Because Apple makes a lot of money selling proprietary overpriced cables. They are overpriced enough that they can get away with including identification systems that attempt to prevent third-party cables from working.

The original news article (in Catalan) says she was stopped while trying to cross into France, where they took the car, and "routinely searched" it for an hour and a half before it was returned. Afterwards a month later she was approached by the same police body in Valencia, right after she parked outside the conference. That's when she decided it was too much to be just coincidence, and searched the car.

The news article (in Catalan) says she searched her car after two incidents where the local police approached her for identification in unusual places, as if they knew where she was going. The second time it just seemed way too suspicious so she decided to search the car.

... I'll be forced to question their intelligence. Communism or no, exporting services means the country gets an intake of money, without this transaction resulting in the country having less resources as a result. Making additional copies of software is virtually free.

And long before the window ends...

Consider it a 3.5GB graphics card, with 500mb of "last resort" memory.

As my employer, you should get sued for invasion of privacy, and I should be compensated for the time it may take to find a new job in a non-corrupt company.

No need to shoot. If you don't vote me, my guys will decide to have their business in front of your shop, and if their business scares all your customers away... well that's your problem.

It doesn't need to be. It's still a history lesson. Not many young people would know that in the past you'd actually call a library to ask them questions. Heck, I'm 30 and I would have never considered calling them!

At which point I think I trust Microsoft not to sue me more than Oracle.

HDDs usually die from mechanical failure rather than the magnetic surface wearing out. I'm not aware of the surface wearing out being something to worry about, since all the headers do is spin around the magnetic poles on the material. But the headers can scratch the surface causing bad sectors, the stepper motors can die, etc. In some cases it's possible to recover critical information by placing the platters on a non-damaged disk, although opening a modern HDD has to be done inside very clean rooms so that no dust gets inside the disk.

The link's path is /freePS3.php -- anyone clicking that DESERVES to be fancy pivot charted.

I may be taking public transport, or share a car with people, but NEVER using a service provided by that company.

Under common usage patterns, you can expect up to 25 years life for first-gen SLC, 15 years for first-gen MLC, 10 years for current-gen MLC, 5 years for current-gen TLC. MTBF is lower due to defective cells and such, but that's also true for HDDs.

As many as research teams in need of more funding.