You mean to tell me that such an organized, concerted and government-directed effort by the Chinese to hack other countries on a corporate and national scale is actually BORING?

I can't believe it isn't more of a grass-roots effort with neat 3D graphics and Jolie boobs like in the movie Hackers!!

As great as the 'Egg is, they tend to be overpriced for everyday purchasing.

If you can wait:
My best suggestion is to get an account at fatwallet (a coupon/deal aggregator and forums site), and set up a "topic alert" where you get emails sent to you whenever a good deal with a specific keyword (I used "i5" as well as "14" "14.1" for my keywords for my last lappy). Also frequently visit slickdeals as they have a nicer layout and faster response time for sales of limited quantity.

It's usually these deal aggregator sites that pick up the best limited quantity sales of clearances (which will almost always be Win7 nowadays). And this will include anything good from the 'Egg.

If you are lucky
Outlets! One of the greatest things about outlets is the option to buy laptops that people have ordered, built, but then cancelled. These are "New" (as opposed to the dented box, or refurbs) on the outlet, and often come hundreds cheaper than buying completely brand new.
Outlets also have sales of 20-30+% off that will be picked up by SD and FW.

Of course, finding one of these takes a bit of patience as well as luck, but that's how I got my most recent lappy.

To all the apparent fanboys who think that dedicated media consumption devices should be PCs just because they perform better than something from two decades ago, there is one very obvious distinction that you are all blatantly but unintentionally pointing out:

All of these devices were still the cutting edge technology of their time, especially as far as personal productivity and capability was concerned!
Sure the very original mac couldn't compile its own code. But it also beat the hell out of a typewriter.
And the iPad's A# processors destroy the original Cyrix, 3/486, Pentiums what have you! I'm surprised we even bothered with those processors at all, pfft!

Now crawl out of the reality-distortion fanboy bubble and look at today and what do you see? These devices are far from forefront of doing anything productive, have just good-enough specs for media consumption, and are a pain to use even if you look at the most modest metrics of productivity such as responding (no, not just reading) an email, or working with a spreadsheet.

Yes, personal computers did used mean something. And I believe they still should.

From TFA:

Originally, I thought the judge lost his marbles. Of course it's more akin to stealing something rather than just trespass, they are part of stealing/redistributing a product!

But then I realized how the media conglomerates played the whole DRM thing as effectively leasing you (and only you) the rights to listen to the music you purchased (and only in the media format they presented it!). That sure sounds a bit like charging an admission's fee to experience some wonderful scenery to me (a scenery experience that you obviously can't share with anyone else!). In that respect, it really does seem like NZB(2) did was criminally trespass over this entity of music or what-have-you that we are allowed to take part in (but not take a part of).

Seems like the MPAA screwed their own pooch on this one. I hope this sets a precedence (even if Bri'ish) and people can start owning their music again.

The summary reads hilariously reminiscent of this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkCNJRfSZBU

Same here. In fact, this is what your post looked like to me...

There are quite a few posts talking about how this isn't natural selection. How it's not evolution. How they should have done this with genetic engineering. How everyone who can write a comment would have done it better than these guys. That's very cute.

It's important to keep in mind that natural selection will effectively span the full probability space of all possible traits as far as offspring go, and only the strongest survive.

What that means is twofold:

1. Given that you're trying to study tradeoffs in nature within the same species, you obviously don't want to engineer any combination of traits that wouldn't occur naturally.

2. What the scientists did was exactly what they should have done. They selected traits that could have occurred naturally, but with a small probability. By enhancing these traits, you can then assess how over time and generations the inheritance would play out.

Obviously, the study's scope wasn't as far-reaching as the ultimate evolutionary end-game of guppies (that would require somehow objectively quantifying the increase in survivability due to larger brain size vs. sheer number of offspring), but they do manage to demonstrate a pretty strong dependence (more than correlation, as this was a directly applied change vs. a control) of the compromise in energy expenditures in developing organs.

Yes, if the results were anything other than "common sense", it would be remarkably exciting news that would warrant further study as to the hiding spot of our brainy fish-overlords. But in science, sometimes it's just as difficult (albeit slightly less rewarding) to isolate a fundamental tenet in its most distilled form.

From TFA (second link):

The dimensions of hyperbole in that statement are impossible to exaggerate, too. Reading that second link (possibly written by a very bitter pundit-turned-scientist Rove) was an absolute waste of time bemoaning everything from NASA considering too many options before making a decision, to Mitt Romney losing the presidential race. OP's summary was more educational and less biased than that pile.

is it worth reading slashdot, if, reading it means reading poorly edited summaries like these? Is it worth reading slashdot, if, reading it means reading poorly edited summaries like these?

Champions? It sounds like whoever says the most offensive thing that pisses off the most people is a champion to you, right?
In that case, let me be your personal champion and tell you that you are a self-righteous pompous shithead of a moron. Does that make me your champion? You fucking idiot. (How about now?)

As much as I love the quote of how "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it.", I'm pretty sure we've gone to war and killed people who were more respectful, level-headed and compassionate people that either the WBC or yourself.

So stop being so fucking proud of the worse-case scenario of the first amendment and learn to be less of a jackass.

It's not a testament to how strong the first amendment is, as much as it is a testament to how low humanity can sink during times of tragedy for the sake of attention and feeling mightier-than-thou compared to the next guy. And and by the way you little shit, I'm not just talking about the WBC, this includes you.

I'd almost agree, but it's hard to ignore fuckheads like that at a kid's funeral.
If they want to mess with people during a very personal and private situation, I have no qualms that their own privacy bubble gets a huge fucking hole in it.

Sad thing is, it's not even close to a taste of their own medicine. Your cell phone is out in public? Oh tough shit, gonna have to change your number. What are the families at the funeral going to do about anything in their situation to even remotely get back to where they were?

Escape Goat. This is Guatemala after all.

What's with all the complaints? How is this not news for nerds?

We thought the heliosphere should have ended earlier. It (surprisingly, without sarcasm) hasn't. It's explained within the same summary what the expected metrics for such a boundary should be (a change in the direction of the magnetic field), as well as a quantification of the closeness (that extra-solar particles are making forays into Voyager's sensors) of said boundary.

Add a dash of the fact that we are able to communicate through outer space with four-decades old technology, and I'm really not seeing what there is to bitch about.

Oh and the Mars rover? Yeah it's still being analyzed whether the "complex hydrocarbons" are actually organic compounds, just like how it was still being analyzed whether the timing glitch in the LHC was a violation of general relativity. That is speculation, it's not news (at least not for nerds).

As much as I'd like to fogey things up and chalk it up to bean-counters and cost-cutting... Honestly, great technology is what happened (and keeps happening).

Building something to last is pointless when something twice as good/fast/efficient/what-have-you comes along sooner (and at the same or lower price) than the half-life that your product was designed for.

This obviously isn't the case for things like clothing or watches or automobiles (or industrial-grade anything), but the tau=1/e of consumer-grade technology is just too ridiculous sometimes for the "ol'-fashioned" way of doing things.

With freakin' lasers attached to their heads!