I can name a few possible scenarios, and I'll let you decide:

• Ballmer had a notoriously short fuse and the company would rather pay for what he wanted to hear, not what they needed to hear.
• Gartner, Forrester, et al were a bit intimidated by the piles of bodies in the C-level offices with gunshot wounds in them, and they liked the money.
• Microsoft-commissioned reports aren't intended for market research, but rather publicity and their own marketing purposes. They don't publicize the ones they commission for actual research, because it's not pretty (especially since Windows 8/Server 2012).

Disregarding built-in microcode that converts CISC instructions into simpler RISC-like operations, this statement is not accurate. All x86-64 processors have the same native 32-bit registers and instructions that the original 386 had (some may be deprecated, but IIRC there is 100% compatibility). No hardware emulation is being done.

You may be confusing the virtual memory translation scheme (Wow64) that Windows uses to run 32-bit processes in Windows x64. Yes, there is some slight overhead, but it isn't considered to be emulation.

No kidding. The one-line quips were usually top-rated for as long as I can remember, provided they were relevant and early. RTFA was never mandatory, however.

I think you're restating what parent wrote (only in more detail):

I believe we're all in agreement that cable companies clamoring for "free market" are hypocrites, as there has never really been a free market for communication service providers, and it's amusing (yet sad, since it's often effective) to see the rent seekers that cry "free market" and "deregulation" only when it benefits them. Govt-subsidized and sanctioned monopolies and duopolies aren't capitalism, and neither is the collusion that results when the barrier to entry is so large due to these monopolies.

If they really want a "free market" and "deregulation", then they shouldn't be opposed to more open (unlicensed) spectrum, rather than allowing the FCC to auction frequency blocks off to the highest bidder. They also shouldn't ask for public handouts to "build rural infrastructure" and then completely renege on their contractual obligations through legal loopholes and shell games.

I was with you until this. Having worked on large C++ with and without smart pointers and seeing the differences between the memory leaks firsthand has made me a believer in using smart pointers.

There are shortcomings of the commonly taught RAII approach when handling raw pointers, mostly having to do with ambiguity of pointer ownership. Maybe not the auto_ptr itself (which has now been made deprecated in favor of unique_ptr due to having stricter move/copy semantics), but the smart pointers in Boost and C++11 are very strict about who owns the data in question. There are other things smart pointers can fix (such as automatic cleanups/refcount decrements with stack unwinding, which addresses leaks caused by unexpected thrown exceptions).

Hell, simply having a ref-counted pointer that handles its own cleanup is a great way to ease developers who only have previous experience with garbage-collected languages into C++ development without introducing a ton of memory leaks or dangling pointers everywhere- not an ideal solution, but this crutch has saved us from many potential horrors introduced by senior developers who have only used C# or Java previously (yes, this is quite common today).

The ! negates the = that came after it. Duh. ;)

I would argue that sharing cache between CPU and GPU is not necessarily ideal. Also, keep in mind that GPUs and CPUs use memory very differently; CPUs prefer low latency, GPUs prefer raw bandwidth- this is why Llano's graphics performance is very sensitive to the clockspeed of the memory you're using.

Don't you mean a hypothesis?

MIDI is very limited. MIDI was set up 30 years ago as a communication interface, and by today's standards it's a poor one- you're limited to one note per millisecond. IIRC, you are also limited to 16 channels, so composing scores for an entire orchestra is out of the question.

To top it all off, it wasn't meant for music notation. Symbols like Accelerandos, Ritardandos are notably absent- changes to tempos are hardcoded. Many other symbols are absent as well. Sometimes notes need to be formatted in a special way (ie- for readability, or left/right hand on piano).

Anyone who has ever composed in Finale, Sibelius, etc and tried to export to midi will notice the limitations right away. Why, what's your beef with XML anyway?

Please don't confuse capitalism with corporatism. The very fact that the Government would dictate or allow someone else to dictate what someone can and cannot do with his/her own property goes against one of the basic tenets of free-market capitalism. In a true capitalist system, Sony wouldn't be able to take legal action against modchip manufacturers.

"Intellectual property" is another concept that is falsely attributed to capitalism. The government should never enforce monopolies, especially over ideas.

I don't know if you're being sarcastic, but in case you aren't...

Some Motorola Android phones have MotoBlur, which require a MotoBlur account (it does its own cloud syncing). My Atrix, unfortunately, is one of those phones.

I believe the Motorola Droid phones (Droid, Droid 2, Droid X) on Verizon don't have MotoBlur, and thus don't require a Motorola account.

This kind of thing pisses me off. After having knee replacement a few years ago, I was hobbling around on crutches for a month- and shopping with a regular cart was a pain in the ass. There were times when I went to the grocery store and the "mobility carts" were all taken up by fatasses who could really use the exercise.

I've always wanted to tell them off, "Hey tubby, laziness and lack of self-control isn't a disability!"

I can't imagine how people with permanent disabilities would feel in that situation.

No joke.

That's why there are "no gays" in Iran, as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad joked about on a previous US visit. Known homosexuals are either forced to have gender reassignment surgery, or risk jail or execution. It mirrors the way western countries forced gays to undergo chemical castration as recent as 50 years ago (like what happened to Turing), but it's terrible that this kind of thing still happens today.

A capacitive stylus is more like writing with a crayon than a pencil. If you look at these, you'll quickly notice that they're not much more precise than your finger (unless you have really fat hands).

Now be serious... there's only 535 seats in Congress. That's hardly enough to put a dent in other criminal enterprises.