The use of the year 2000 distorts the argument as it was an abnormal high point for earnings. In 1999 and 2000, IT salaries benefited greatly out of all proportion to the productivity gain the workers provided to companies due to the scramble for Y2K compliance. A longer baseline going back to 1997 and treating 2000 as an outlier would provide a very different picture that is more likely to reflect real trends in hourly rates etc.

Once upon a time, in another career ... http://www.physics.uq.edu.au/sp/sp.html

mod insightful. Space weather events only strongly couple with the Earth in geomagnetic high latitudes (Alaska, parts of the Canadian peninsulas etc - you know, missile sub launching areas). Most of the Earth's population lives in equatorial (subject to tropospheric {rainstorms} more than space weather {ionospheric}) or mid-latitude regions. Yeah, there is a really low risk of a high energy electron embedding in satellites and other terrestrial electronic systems - every day risk largely independent of solar cycle activity. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_weather. I was at the Hitachi, Japan conference where the term "space weather" was coined. Talk about a media piece trying to conjoin disparate instances of geophysical systems :-(. 2012, you are kidding me right? Who is going to get a satellite program up in an early warning emplacement in time? USA, you have _got_ to be joking. This is a money grab, nothing more. Is there a risk, for sure there is. Beating a drum and sounding the end of the world? I think cry wolf has been sounded a couple of times already and the effort on the cry wolf at least is doomed (may be not misguided, to note, ipad generation).

Mod parent up. Market cap is also not acquisition value (usually about x8 market cap).

Its all a plot to make people buy Mac

If an auditor certifies a system compliant, at a set point in time, to an agreed, contractually stated structure of compliance, how is this different from an insurance agency underwriting the contract to a set event misfortune? If there is no effective penalty mechanism, does this not just encourage the types of behavior most recently lambasted during the GFC? Operators in this sphere are well rewarded for their efforts. Why should they not stand by their assessments (ie fiscal risk) in addition to reputation loss? Any other contract scenario would require it so why not this circumstance?

This may depend on if you run the VM in NAT or Bridged network mode. The firewall to the Windows 7 machine and the communications to the XP machine could be different. The software installed may expect different firewall behavior (TCP keepalive etc) or use different ranges (eg random UDP port exclusions) for some connection types. At least that seems to happen now using other VM technologies (VMWare, Xen etc). How would licensing work for AV (and other applications)? Surely you'd need a copy per client (host + VM)?