I am Mexican expat. no I don't pick fruits. My background is IT but switched careers and now I work in Finance. yes joined the dark side i guess. Worked in the UAE for about 4 yrs, and now been in Switzerland for the last 2. In both these places you gett 30 days holidays, plus about 5 sick days. and in Switzerland it is mandated by law that I am able to take at least 2 weeks straight. employment laws were more flexible in the UAE than in the US, and in Switzerland are far more flexible than in the rest of Europe which means I can be hired/fired way easier, but notification is 3 months. so not pum! you are fired, security will escort you out of the building now, like it can happen in the US. Income tax was 0 in the UAE and in Switzerland it's very low. In both countries you are obliged by law to pay for private health insurance, which is very expensive when compared to the rest of europe, but not outrageous like in the US either and with good coverage. The education system in the UAE isn't that great, and certainly expensive, but in Switzerland, the public education system is excellent big focus on STEM, and even the tough of bringing "creationism" somewhere into the curriculum would get you laughed out of whatever room you are at. yes that would probably include a room in a lot of churches. (no school shootings here either) Crime is extremely low in both of these countries, as in practically nil, certainly violent crime. but probably the UAE even slightly safer. i've never felt safer in my life, yes that's in the middle east. (no asset forefeiture by the PO-lice in any of these countries btw) my commute here is about 25 min long (considered long) on a train that is very comfortable, clean, etc, that arrives ALWAYS on time... ok, ít's late every now and then by about 4 or 5 min. I like cars and driving, but here i don't own a car because i just don't need one. (and gas is taxed heavily to curb down greenhouse gases) I have a ride share for when i do need one or take uber. Because of my industry it would not be weird that one of my next career steps would take me to the US. which i'm not against, but it would have to make a lot of sense, but it could also take me to London, Singapur, maybe the UAE again or perhaps a developing market (and i would totally consider Africa). if I did go to the US I would not be comfortable with an H1-B visa as it basically ties me to that company and it makes my wife's job search extremely difficult (also a working professional, who earns slightly more than I do). so perhaps a green card, which I would probably give up, the MINUTE, I move out, and then it means I would still have to report to the IRS for several years even if i am no longer living there (nor would i aim to become an us citizen, which is a tax disaster if you are an expat) and most banks in developed countries would probably refuse to open a bank account because of the very tough and difficult IRS FATCA regulations... no country is perfect, of the ones i lived in, there are tons of things i like and tons I don't, and there's plenty of stuff i love about the US.(I studied a master's degre over there). but no, i'm not dying to go there, I would consider it, but it's not number one on my list. (the holiday and the likely long commute are probably my biggest turn offs) and I know plenty of expats who feel the same way about it. so that's my 2 cents.

i work in a company that has about 1000 clients, out of which about 3/4 are working with officescan AV. on friday we 1st tought part of our network was down then we saw a system process driving the processor 95%~99%. so we tought it was virus outbreak. but it came to our attention that the computers not using officescan where o.k., and also the part of the company that doesn't allow people to install messenger on computers. we got a box working when we tried installing norton, to do that we tought it was a good idea to stop all officescan services before (we had to do it on safe mode, which was the only way we could do anything) when the box was booted up again, it just ran smoothly. then we noticed a new update version was up. by then we had also noticed that the boxes that didn't have messenger where also windows 2000 boxes. in all the faulty update was pattern file 2.594.00 replaced about 2~3 hrs later with 2.596.00. The "infected" boxes had to had officescan's services disabled, except for the listener service so it could download the new file, and then had the whole box restarted. in all, all IT personnel had to stay until around 9:00 p.m. on friday to fix the boxes on the assembly line. lots of money was lost. and by the way, officescan's EULA states that their product is NOT without errors. here's a copy of an e-mail we received the next monday: Urgent Notification - Trend Micro Pattern File 2.594.00 Causes High CPU Utilization On April 22, 2005 at approximately 3:30 pm Pacific (11:30pm GMT) Trend Micro posted a pattern file (2.594.00) which had the potential to interact with certain computing configurations and cause computer performance issues for some users of PC-cillin, OfficeScan (including the OfficeScan component of Client/Server Suite for SMB, and Client/Server/Messaging Suite for SMB), and ServerProtect for NT. This specific pattern file was only available during an approximately 90-minute time window. Trend Micro removed the pattern file from our Web sites and Active Update servers at 5:02 pm (1:02am GMT), and immediately took steps to post a new pattern file. Subsequent pattern files do not cause these issues. For any customers experiencing instability, Trend Micro has provided a set of solutions which can be found under the Support section of Trend Micro's Web site. Additionally, Trend Micro has extended support hours especially to help those customers who were affected by this issue. Further information, instructions, and details can also be found on the Trend Micro Web site at: http://www.trendmicro.com/pattern594 We sincerely apologize for this incident and will continue to improve our processes so that problems such as this do not happen in the future. Eva Chen, CEO Trend Micro, Inc.