Heh, I'm assuming you're referring to this: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt01...

$50 per year for unlimited data, and you can use your own encryption keys to encrypt prior to upload. Will take a loooong time to back up that much data initially, but incremental updates are pretty quick (depending on how quickly you add new media).

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Supposedly, benchmarks are written to simulate real workloads. It seems to me that tweaking processor designs to run benchmarks faster is a good idea. If you have a better idea for what applications to design a processor for perhaps you should join a processor company in the workload analysis or planning group.

I agree that Intel, or any company with enough "muscle" (see Nvidia, ATI/AMD, MSFT, IBM, HP, Oracle, etc.), will try to influence the press and show their products in the best possible way, even dishonestly on occasion. I'm not saying that the fact that "everyone does it" makes it right, just that everyone does do it.

I also think that these companies receive a lot of blame for articles / "research reports" like this one that they have absolutely no involvement with. To think that EVERY positive Intel article is funded or influenced by Intel would:

1) Ignore the fact that Intel does make fairly good products most of the time
2) Greatly overestimate Intel's marketing prowess. :)

Where, in any of the linked articles, was any data provided by Intel?

I rather think that they don't get in trouble because their recorded income subject to FICA and medicare is much higher than $1. Salary is not the only form of compensation for them.

For example, I work for Intel. Last year my base salary accounted for about 68% of my taxed income. The rest came from 2 different bonus programs and from stock grants and a discounted stock purchase program. All of that income was recorded on my W2 and taxed appropriately.

I believe for most of $1 salary guys, the cash bonuses are the in high hundreds of thousands and the stock grants are in the millions. That still gets taxed as income and the IRS doesn't have a problem with it. The low salary is done for 2 reasons: 1) Make all of their income dependent on company performance, 2) Morale booster for the rank and file.

This usually depends on the elevation of the region where the gas station is. At high altitudes lower octane gas provides better performance. All of the states you listed contain lots of mountains and mountain passes.

Lower octane fuel actually ignites easier. The reason high-performance cars like high-octane fuel is to increase compression ratios without having the fuel self-ignite. When driving in high altitude there is less oxygen in the air. Having lower-octane fuel helps offset the oxygen level difference.

I once drove through Wyoming using 87 gas and couldn't make it up some of the hills without dropping below the speed limit. Changing to 85 helped a lot. Of course it didn't help that the vehicle was a POS...