The simple answer to this, is that most liberal arts-oriented positions will morph into sales and marketing, and technical-oriented ones will morph into technical services (software engineering, maintenance). The world isn't going start starving, or somehow skyrocket into 99% unemployment rates. While there will be a "new norm" of higher unemployment rates for a while, that will quickly subside and people will find jobs, etc. We're just experiencing a cultural shift to a different type of business format. Call it the post-technology era.
5% won't be enough to outpace inflation in the next 10 years. Invest 100% now in 20 different companies at $50,000 each, with the expectation that one will go 30, 40 or 50 to one.
Typically not. Usually companies lease the right of way (power lines, conduits between manholes, etc) on extremely long terms and pay to install the fiber / copper themselves. Cities that "own" the fiber directly are what would be considered "municipally owned."
Cities may also provide "franchises" so that only one telco or cable operator gets the right to lay cable pathways, and all other companies are denied the rights. This is usually coupled with the company picking up the cost for actually building and maintaining the rights-of-way (ie, actually building the manholes/conduits, or whatever). There's thousands of cities, and many hundreds (if not thousands) of companies in the game, so its expected that there are many different variations between each municipal area.
2) Did customs do their job and scrutinize the person's paperwork? Yes
3) Was the person held for an inordinately long time? No -- 3 hours is not a "long time." If you can't deal with the fact that you just flew (potentially) halfway across the world in an airplane
4) Was the author unduly molested or given harsh treatment, perhaps by being denied food, water, medication, or otherwise harassed? No -- the author points out that there was a water fountain and snack machines, and the author was not strip searched, nor was he otherwise harassed/degraded. Sitting in a waiting room while your paperwork clears is "not a big deal."
Please stop blowing things out of proportion, and criticizing the US for no reason. I've immigrated to and lived in 3 different countries, and BY FAR the procedure described here is not difficult or tedious. If you can't deal with a a 3 hour wait, how can you deal with anything? Patience is a virtue.
BTW -- I was a paying awe.sm customer -- I just cancelled my account due to this overblown blog posting. Enjoy.
Uhm, no. Arguably MS and Apple got a much stronger patent portfolio for a much lower premium than Google did. If anything, this action makes Google look desperate, striking out to try to acquire as much IP "real estate" as possible before their competition completely buys out all existing IP. Additionally, MS was reportedly in the running for buying Motorola.
I think this is most likely a reactionary move by Google to basically make sure Microsoft doesn't buy out / pay off all the cell phone manufacturers, and make them all go WP7.
tl;dr the sky is not falling