Terabyte drives (or close to them) are practically a standard in new desktops. It would have been much more practical to lower the absurdly-high 16 GB of RAM (c'mon, does it need more than 8 as the baseline?) and use the cost savings there to beef up on storage, either through more space available or SSDs.

You could very well ask them why they prefer a competitor's products; I'd encourage anyone in this situation (including Microsoft) to do so. There's a huge difference, however, between allowing employees to bring in their personal Macs for work purposes and allowing employees to use your hardware refresh funding or hardware stipends on an excessively expensive competitor's product. The whole situation regarding banning iPods was ridiculous, and they were rightly mocked for doing so. Still, this scenario is about what Microsoft allows to be done with its own money, and I can't particularly demonize them for making this choice.

If Apple were a competitor to my products, I'd absolutely prevent employees from using company funds to purchase Macs. If we're a BYOD shop, with devices purchased with private money, then no problem...but I'm not helping out a rival, especially given the cost of Apple's hardware.

I do find it kind of interesting that they've waited this long to blatantly say it, though. Perhaps they're now starting to see Apple as a more viable competitor to their interests?

I can't disagree with the fact that men usually get the short end of the stick regarding divorce and child-related proceedings. Still, the issue here IS about free speech; how can a judge reasonably order someone to issue an apology online like this, while the man was (presumably) writing within Facebook's Terms of Service and directing his thoughts to his friends and family? Facebook pages may be public, but so what; it's still a medium for personal thought, much like a blog. This is actually quite disturbing, and something we need to be proactive against whenever possible.

That's exactly what it is...musically speaking; the rests are often equally important to the rest of the notes. In fact, an entire composition (John Cage's "4'33" is dedicated to the "sound" of silence: http://youtu.be/hUJagb7hL0E

It's an absolute travesty that it took nearly a year to have this domain returned. A lot of people make their livelihoods from their websites; domains are brands, and the government erroneously damaged these guys' ability to operate. I'd recommend seeking damages if the website was a source of income; even if it wasn't, something needs to be done to prove the point that a little more thought and due process needs to occur before arbitrarily taking things down.

...now the inane mumblings and poor grammar of the Twitter Age will be remembered throughout history. I was kinda hoping we'd eventually be able to forget all of this ever happened.

Your local comic shop proprietor(s) truly thank you for it. A friend of mine owns a shop in South Florida, and it's amazing how difficult it is for these shops to stay open given so many competing avenues to purchase comics and such. Between the national book chains, digital comics, etc., it seems that the publishers hardly care about the little shops that have fostered and helped to grow the comic-loving community over all these years.

Don't even get me started with the artificial scarcity of DC's "New 52," which I'm fairly certain was orchestrated to push digital comic sales while the physical shops had little to no stock...

A bit excessive, don't you think? All of that on top of, say, a manslaughter charge is a little rough for an accident.

It's nice to see someone take a stand for a change. I doubt it'll accomplish much, but it's a start...

If you seriously think that there have been "no new stories, no new characters..." introduced in relation to Star Wars, you are likely a very close-minded individual, or someone who doesn't think reading novels or playing games are enjoyable activities. To each their own, of course; however, there have been a number of well-written stories that use the Star Wars universe as a framework.

I certainly won't argue that Lucas has reaped every ounce of money he can out of his franchise (which by the way is his right, so long as people are willing to pay), but to trivialize the works of other creative individuals who use his work as the tool with which to tell their tales is akin to calling all programs written in (insert programming language here) crap because they're using a [perhaps] old tool to complete the task. What kind of sense does that make?

At the rate things are headed, they certainly won't have to steam open any letters; you'll receive them clearly opened, with an official government seal marked "Approved." That is, if you receive it at all.