could transform the humble Icelander into a legal superman, virtually untouchable abroad for comments written

It's a word! It's a claim! No, it's FreeSpeechMan!

Whatever will we do when Iceland is overrun with people with the power to say whatever they want?

Freedom Of Speech -- It's Scary!

He's on crack. By and large the discrete math will serve you better because it's the sort of thinking that is essential to programming algorithms.

That being said, if you intend to pursue work in graphics, or writing physics simulations or engineering software, the vectors/euclidean/differentials will be a big help. But that's really only for those cases. None of that is at all useful to the average developer.

Discrete math, logical conclusion, sets, graphs, and (duh) algorithms are a must though.

FWIW, before being a CS major I took a humanities philosophy class called Intro to Logic. After being a CS major I was required to take Discrete Math. I aced the latter because it was exactly what I'd learned in the former, with different notation and namespace.

the wildly successful Network Computer.

some basic R&D into why conservatives hold on to the mantra that the free market cures all ills

Uh, because it makes the rich richer.

I'm not so sure stone tablets are really the superior medium. Without knowing how many stone tablets were actually ever created compared to how many still exist it's hard to run the numbers.

Stone survives fire and water fairly well, but is vulnerable to vibration and shock compared to paper.

Meanwhile, one well-heeled corporation church has their own suggestions on making data last forever.

where the hell SCO is getting the money from to pay for a decade of litigation. How has SCO managed to survive two recessions and continue to base a business model solely around endless litigation? Dear SCO: I have a great idea for a futile court case, who is your angel investor? PS: Your money would have been better spent hiring engineers and developing new products.

skyrocketing healthcare and insurance costs plus economic contraction has led to less people with health insurance year over year this decade.

Correlation may not be causality, but you tell me if you think having health insurance affects your longevity. Some think so.

Copper wire is an outdated technology by at least 20-30 years and yet the telcos have not upgraded infrastructure. The public has said fuck it realizing that wireless offers greater mobility and there's rarely any point in having two phones.

In the foreseeable future, wireless Internet (via either IMT-* or 802.* methods) will make DSL obsolete as well, and the only reason for the telcos to continue to exist will be to maintain the lines

IFO keep a landline b/c it offers unlimited call minutes including long distance at all hours to an entire 4-person household at a price much less than equipping the whole household with cell phones and a comparable level of service. Not everyone is as cheap as me.

The only fear I have of people ditching the landline system is that, ultimately, right now, all our current wireless services interconnect through it. Your cell phone call ultimately feeds into a landline trunk. If that system gets neglected, your wireless service will degrade despite your belief that you are "wireless". I suppose eventually those systems will move off landline dependency, but knowing US wireless upgrade speed, it'll be slow and painful.

(And then we'll all get cancer from the massive amount of RF floating around everywhere, but that's not important.)

Seems like an increasing number of places are naming workstations after the employees whose desk they are on. This not only helps IT identify where they are, but also identify what box your coworker is talking about when he says "I've got it up and running on my machine."

Others simply give them a brief categorization a serial number, like LAP345 or WKS456.

One place I worked years ago that made digital reference books named their workstations after sequential words out of one of its dictionary products. This was a little strange as pretty much every workstation name started with A.

A few years ago there was a Korean operation in my town that was basically a big LAN farm (ok, they had a couple DDR machines too). It didn't seem to catch on (and we were fish out of water as we weren't Korean), though a new one has opened up.

North of the border they have a number of Asian arcades that are both full of those sit-down arcade boxes (all of which seem to play a Mechwarrior sort of game), and desktop gaming farms.

Despite the (young, childless) American geek's love of LAN parties, and the popularity of the PAX PC Gaming room, the commercial, always-on LAN Party business just doesn't seem to work down here.

to take advantage of hordes of unemployed technologists than to get them to provide months of free work?

I suppose if all your users are secretaries or CSRs then you can get away with this, but if your users are engineers then they are going to need to be installing new tools all the time to do their jobs, and waiting for you to get around to manually doing the same monkey work they are more than capable of doing, and you staying late on Friday night to do it to all their machines, each time a new tool comes along that they want to use -- or even evaluate, is not in anyone's interests.

Right. Everytime a user needed to install a piece of software, they'd have to put in a request for IT support. IT support (i.e. you) would put it in a queue, low prioritize it, and fix it next week. In the meantime the user can't do their job because they're waiting for you to come over and enter a password and then click Install. That's no way to run a railroad.

"Not only will we keep you in a baking hot desert for years on end, but you won't be able to chat with any of your friends back home."

I guess they are pretty confident they don't need any more troops. They can stop recruiting at high schools then, right?