He also mentions that the video recorder on his machine is slowing it down, and it gets anywhere from 60 to 120 fps without it.

Ask your roommate "YOU WOULDN'T STEAL A CAR WOULD YOU?!!!" He will then see the error of his ways and stop downloading.

When I call my major vendors, I have a single main sales contact. This person is usually pretty darn smart about what people need and want. When we get to some details that he/she can't answer, they set up a conference with a technical lead (who may or may not also be in sales). While this conference occurs, I can tell that the primary salesman is taking hardcore notes and prepping up so he doesn't have to waste the engineer's time again on this particular subject. I've watched a good amount of these salespeople learn and grow until they no longer need to consult with anyone else.

As a customer, a salesman's admitted lack of knowledge doesn't hurt. In fact it helps strengthen our relationship because he's not only honest, but he still has the ability to point me towards someone who does know. In contrast, I quickly drop salesmen that completely bluff with high confidence (these can lead to expensive mistakes, especially in terms of volume licensing if the vendor blows it).

During lunches and other casual chats, the really good salespeople are genuinely curious about what motivates me and what is exciting me about the direction of our company. This isn't just idle chit chat - they're boning up on their knowledge. Just last week a vendor asked me "What tech news sites do you read?" and proceeded to bust out his notepad and write them down. And some of those special sales/tech pros I talk to are actually sales people that used to be engineers, but love the interaction and incentives of sales. They weren't failed engineers. They were looking for a new challenge with a potential for higher rewards, and they were extremely well equipped to earn those rewards because of their knowledge. The age old adage of "engineers are socially awkward" doesn't always stand true.

That being said:

1. Don't touch your engineers at first. Leave them in their current positions.
2. Start by coordinating some method of training your sales team on the product - connect them with engineers for a while, or get them reading materials. Do this tactfully and lean heavily towards rewarding the engineering team. If your sales team comes off as a bunch of scavengers with no respect for engineering and only want to leech enough to make profits for themselves, your engineers will probably feed them the wrong info and laugh over it later. Prep your sales team accordingly, and reward your engineers accordingly. Engineering will be doing you a huge favor here, don't screw it up.
3. Also set up a way to bring in engineering knowledge on special sales calls. Provide some sort of incentive to engineers and/or an inter-departmental billing process for sales support (when the sales guy calls on the engineer for a conference call). This measures potential abuse of engineering's time from your sales staff and tells a story to management of why engineering projects might not be chugging along as quickly. Also allows you to measure the proficiency of your salesmen (the # of calls should decrease over time for each salesman, and you can figure out the average training time until a new salesman is effective).
4. With the metrics of #3 in hand, you should be able to gage how many full time engineers might be needed for the sales team. Meanwhile you can feel out which of your engineers enjoy this new consulting duty, and see if you can't transition them to a full time sales role (provided they aren't all senior engineers whose salaries would destroy the sales margin).
5. Once you transition any engineers over, they are now officially in the sales group as "product experts" or something of the sort. Get them out of engineering, make a clean break from their old jobs, and start providing them with the same sales incentives as others (if you already haven't been giving them a percentage for their previous consulting). They won't turn into some greedy self-serving salesmen nightmares. If they worked on the products before, they're going to trust and have faith in the product enough to be solid salesmen.
6. Treat those previous engineers nicely and reward appropriately. They will be key players in your new sales process and may even be part of your higher paid sales staff. If your junior salesmen are making all the profits while your product experts are doing all the heavy lifting, they're going to drop you quick and move back into a safe and solid engineering role.

There's a lot of room for leverage in this plan, but the gist is to get an educated sales team that believes in the product, help sales & engineering make friends, and possibly nab a few pros into your court. Certain types of engineers can really shine in this mode.

Don't you mean a "lamer" lame?

Clearly you've never used another GUI. The trash can in Ubuntu isn't a draggable icon - it rests on a panel and is about 5x smaller than a Windows Recycle Bin.

The numerous comments of "I use Shift-Delete" and "I just remove the bin" messages are proving I'm not alone here. Metaphorically speaking, people don't leave their trash cans in their living rooms in plain sight - and if they did, they'd probably clean them more frequently. Instead they put them under the sink / in the closet.

In terms of UI, I have to agree. My recycle bin has been much more useful in Ubuntu than Windows. Why? Because OCD or not - In Windows you have a trash can sitting right there in front of you waiting to be emptied (or "cleaned" if you will). I probably clean my recycle bin in Windows 2 or 3 times a day. In Ubuntu, I hardly notice it because sits quietly in the lower right corner.

In Windows, I have maybe the last 4 hours of data. In Ubuntu, I have the last 4 months. Definitely a use case in terms of UI improvement for myself.

Somebody forgets about this feature and puts a processor in an airplane or some other type of mission-critical machine.

Different strokes for different folks. I took the same two classes online (intro to pol sci and business writing) and loved them. For me it was faster to read and do homework than sit through a lecture...then go home and read the same material and do homework. A little tough to work past the distractions (age 21 at the time), but definitely doable.

Breaking into an Apple device: "it just works."

I was talking to Slashdot and it said that YOU suck on April Fools day!

Oh geez, I'm gonna have to explain things to my Mom after she gets the following notice in the mail:

"Great news! Our engineers have invented an amazing new technology called IPv6 that NONE OF OUR COMPETITORS HAVE: More addresses! Greater speed! Less lag! New HD content never before available! OMG this new technology called VOIP works over it! Perform online backups! And enjoy the $20 increase to your monthly bill!

That or Obama launches a "Rebates for Routers" program - 6 months AFTER I purchase an IPv6 device.

"While the goat didn't survive long due to lung defects this gives scientists hopes that it will be possible to resurrect extinct species from frozen tissue."

That was about how my 8.10 experience went too.

How can Dolphins save you from the net when they get caught in them all time?

Most people, I think, don't even know what a Trojan is, so why should they care about it?

IMDB > Actor biographies
Google Images > Special Artwork
YouTube & Movies Sites > Deleted Scenes and Behind the Scenes Documentaries
Blogs > Director's commentaries
Apple/Youtube > Upcoming releases
Ripping Disc to cleanse the movie > FBI Warning
Watching mold grow > Overdone menus
Surfing the net on my own > Launching my browser with your dumpy "special access" software.
Root Canal > DVD Quizzes

And now...

Downloading Demos > Having them bundled

Hooray, I love more garbage that will make my movies seem even more dated when I watch them 10 years later.

Who am I kidding? They probably won't even put the demos on the disks...they'll just waste your bandwidth by using BD Live to download the demo.