Good one. While I like my thinkpads, I would like to have other options while keeping my prefered pointing device. And all the stupid pointing pads should at the very least be disablable at a level _below_ the OS - anice cover plate would be nice too :-)

Just a quick counter point to your first problem. Lack of a (good, working, sane) chargeback system may cause needed work to not be done, if the people who need to do it are not on the same team/in the same department as the people who need it done. Think servers being built by developers - who can't continue work until they have been created - instead of having server specialists build them - who may in fact be able to build them better and faster. This happens easily when no chargeback system exist for the developers to "pay" the server specialists. Everybody works on tasks that contribute to their own department/team bottom line - but the total result for the company as a whole might be a lot worse than possible.

The MG 42 was in fact so good, that it's successor, the MG 3, is still in use around the world (I trained on it myself about a decade ago, in the danish army).

MAC is 48 bits. It is expanded to EUI-64 format by inserting 0xFFFE in the middle and flipping the 6th bit of the first octet. This is then used as the host part of the address.

The secondary market solves the problem of matching the time frame I want to invest on with the time frame companies need investment on - if I need my money back in a year, I can still invest in a company that will take 10 years to return the investment. Depending on how well that looks after one year I might get more or less than one tenth of the eventual profit - I might even take a loss. But since money is interchangeable and there is a secondary market I still get to invest.

Charlie Stross - Halting State: Searchable voice tags... And the police are wearing recorders for evidence - there's actually a small bit of the story that involves the police not being able to prove their case because of having no video - Imagine a world, where confessions get thrown out of court, if the police can't establish continuous video from arrest to court hearing...

Got a PRS-600 a little while ago and I totally agree on it being a good choice. The screen is a little bit grey on account of the touchscreen - but not so much that it bothers me. Everything else is just about as good as I could wish for (granted, eInk is a little slow on the update, but I knew that going in).

Not every problem is solvable! Lots of real problems are in fact instances of unsolvable problems - then the very best you can hope for is to find a partial solution with the right properties to be useful. A practical example would be optimizing software for size - a perfect implementation would leave no unneeded line of code behind and would thus be able to solve the halting problem. Since the halting problem has been proven unsolvable, it follows that perfect optimization for size is not possible. Thus the best you can do is an algorithm that removes _some_ unneeded code while ensuring that exactly zero needed lines of code are removed. Not that the partial solution is not helpful - it is often enough to give great value - but that does not make it a complete solution.

Not to mention that assigning any men at all to carry the fetus will generally ensure that the project fails quite rapidly... ;-)

Since I haven't tried a CC+SVN setup, I would genuinely like to know, which features of TFS itcan actually replace? As far as I can tell, CruiseControl is for continuous integration, so I expect that it is comparable to the build features of TFS. SVN obviously delivers source control. But does CC+SVN deliver anything as far as issue/bug-tracking, planing and reporting on work done/outstanding etc? Because I think this is actually the more important part of TFS. The way checkins are actually linked to bugs/backlog items/requirements or whatever work items you choose to track adds a lot of value in making it easier to understand why the code looks the way it does.

It might not be a bad idea if something like this was mandatory for civil servants while on duty (maybe with higher framerate or even full video - sound would be good too) - then a digital record of what actually took place would exist - that might be useful to resolve some cases where the parties do not agree on what happened...

Better yet - do a screenshot of the users desktop - with apps open and all, hide all icons etc. and set the screenshot as background... :-)

Why does it seem, that the entirety of American business is set up to fall to pieces if employees take more than a few days vacation? Here (Denmark) we are actually entitled (by law) to have five weeks vacation a year, and we can take up to three of them together as summer vacation. This year I even combined it with some comp-time, and took 29 days in one go. And that didn't cause any major problems, since my manager knew he had to plan for it (it did cause him a spot of bother when I quit a week after coming back from vacation - but that's besides the point). I just truly can't imagine working in an environment where you are expected to put in long days (standard workweek around here is 37 hours, give-or-take) without compensation and not even get to take proper vacations...

Yeah, I don't really get it either.
I just changed jobs, so I still have some of the contract language fresh in mind. The it's spelled out in my contract (which i not unusual in terms of the danish labor market) is that I must call in sick, if I'm too sick to go to work. If I'm going to be sick for more than a few days (i.e. it's not just a flu or something) I have to get a note from a doctor (I think the company pays the expenses). Finally they are entitled to let me go if I'm sick for more than 120 days in a row.
Besides that there are specific allowances for the first day your child is sick (you get to treat that like you were sick yourself) and pregnancies (I can't remember how much time I get of for that, but even as the father I would get a number of weeks with pay).
But the short version is that sick leave is not a set number of days, but the number of days in a given year that I'm sick (which could be zero). And that has absolutely nothing to do with the six weeks of annual payed vacation time I get.

One useful thing to do with the CapsLock key: Compose key! I happen to live in Denmark, but find my native keyboard layout rather less than ideal for programming - there are however a number of characters, that are needed to type in danish and not present on a standard us layout (e.g. æ, ø, and å). But using the CapsLock as compose key, I can have a us layout keyboard and lots of special characters take only three keypresses to produce.
Since I spent by far too long tracking it down - if you need this on Windows, AllChars (http://allchars.zwolnet.com/) does the job nicely.