I don't think AMD has ever been a good investment. They are the little energizer bunny from hell to keep Intel execs awake at night, they're one of the best things to ever happen to technological progress, but the flipside is that their financials are always somewhere between "underperforming" and "imminent bankruptcy". It's pretty amazing actually. If every company was driven the way AMD was driven, humanity would be a lot farther along by now and, well, let's just say wealth distribution would be a bit different on this planet.

Could you elaborate on that?

There are at this time about a bazillion comments here pointing out that a privilege escalation that requires root access is not a privilege escalation.

I don't know what the authors of those comments were doing for the past 5 years, because they should really consider whether they are qualified to talk on the subject. AMD and Intel have been incorporating virtualization and paravirtualization support into their CPUs for a long time, and there is a massive market for these solutions. For an equal amount of time security researchers have been messing around finding exploits like this one in the hardware. Privilege escalation from domain to hypervisor/cross-domain level is a breach of the virtualization security model, and you can bet your ass it's a serious security issue. And if your favorite virtualization solution doesn't consider this a root exploit, then that solution is broken. Because there's no way anyone in their right mind running something like 50 domains on some 24-core beast - made specifically to virtualize the crap out of everything - will consider those domains being able to get root in all other domains to be anything short of a huge problem.

tl;dr: root is not root if you are in a guest domain. (cue inane Matrix reference to taste)

In this case, it sounds like someone knew exactly what they were doing, and they knew there was nothing they could steal, and brought along serious equipment. This was certainly sabotage, the question is by whom.

Those who fail to learn the history of Tesla vs. Edison are doomed to repeat it.

Power conditioning in your house may suck. I have a similar problem in one of the places I live and I attribute it to bad power.

Wrong. CFLs will never overcome their disadvantages, because they contain a poisonous chemical (mercury) and will be replaced by LED lighting at first opportunity. The people denouncing CFLs have a very valid point - CFLs produce mercury contamination in a less controlled manner than power plants do. LED lights however have no such disadvantages and are in every relevant sense superior to all other forms of lighting we have.

What you say is true within the confines of your house's thermal insulation. However, electric heat is a very inefficient way to heat a house compared to gas or oil heating due to transmission losses that happen outside your house.

Long may it continue that way.

Completely moot. Within the 1000-year timescale, we will have transferred every aspect of our bodies into machines that can do our bodies' work vastly better. Using wetware bodies will be a quaint pastime.

Where exactly do you think the tank goes after MECO?

The shuttle doesn't have a lot of maneuvering authority after MECO. To stay in space, it fires the OMS to circularize its orbit. The main tank has almost exactly the same orbit until that point, but doesn't circularize it, so it falls back down into the atmosphere. At the apogee, it's very much in space, though.

The funny thing about UT3 is that everyone agrees that it failed to live up to UT2004's awesomeness, but nobody can agree on the reasons for it.

Beyond the excellent onslaught mode and all the good stuff it succeeded in carrying over from UT, there was something ephemeral to UT2004's success. A lot of people say that UT3's fault is that it was developed for the PS3. I'm not sure how true that is. But UT2004 was a reboot of UT2003; maybe the Titan Pack can serve as the same kind of reboot for UT3, maybe not. I hope it will, or that Epic will make something unreal again to return it to popularity, because the Unreal series rocks.

Yeah, and community college work is far easier than any of the high school work I had to do.

Don't extrapolate your experiences in school to other people ;) There are some tough grad school programs out there!

No. Failing to name the exact or +/- 10% fraction of Earth that is covered in water most emphatically does NOT demonstrate a disregard for scientific knowledge.

Not to mention being the second architecture by count in the Top500 and being in the 4th and 5th fastest supercomputers in the world...