I fully agree! Throwing money at the private sector with no accountability is a horrible idea. A great argument for nationalization (of those companies that can be nationalized) if I've ever saw one. ;)

No, it cannot be used for classical information due to the basic principles of quantum entanglement. You cannot send information over a channel when you don't know the spin of either entangled particle: this is equivalent to sending random binary data, because while you know the particle the other guy gets is going to be the opposite of yours, you don't know what particle you have.

Think of it like this: you're a kid, you have a friend, Santa Claus has only two presents: a Game Boy and a rock. Christmas Day, neither of you know what presents you got: if you open your present and it's a Game Boy, you'll know he has a rock, but he can't know that without opening his present too, unless you tell him. Your opening the box has no effect on the outcome, other than you know what the other guy has. In fact, you don't even know what you sent until you observe the particle.

This has been better explained by others in other comments but it is important to make sure people don't think this is some sort of crazy FTL Star Trek thing.

REDMOND, WASH: The public beta of Windows 9 isn't garnering good reviews.

Windows 8's removal of key services due to antitrust legislation infuriated longtime users. A rumored FTP application was announced scrapped, but that wasn't the least of it: on release, Wordpad, Notepad, Calculator, Minesweeper, Media Player, Paint, Sound Recorder, and virtually all Windows applications were removed due to antitrust issues brought up by several software companies.

Now, many users are running into issues. Steve Ballmer addressed them in a interview last week, saying that "bundling display drivers with Windows 9 could possibly create a monopoly situation. While we realize that booting into 9 with a black screen makes everyday applications relatively difficult, who is going to download the official drivers if the ones we give you work fine? Therefore, users will have to manually write their own drivers onto the hard disk. We have attempted to bundle a small magnet with each beta copy, but we quickly realized that would create an unfair situation in the toy magnet sector." The Windows 9 beta is therefore hard to recommend.

Ballmer noted in a follow up that "the existence of Windows itself" might possibly be infringing. This is dire news, as some software makers have ironically attempted to thwart antitrust rules by forming large monopolies then proceeding to buy national governments. The next version of America General Software Co's Generic Software Suite of Freedom goes on sale Tuesday.

I supported the guy here there and everywhere during the elections, but whether or not he gives us our money, I've got a feeling we'll be carrying that weight for a long time.

Most gamers are better off spending under $200 on a CPU, and most consumers won't tell the difference.

People who buy quad core processors nowadays either want extremely performance for multithreaded tasks and are willing to pay (a lot!) or they're total dumbasses, in either case they'll buy an i7.

If AMD wants to catch up they need to cut these things down to duals like they did the original Phenom to 7750+.

I don't make these kind of claims without basis. If you want to be semantic, you could say $550. But a E5200/4850/4GB RAM setup hovers around $520 with $50+ back after rebates. That should play FO3 at 1440x900/1280x1024 at solid 60fps, and if it doesn't it's definitely much more than playable, and should run it at 1680x1050 just as solidly. This includes case (Centurion 5), PSU (PC P&C Silencer 510 or Corsair 400/450), and all the other basics. This is not 2006/7 anymore where a midrange machine costs $1k+.

Now if you're saying "well wait a minute, what about 1920x1200" - too bad. If you can afford that sort of monitor, you can afford throwing another $100+ at your GPU. I suspect from your post that you are at that res, and that's what my 260 216 comment was referring to (enthusiast level hardware). A budget system is going to do a 4830 or 4850, there's no need to shove that kind of graphics card in there.

As for your claims about expandability, there is nothing a 780i can do that a P35/P43/P45 board can't..well..except cook an egg on the northbridge and fry everything connected to SATA. Their reputation is for instability, hardly a trait valued to overclockers. Intel's chipsets have been the new high water mark for excellent, full featured chipsets that cost very little and can have a wide variety of roles from budget to high end.

...why OEMs (HP, Dell, etc) can't put together a solid midrange machine for the life of them. If fly-by-night cut-all-corners places like iBuyPower and CyberPower can do it, why don't I see a (E5200|E7300|E8400)/(4850|GTX 260) sort of machine on these companies' websites? It's to the point where if someone wants to buy a PC and can't build it themselves, and asks for a prebuilt recommendation, I can't give them one. It's not even a question of price (of course you're going to pay a little more for warranty etc), these companies just don't or can't offer a combination of reasonable hardware anymore.

Does anyone know why this is the case?

Your inability to find or hit a price/performance peak should not be used as an argument against parent. Dual 8800GTs get blown away by most single-GPU cards (especially when SLI scales so poorly in most apps) and had you spent much less money on your motherboard, you likely could be running a much more efficient setup (GTX 260 216SP for example)

$450 buys a pretty damn good gaming PC these days - E5200, 4850, 4GB RAM.

Had he known a bit more about his chosen subject before writing, a great article could have been written about the market's switch to the midrange: ATI, for example, didn't make a giant monolithic design then shrink it down for the midrange, they built it from the bottom up for the midrange and now they are winning in low-mid end price/performance with the 4850. nVidia made their entire lineup obsolete overnight with the 8800GT a few months ago, a small, single slot, efficient card that tied or blew away anything they had offered before for an extraordinary price.