The first thing you need to do - is work out what you want to do.

Then you can start getting your skills together - and plans.

However in saying that, networking is always important, regardless if you want to start a business, or get into the higher rungs of management - no body is going to want your skills and services if they don't know about them.

If you want to start your own business, remember there is things like start up cash (you'll be running at a lose for a while - even a year or two if you don't have clients to start with), you'll need to be able to market your business to the right people

Are you going SaaS?
Are you creating software to sell in volume, or are you going to do custom work for every client?
Have chosen a vertical industry to go into?

Well,

At the end of the day, they'll more then likely earn commissions on referring people to the sites to get the "legal" version of the items, so it's in their interest to get this done and fast, it'll mean more profits for them in the long run.

In the end, it'll mean their earnings per customer will go up

Hope they don't try to enforce this here in Australia.

The Setup of the Apple store is the general way mobile phone stores have been setup here for several years. Colors and textures might be different - however the layout and form (of the tables / displays) of the stores are pretty much identical.

I am still amazed some of the patents are handed out in the USA.

First, I'm Australian and not American, However i know how wrong this is.

He Stole:- Well no he didn't. If anything it was IP Infringement - and because of the way a law was made in 1984 it means it was a felony and he was going to spend 5+ years in Jail For. The DOJ took the case over from the state. The State was going to let him go with a warning, the DOJ took the case, and started stacking up the charges - 9 of them the i read - which was going to be 25+ years in jail.

Lets make this clear - if he *STOLE* a hard drive with the files on it, it would of been a slap on the wrist.
The law basically means if you break the T&C of a website or service, it's a federal crime which is what happened here.

He tried to do a plea bargain - but the DOJ said you have to plead guilty to all of them. He had a choice - fight and go bankrupt, then to jail. Plead guilty and goto jail, Or take his own life. He chose to take his own life.

Seriously, The People in the DOJ of the case should either be charged with some type of assisted suicide charges, or involuntary manslaughter.

If HP Issued the patches, and xerox pushed a fix, then who's fault is it really?

One of the biggest gripes about the patch release cycles is that they are slow. Companies like HP state this is for people to be able to do full testing etc to make sure nothing goes wrong. So the real question here is who didn't do their testing on the systems before the patches go live?

It's obvious there has been mistakes made, but blaming the wrong company/person never helps the situation. There are people who currently rely on the welfare payments to make ends meet, and ensuring this type of stuff doesn't happen is critical. Regardless if you agree or not to the payments themselves, while they are valid they need to make sure they are delivered on time and correctly.

Already Checked the store out.

If you run up and down george st (where it is located), you'll be amazing at how many of the tech stores look very similar in layout (esp all the mobile phone stores).

hell even some of the food stores (mainly cupcake!) are using similar layouts now as well.

Well it probably wasn't their Fault. A few accounts hackers have admitted to hacking fan sites and getting usernames and passwords from there, and trying them against battle.net, quite a few people use the same logon details.. and account hacked. Not Defending them what has happened (according to this article), But alot of people are blaming blizzard for hacked accounts that had nothing to do with Blizzard. They have really F'd up big time with D3, but account hacking issues up to now haven't been because of them.

even better. Australian DVD's - which are region locked to prevent us from using oversea's ones (ie paying less then 1/2 what they charge here) still have FBI warnings on them, they can't even bother to put the Australian warnings on them these days!

Your Forgetting that the standing government is going to lose the next election, hell they might not even get to the end of their term. When a government is in this position they'll pass a lot of legislation that will be bad, look at previous governments in this country that knew they where going to lose - like nsw labour selling off the power companies etc...

and therefore violating terms of service and corporate use policies is not a federal crime.

If it was a Federal Crime, Basically what it would lead to, is private entities been able to send people to jail for breaking rules not set by the government (ie laws...). If this does start to happen, then the corporations have effectively directly taken over law making in this country, and could even possibly put in jail terms and penlites for breaking their tos's.

They are running a "Business". You try to maximize your profits. More infections means more money to them. Time Vs Effort. It'll wildly more profitable to go after large targets like windows (and even Mac OSX these days), instead of things like BSD and Linux. They are Already up to 70k Accounts according to the summary, do you even think that there is that many people using Facebook from a linux system?

The Real Problem is, it can't be cheap, as if the wind stops, something has to generate the the power like gas turbines, which are expensive. We need some form of baseline renewable energy. Until we get that every solution we come up with is going to be expensive due to having to have to supplement the power when the primary energy driver stops (ie wind/solar/waves/etc).

So you can bypass them now for a payment. If anything doesn't justify removing them completely? as you can bypass their soul purpose for a little bit of cash. If the "bad guys" can afford plan tickets, i'm quite sure they won't worry about an extra $100, even more so if they don't expect to land...

While i Agree with you, However regardless if you use akismet, or keep it up to date, if your site has any decent SE rankings, you are going to get hit big time by comment spam, and search engines. The more content you have the more you are going to get. From 7 Wordpress sites, in the last 24 hours i have received over 400 blog comments (including ones automaticlly marked as spam). It's pretty bad, and getting worse.

If you run wordpress for your site... It's more like 50% Bots (search engines), 40% Comment Spam, and 8% Content Scanners and 2% Visitors....