As a fluent PowerShell and bash user, I would bet money that PowerShell was designed by some poor sot from the Visual Basic team after watching a 15-minute presentation on bash.

It's simultaneously an obscure reference, somewhat descriptive, and humorous. Best of all, it was my kid's idea.

The FCC is not proposing that the govt. actually become an ISP. All the FCC is proposing is that a band of spectrum be opened up for unlicensed wireless Internet access. What this means is that anyone could set up shop and become the ISP, such as municipalities, private corporations, or IT Bob providing access to his neighbors.

What this essentially does is reboot the current Internet access model and create a well-fertilized field in which something else can grow. This gives us more choice, not less. There are no guarantees that what grows there is Good, but what it is not going to be is an ISP run by the Federal Govt.

And apparently, I can't remember how to log into /. I'm the AC who posted above.

I'm sure the answer is "drivers", but I've dreamed of the same for years. These days, it's not even that much of an inconvenience, as game load times are significantly longer than boot times.

I have worked at a Fortune 500 company for almost five years. A few things I have observed there:

1. Most businesses larger than, say, fifty employees are going to have very complex problems -- problems that only dedicated IT personnel can solve. I fail to see how any outsourced "mashup" (whatever that *really* is) could tailor itself adequately to these problems. It's just a restatement of the common problem of customizing third-party vertical software for a specific business. In my experience, that endeavor tends to faily miserably, draining productivity as users are forced by the software into a non-intuitive mode. Eventually, the offending system is removed and replaced with something else. You need IT personnel for all of this.

2. In a large IT group, there are a lot of people who don't contribute value. You have your sycophants, ass-kissers, hiring mistakes, misassigned resources, bumbling managers, etc. The problem is that the corporate culture can make it very hard to get rid of these people. They may have influence with the powers that be, or they may even *be* the powers. If you see some downsizing, you have to ask *who* got downsized. Perhaps it wasn't the people actually adding value.

Their argument for not forcing companies to disclose is that those big companies would be better off spending the money they would use to inform everyone on the people who actually get victimized. What does that even mean exactly? Also, they don't want to needlessly freak people out.

Sounds like a pretty weak argument to me really. More corporate BS?

BTW, I beat /. to the story on my ID theft site: Identity Theft Risk Overhyped. Do I get extra points for that, or what?