The principal was obviously a product of the US education system system, which is apparently too busy with the science/religion question to worry about something as mundane as free speech. That, plus a mistrust of even the least qualified lawyer to tell them what the constitution says about free speech, makes these issues increasingly frustrating, and expensive.

Now all that's needed is dispensers that enable it to be administered surreptitiously in crowded areas, although seeing someone standing next to you turning green might cause other problems.

I'm wondering what percentage of the drain began during the Bush administration, when the perception held by foreigners around the world began to be increasingly negative, and as a result if the financial meltdown, which has put a crimp on the American economy. In my previous travels, just about everywhere I went, people talked about their friends and relatives who were in school or working in the United States positively, and often great pride. Now, not so much...

As a dinosaur who started cranking code more than 40 years ago, I've been out of touch with things like virtualization for some time. The last word on virtualization in the mainframe world in the 70's and 80s was IBMs VM series of virtual machine operating environments: CP/67, VM/370, VM/SP, etc., coupled with CMS, the Conversational Monitoring System OS for each virtual machine. These were spectacularly useful across a wide spectrum of user profiles. In concept, how do current virtualization strategies differ from these early IBM products, and what took so long for products of this type to return to the mainstream?