See, government contracting works like this. You create a company, hire some folk to work on a contract. Whatever their salary is, you charge the government +50% or more, so essentially the government is not only flat out paying your salary but also the company for your services. If the contract ends, so does your job as the company may not want to charge overhead. In contrast to other business sectors, employment typically isn't grounded so harshly on the existence of a contract, which is where cost of business and business management can keep workers afloat even during down times (think department store).

I do a lot of business with both the federal gov't and private sector businesses on IT projects. You've over-simplified things to the point of painting an inaccurate picture. Federal contracting is extremely complex and there are myriad types of contracts that can be awarded, each with different terms. It sounds like what you're describing is a labor-hour contract. The contractor bills the gov't for the "fully burdened cost" of putting a warm butt in a seat. This includes the worker's salary, overhead, G&A (general & administrative), and profit. All together, it's typically a lot more than a 50% markup of the staff's straight salary.

Unlike most private sector contracts, when doing a fully burdened labor hour contract with the feds, the contractor will spell out exactly what their profit margin is. Generally this is only 6-10%, which is considerably lower than the private sector. Despite what everyone thinks, doing business with the gov't isn't all that lucrative. It's an extremely competitive market in which the bottom-line cost is almost always the most important factor. Contracting officers are even prohibited by law to give preferential treatment to companies that have previously done a great job.

I can't really comment on forced furloughs, because I'm not familiar with how Northrup operates. But just because they do "government contracts" doesn't necessarily mean they can afford to keep highly-skilled staff on the payroll until they find a new project for them. Federal contracts can really help with sales revenue because they can be large awards and the government *always* pays. However, the trade off is all the red tape (which increases G&A costs) and the low profit margins. Next time you hear about Company X getting a $10M contract, don't just roll your eyes. Get a hold of their proposal and the contract and see what their actual profit is on the contract. Both documents are public property and available upon request from the federal contracting officer that made the award. (Defense related contracts might need to be pried from gov't with a FOIA request though)

Python and Ruby are in no way similar, other than the fact that they're both open-source OOP languages. They have completely opposing design philosophies: Python's "one right way to do it" vs. Ruby's "give the developer enough rope to hang himself."

No. The start of the "Tea Party" occurred during the grassroots movement to get Ron Paul the '08 Republican nomination for president. It grew out of the series of "money bombs" that were organized for his campaign. Fox News then hijacked the concept after the election because it was an existing vehicle of disaffected voters. Nowadays, the "Tea Party" has no coherent platform, it's just a bunch of soundbites used to whip the throng of useful idiots into a froth. And it has no actual leadership because everyone is too busy knifing each other in the back, trying to make themselves relevant in the current power vacuum of the Republican party.

So you take them to small claims court, where in many jurisdictions lawyers are not permitted. Motorola will have to send a corporate officer to represent the company. A much more likely outcome is that they'll settle with you prior to the hearing. All it takes is a few people to do this, and then blog about it and/or post info on social networking sites. Suddenly, Motorola is facing hundreds of small claims suits. They're still likely to settle them all out of court for the cost of the phone, but perhaps the next time they make a phone someone in the initial design meeting says "Ya know, the fuse function really seemed to piss off a lot of people, people who are now likely buying phones from our competitors. Maybe we shouldn't take that route again."

+5 Insightful? The world does not exist in black and white. You know those chip fabs that Intel and AMD uses to make the processor in your computer? They typically cost anywhere from $1-4 billion dollars to build. Some things simply cannot be accomplished by small businesses and require the resources of large corporations.

You can set a daily spend limit, but the ads aren't prepaid. Google charges your credit card at the end of the month.

Ultima reference?

I just wanted to add my two cents... A month or so ago, I filed my first FOIA request. I requested some non-sensitive statistical data from an office associated with the Dept of Defense. Despite the banality of the data I was requesting, because it was related to the military and the shear volume of it (over 10M records), I was expecting some foot dragging. However, I was very pleasantly surprised. The very next day, the FOIA officer emailed me and then followed up with a phone call. She kept me apprised of the status of my request and about three weeks later, the data was FTPed to me. She even found someone to answer some questions I had about the formatting of the files.

I was fully expecting a more adversarial process considering the reputations of FOIA requests. But I learned that FOIA officers seem to care a great deal about facilitating requests. Just wanted to give kudos here where some is due.

I believe everyone here is talking about prescription drugs, not vitamins or OTC meds.

I once wrote a post on my blog that got frontpaged on /. and I had zero problems coping with the traffic. This was using Wordpress with the WP-Cache plugin on a modestly-powered server in a datacenter. I'm not really sure why so many people have issues (unless they aren't running WP-Cache, of course).

You should look into Stardock. They're an independent studio/publisher based in Michigan that have some pretty top-notch games. They're also widely known to have a very pro-gamer stance on DRM.