Actually, the Wii can be softmodded to play burned games or games off a hard drive.

I don't really think this is a concern. AES, for example, was vetted by a lot of very smart independent mathematicians and cryptologists who didn't find a secret back door. And brute-forcing it is impractical even if they have computers 10 Moore's law jumps ahead of ours. You should be much more concerned about being forced to give up your key.

Oh wow, that does sound bad. Sorry you had such a bad time there.

MBA interns are likely program managers - these are the people in Microsoft who go and talk to the client, figure out requirements, and write them up for the developers. It's not really a technical job, although these people do have to at least ave a concept of what is possible within the system. I would also remind you that Microsoft has a business division.

Because Microsoft relies very heavily on finding and keeping good people. Finding a highly-qualified college kid and having him intern for the summer is expensive, why throw that all away by treating him badly and making him not want to come back?

Hey, you sound pretty much like me. I worked on AX in Fargo, and despite going way above and beyond my commitments, I was not extended an offer because my boss felt I "didn't have a passion for business". I did have a good time interning and was paid very well, including the low end of the salary described in the article, a relocation bonus, and the free Xbox.

See this: i4i has been around for a while. They made custom XML document editing stuff for Word 97 and 2000, and when Microsoft added this functionality to 2003 and 2007 their business model went away.

No. i4i has been around for a while. They developed tools to edit custom XML documents for Word 97 and 2000, and our now suing because the XML editing in Word 2003 and 2007 has pretty much destroyed their business.

I'm afraid it's too late for that. Look at the bank and auto bailouts.

Mod_rewrite will do that - it would be pretty similar to this.

Productive in this sense means "produces more for society than they cost", which is not the case for someone who doesn't work and has huge medical bills.

They sound like a net negative to society then. Why should the productive people support them?

The problem is that people can opt out right now: if you are a young, healthy, nonsmoker, it's probably a better deal for you to skip the health insurance and just have a decent emergency savings account. If you move this to taxing everybody, then the person who is always healthy and never seeks medical care is supporting the hypochondriac who goes to the emergency room every month.

Actually, it raises the question.

Crack one open, die of mercury poisoning.