Honestly, I don't think there's anything on the books to prevent a company from opening a store that directly competes with an indie that used to sell their product. So why should the car dealerships be any different? If the car company thinks they can do a better job that way, and I agree, I spend my money with them, if not I spent it with the dealership. That's capitalism, which is what really bothers me about this, is that it reveals the hypocrisy of the Republican claims to be against regulations that stifle business.

No, but you CAN blame them for taking advantage of the legal system as it stands. If the 1% manages to pass a bill tomorrow that makes it legal to shoot anybody who has less the $10K in assets that doesn't make it right, and it doesn't make the people who follow the law moral.

Courts of law are not the only judge of what's bullsh*t. Since it's pretty clear the current court system is flawed, allowing massive abuse of the patent system, I think it's fair to ask Microsoft to justify itself to the large audience, and explain what value it's adding. This way we can make a determination whether or not it's acting like a parasite.

This is a good point. To build on it, the results reported from the propertiary code has had coverity at least run against it, and usually the problems that it reports fixed. This does not appear to have been done in the case of the Open Source software, which was just scanned, but never given a chance to fix. In that circumstance I would have expected a much much higher result for the Open Source software, because Coverity often reports on very pedantic issues, which are often not important to overall software quality. Further these issues would not show up in anything other than Coverity, making the initial scan the first time these issues were brought to life.

I've heard the pinky toe comment before. Not sure how your teacher was using it, but the idea is that the human race will evolve out of having it, mainly due to wearing shoes all the time.

There is no room for failure. Without failure, and the ability to take risks, you'll get a lot of me too ish. Silicon Valley thrived when it was cheap to fail, now that it nolonger is you need to look to other places. I'd expect something more radical outta Detroit (where the buildings are almost free) or Kansas City, with the Google Fiber, than the Valley.

Sorry, this is a common myth, but Hitler was NOT elected. Instead he used a combination of backroom deals, politics, and outright thuggery to seize power. http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-hitlerdemo.htm

Honestly, Ghandi slept in the nude with young girls, and had an very intimidate relationship with a woman who was not his wife. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/thrill-of-the-chaste-the-truth-about-gandhis-sex-life-1937411.html Mother Teresa supposedly squandered the money that people donated to her on various things not related to the orphans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Aplank/Criticisms_of_Mother_Teresa

Vista = BAD was largely a result of bad marketing, poor drivers, and large internal changes at the last minute.
Win7 = Vista + SP2.

Between the hot redhead, and the not quite 100% insane he almost sound human! :)

About the time that the specs caught up with the hardware available. For Crysis 1, this was somewhere around 2-3 years AFTER it's initial release. If only the Crysis devs had been smart enough to NOT release the debug build as the RTM..... :)

Not trolling, but how hard is it to replace the power supply in one of these systems?

Seems like anybody comfortable enough to upgrade the graphics card should also be able to swap out a power supply as well. Does HP, etc make it such that the power supply cannot be replaced?

FWIW, Scape goat is a pretty old term. I believe it originated with the Greeks who had a ritual where everybody in a town would symbolically add all their troubles onto the back of a literal goat. This goat was then either driven out of town, or sacrificed to the gods, taking the people's trouble with it.

Normal key locks are vulnerable to various cheap lock picks as well, and, shock of shocks, a locksmith will charge you to upgrade those locks as well. So.... where's the story? I don't see anything on slashdot about normal burglars breaking into house with zipguns and the like, why is THIS news?