolution of the monasteries in 1536 there have been various efforts at funding science in the way we think of it through universities, I suppose arguably you could even go back to the 11th or 12th century in Italy for something similar, though that was much more limited in scope.

Government funding is a sort of odd concept. If you expect rich lords to subsidize the children of other rich lords (who sit in the house of lords) being educated at a government school is that government funding? Not exactly, but it's not really different either. The world has had had government support for industry and research for centuries, but different funding models are well, different. Tax breaks, making members of the government pay for it, making 'The Church' pay for etc. have all been going on for ages.

Because he's not a microsoft technology nerd.

Microsoft needs someone at the top who uses their products the way someone who isn't surrounded by microsofties every day does. So they can get their shit together on design. Windows 8 is an example of doing a great job executing a terrible idea. That has to stop. Now.

It also needs someone who recognizes there is a market beyond himself and can support that (this is where Steve jobs always struggled) - car guys get that. This car might not be for me, but there is a market for it.

It also needs someone with an internal employee evaluation system that is going to actually make supportive of co-workers and that rewards everyone doing great work when they do.

Ideally microsoft needs someone who can decide what direction to take the company - an open services and software company that supports a large collection of partners, or a device and services company that has no friends. And to decide which of those is best for shareholders they need someone from outside the microsoft bubble.

Mulally isn't necessarily the best pick - but of the list of known candidates from outside MS he's got a decent track record.

There is a bit.

We had a grad student get charged 3000 dollars in tuition (money she didn't have) because she submitted the final corrected version of her thesis wrong in the computer system (she created it as a new thesis rather than as an update to the existing submission), She didn't realize this problem for a full 40 minutes, and by that point it was 00:30 hours. She fought for a couple of weeks with the administration until finally the dean overheard her arguing with someone, asked for an explanation, shook his head, and magically the 3000 dollar fee disappeared. But she wasn't going to get her PhD until she paid the money otherwise.

A lady I started my Masters with had a supervisor who retired and moved to australia. She was told about 10 months in advance this was going to happen. But her project didn't get done, so... she had to start over with a new supervisor on a new project. (There is and was a whole lot of the university screwing her on that one).

The big difference I found is that in business, your first priority is business. If you're on a project and you get moved to something else because of an emergency no one expects you to have completely the first project at the same time. In academia, not so much, well, not as a grad student anyway.