Good point.
And kudos to whomever spotted that script. I thought they were being sneaky using the light grey font so it didn't stand out. I popped the page over to my portrait monitor and sure enough the layout changes quite naturally to keep the Samsung notice out of sight.

Reminds me of when RIAA went after pirates of "The Love Guru"...
You can hardly call it a lost sale if no-one really wanted it in the first place.

I stopped installing Firefox onto all the machines I work on earlier this year when Flash instances started crashing it. This has been going on since about Firefox 13-present and Flash 11-present. I'm not going to mourn the eventual death of Flash, but I'm not limiting my browsing while I wait for the websites I use to replace it. If I wanted a sucky web experience, I'd get an Ipad.

It's one thing if you couldn't install Firefox or Chrome on your PC, but the whole browser issue is a bit of a dead horse. I don't see Apple getting smacked around for the browser defaults in their OS, nor Google. Faulting Microsoft for setting up IE is a bit like getting after Ford for selling a car with seats already installed.

Seriously, learn the shortcuts.
I was as upset about the loss of the start button as anyone, but having come across a list of the new windows key shortcuts, I'm now able to get things done faster than ever. The final version of Windows 8 is a 10000x better than that buggy POS preview edition.

Steam is full of crap as far as Windows vs. Linux goes for gaming. They're just shooting their mouths off like Acer did because they're afraid of any competition. I've got Steam and all my games installed on both my pc and notebook on the Windows 8 desktop and they run just as well, if not quicker now than they did under Windows 7. It wouldn't take Steam more than half an hour to turn their storefront into an "app" just so they're searchable in the marketplace. PC gamers aren't so stupid that we can't find the desktop or the site that sells PC games.

If Valve wants to invest in making Linux a more consistent experience for millions of different hardware configurations with a slick interface, that's super ! I don't think they can do that, but I'd like to be proven wrong.

We had a guest speaker at an ASME meeting a month and a half ago talking about this very issue, Dr. Bonnie Dunbar. She was speaking about her talks with congress about the importance of replacing these weather satellites and the response she got from the representatives was "why do we need satellites, can't we just get our weather from the internet".
A republic only works if you send your best and brightest off to handle the day-to-day decisions.Representatives that got their job via a popularity contest are usually no more fit make technical decisions than guys and gals who won the homecoming king & queen positions. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrrj9Wc2L84

Well put.
The MS approach is quite different from Apples. I'm not crazy about the extra mouse clicks required to get some things done under Windows 8, but a seamless experience across all my devices (or screens) feels like a net productivity gain. I ve tinkering with Linux and even OSX, but I still use Windows everywhere I want to get things done. Linux has some great components, but 2 copies of the same distribution aren't even guaranteed to be binary compatible let alone sharing a common structure. At the end of the day I want to be able to log into my profile, launch solidworks, office, or whatever program I need, and get work done.

I've been running the latest ROM from project Jandycane over on XDA, hardware acceleration works just fine. The one thing I haven't bothered to sort out yet is the sleep mode. With the stock Kindle Fire ROM you can hit the power button and leave the Fire in your bag for a week or two without the battery running down, now it's running in the background as if it were a phone and the battery's flat in a day.
Otherwise, it works far better now that it did unmodified.
If you want to run Amazon apps, just register it as one of your android devices and re-send the apps to it.
This article is a bit dated, Jandycane is now on 1.7.3 updated last Oct.1st, but it hasn't changed that much.
http://www.androidauthority.com/kindle-fire-jelly-bean-tablet-ui-jandycane-custom-rom-105945/

I tried that too, it also broke all my games and all my productivity.

Linux is a great idea and has many powerful tools, but for everyone who's not a comp-sci major, the OS is just supposed to launch the programs you want, and preferably do it fast.

A $99 'lazy tax' for everyone who doesn't want to format their hd, perform a clean install, setup their drivers, and download a ton of patches, etc...
meh, sounds pretty fair to me.
Those same people could have avoided all that junk installed on their pc if they'd just bought a computer assembled by an enthusiast company or a local computer shop in the first place. Those low prices at Best Buy or many online retailers are subsidized by all the crap they pre-load the systems with. Complaining about the crapware on an HP is like complaining about the ads on a "Kindle with special offers".

I tried to argue a reckless driving ticket using math and physics when I was younger. I was in the right and proved it conclusively based on the officers statement, but the back-woods judge just changed the charge to a misdemeanor and fined me anyhow for "anything you might have done in my county". When I asked about appealing his decision, the judge pointed out that it would cost $300 and him being the only judge, he'd probably say the same thing next time. If the court's looking to collect some money, the court's going to collect that money one way or another.

I wonder if Apple has a similar policy, although you can bet they have Microsoft Office installed everywhere they need people to be productive.

I hate Bluray, yes the picture and sound might be better than dvd (even with upscaling), but the DRM is a nightmare. Blurays in our LG theater system take 4-5 times as long to start up as dvd's and more frequently than not, new releases are incompatible until LG makes a firmware update available. If it doesn't play, it's as useless as an AOL cd. Once the movie starts I'm not worrying about the diff between 5.1 and 7.1 sound, nor am I nitpicking every pixel. If I am looking at little details like that, it means the movie is crap and I'm bored out of my mind.

Completely agree.
I'm reading way more now on my Kindle Touch than I was before. While the cost of books is about the same regardless the format, physical vs e-book, I only like to keep really good hardcovers in our library. With the Kindle I can find a quiet seat almost anywhere and immerse myself because I can carry it anywhere and when one book is finished, I just select the next book and carry on.

Tablets are not e-book readers, they're little computer screens. I don't like reading anything for very long on the computer, even code I want to go over, I'll print out to review. If it's not interactive,

Frankly if someone is harassing others with a toy aircraft and it's in an active hunting/shooting area, I can't imagine any other outcome. It's a stupid publicity stunt, nothing more.

I am curious what rights we have to shoot down drones.
It seems that the very nature of surveillance drones is going to make it difficult to differentiate between 'protected' & questionably legitimate law enforcement equipment and private peeping toms.

However you read the headline, here on slashdot, or in its original context, the story is still the same. Apple wants to cry about being unfairly put in the spotlight when it's far from being the only company making products in Chinese sweat shops. If you want to make yourself out to be the most publicly recognized with a high-and-mighty attitude, good or bad, the spotlight is going to fall on you. Take a look at how McDonald's has been treated over the years, amongst fast food burger chains their grub has the lowest calorie count by far (Wendy's triple Baconator anyone ?), but McDonald's is the public face of an inherently unhealthy industry. McDonald's can throw some apple slices in their happy meal and Apple can mandate suicide nets at their Foxconn plants, but it's not like either are really changing the game.

If our gadgets were made a little less like the instantly outdated disposable trash they are, we could all plan to keep them a little longer, meaning we could pay more for them and then they wouldn't have to be made under sweat shop conditions. If you want things quick and cheap, like a burger off the dollar menu, don't start whining about how inhumanely it's made or how unhealthy it is.

Why is there no option to downgrade/flag horrible stories. I'd love to see the Seattle Times run something this stupid, like "Why our mayor won't stop digging pot-holes" ...
I'm pretty sure everyone on slashdot is already well aware that there's hardly an ounce of truth in this article/troll. It's too bad the author couldn't be bothered to do any research, even a cursory peak at wikipedia would have made a substantial improvement in the quality of the article.
Next up, the internet will no longer be available to non-iPhone-5's because they lack quad core processors and thus the ability to render pages in a sufficiently timely manner. Apple's a company that has shown time and time again that they do not believe in supporting legacy equipment.

Siri'ously, if you don't like getting screwed by Apple on a regular basis, stop buying their over-priced, over-hyped, crap.

To massacre a bad pun, there's two types of people, the doers and the talkers. It doesn't matter what field you're in, the doers need math skills and the talkers will keep telling you math isn't that important.
Whoever gave that board member a BS (or any other degree) ought to seriously investigate them for cheating because he's got to have cheated.