Actually, where I am located that could conceivably void the restraining order. A friend of mine voided the restraining order he had against someone by not enforcing it when encountering the person at a mutual friend's house. Not that it is quite the same thing, but if you do not complain about/enforce it all the time, then do you really feel threatened?

Just out of pure curiosity, why repeal the 17th Amendment?

This has been how Apple has done business for years. How much more money could they make if they allowed OS X to be installed on any x86 PC? They do not because they like being in control. You do not purchase a Mac, or an Iphone, you purchase the experience, as regulated by Apple. Right or wrong, this business model is along the path they chose long ago so I doubt that they will change much now. If, as a developer, you do not want to play by their rules, then you can take your software elsewhere. Just as it is their right to do this, it is also your right not to develop for their platform.

I agree. In the best case scenario, in my opinion, the times things seem to get done (semi-positively) in Government, appears to be when one or both houses of Congress are in the control of a party (though a very slight majority) different that what the President is.

Not that this was directed at me, but I will respond anyway. I refuse to use Belkin cabling because it is overpriced and likely underquality. If I am doing cabling work, I go to the nearest electrical supply house that has datacom cabling, and buy the cabling wholesale. Patch cords run between 5 and 10 dollars a piece.

With what kind of cable, though? And what tests will it pass? I have done an extraordinary amount of cable installation, and, I can assure you, it is fairly common for hand made patch cords to fail on an impedance mismatch, which most test equipment will not test for. When you are dealing with Cat6 and above that impedance matching is quite important.

HP has had some poorly engineered printers come out (the Color LJ2500 series comes to mind), and they typically took care of them fairly. Though, again, being an warranty repair shop, that may have been because of our status, but I have been fairly impressed with HP since then.

The only time I have been unsure of an HP product was right after their Compac acquisition. Once they decided how the product lines were going to work out they have been fine.

I am guessing (hoping) that you pulled that off of Dell's website right before you posted it. Dell has only been in the business of selling to retailers for about a year or year and a half. If I get my computer from them directly, 3 days to a week is significantly different that sitting on a retailer's shelves for 60 to 90 days.

Though, I would likely be a little cross if it failed in the 3 days to a week in question.

I am not sure how Dell does it, as I have not dealt with Dell on a retail basis, but HP will honor a warranty in that situation with a simple phone call. All they require is proof of purchase date, which, as an authorized service provider, my company was allowed to verify with them over the phone.

Of course, I have not done HP warranty work in a few years so they may have changed their policy, but I doubt it.

If that "typical desktop environment" needs the transfer speeds that fiber optic cable allows, most companies see replacing patch cords as a cost of doing business. As more companies discover the need for that bandwidth, and start considering fiber to the desktop more seriously, the cost of fiber will continue to fall. This is especially true as the tolerances for abuse decrease significantly with copper patch cords above a CAT 6 rating.

Disclosure: I did start out working in IT/Telecom as a cabling/phone technician so I have seen firsthand how easy it is to ruin copper connections, inadvertently.

FTFY

Anyone who still thinks that Obama and the rest of his administration will suddenly revert course on constitutional freedoms from the last 8 years has been living under a rock since the Inauguration. He is a politician. Politicians like power. They, repubs and dems, are not going to remove some law in place that benefits them, even if the other side used it first.

If you are going to allude to the tool, you could at least let people know that it is an optical time domain reflectometer.

For myself, no I do not think "it's Bush's fault." Neither do I think it is Clinton's. Though both men, as president, along with every other president (and Congress Critter) since the end of the Nineteenth Century, have contributed to the mess we are in, last time I checked the citizens of this country were the ones who decided who filled those chairs. Therefore, in my opinion, whoever voted for them, or has supported the two-party system that guarantees that your choices are "Stupid, or Useless" is the sheeple you need to look at for fault.

Yes, but without looking at the specs, I would imagine that if the technology is significantly different, Google would still be eligible for a patent. Especially so if they were aware of the "prior art" and took the necessary steps not to include language that would overlap. Though IANAL, nor am I a patent expert.

I think it is all up to interpretation, forgive the horrendous pun, it was the first thing that came to mind. I have a working knowledge of English (I have been speaking it twenty-eight years), and at one point had a working knowledge of Spanish (no one around here speaks Castillian Spanish so sadly I have lost a significant amount). From a linguistic standpoint, I found that Spanish was a more concise language when I first studied it because of the simple fact that I was learning what small children would learn in Spain. As one grows, hopefully their command of the language grows. This results in being able to say the same thing in different ways. A native speaker of any language will likely find a new language to be more concise, until they have spent a significant amount of time learning the various idioms to express things differently. Idioms and other figures of speech should not appear in development comments; the comment should be as concise as possible, while still explaining what the code is for.