But you never know if you could have gotten the better deal even when you do agree. You may indeed get a price that you agree on but you never know how low the dealer might have gone.

You're absolutely right, of course, but in my case, I placed a non-trivial value on my free time, and given that what I was offering was a couple thousand dollars under the researched "invoice price" (which of course is bogus, given the nebulous value of the dealer's holdback and other potential dealer incentives) and *many* thousands under the MSRP, I felt that it was at the very least a fair price and that it represented a case of diminishing returns to pursue anything lower.

If it helps any, I hate the car. It's what my ex wanted to get, not me.

Who here has actually had a 'good' experience when buying a car from a dealer?

The last car I bought was pretty much trouble-free. I researched the vehicle, determined what I was willing to pay for it, and called the dealerships with my out-the-door price. Three of them balked, the fourth faxed me a quote with my price, and I picked the car up later that day for exactly that amount. They weren't real pleased to find out I already had financing in place through my bank, but that wasn't my problem. :-)

Haggling means that the person with the most experience at it wins

No, haggling means the person that's least willing to walk away loses. It's not hard, you just have to say, "okay, no deal then", get in your car, and drive away if they won't sell for what you're willing to pay. Plus you get the bonus of knowing the salesman is going to be sweating as he explains to the sales manager why he lost the sale.

All they need to do is place a generator on a trailer and tow it with them.

If you don't mind spending thousands of dollars on a generator that can keep up with the car's power drain, and the snickers of everyone around you when you pull into a gas station with your $100K EV to fill up the tank. :-)

A 39 inch 4kTV is the equivalent of 4 20 inch 1080p monitors together.

But useless for when you need to run the debugged program full-screen while watching what happens in a debugger, network sniffer, etc. at the same time. There really are times when you need multiple displays not just for the added screen area, but because each display is being used for something different.

What do game programmers need?

Multiple displays that work well for the task at hand.

There is no warrant with the use of a stingray device, hence no legal permission for a search

Not to mention the various FCC-related issues.

The same is true of Publix in the Southeast. Their normal pricing is higher than Walmart, but they run so many sales and BOGOs that it often ends up as a wash.

The reality is closer to "any delivery man could one day decide to just steal your mail, and this is pretty likely to happen actually". But why don't they? In fact why doesn't anyone with some control over your life use that position to screw you over and take what they want? It's the question never pondered.

There's not much need to ponder the question, because it *does* happen. Not on a huge, sweeping scale (not including the NSA stuff, anyway), but it's enough to be concerned about.

Choreography is so dependent on timing anyhow that they'd rather have the singers step on their dicks than make the entire crew have to adjust to the mistake.

That's a whole different ball of wax. If the lead doing her pretty solo under a follow spot screws up and misses a verse, we can compensate and help her out. However, if we're doing something like "West Side Story" and someone gets lost in the midst of 30 other people doing their thing, that's their problem - we're not going to wreck dozens of people like that trying to save the soloist. :-)

If you want to get around BitLocker, you don't bother exploiting BitLocker, you just install a kernel driver that filters ALL read/writes to volumes, this would be just as effective against TrueCrypt as it is against BitLocker.

On Windows you don't even need to do that. Detours gives you the ability to intercept any API call you'd like. Hook the appropriate file I/O calls, and you're done, no compromised drivers needed. Of course, there are ways to determine that the calls have been detoured, but there's practically no software in common use that does this.

The problem with using recordings is that the musicians normally synchronise themselves and follow cues from the stage.

This is the biggest issue for me. Most of my pit experience is from playing musicals, and while everything you said applies, there's another issue - when one of the performers has a brain fart and skips the first verse of a song, a real pit orchestra responds instantly and seamlessly because they're listening to what's going on independently of the conductor, and know the show. If an actor misses a cue, the orchestra vamps until he gets his act together, and can make it sound like nothing out of the ordinary happened. If for some reason the conductor gets out of sync with what's happening on stage, the orchestra knows to ignore him and to follow the stage when need be. All of those situations have happened to me personally, and I've yet to see an electronic performance that can deal with them effectively.

Having said that, I agree with some of the other posters that most of the sampled/recorded music in musical theater today is there because of money. It's not cheap to field even a small (5-7 members) pit orchestra for a show that does even only five performances per week. It's been years since I had the opportunity to play a show simply because all the theaters around where I live don't use live music anymore.

Yeah, tell that to the IRS when you go to pull your records during an audit... ;-)

Super AMOLED is superb.

Agreed, as long as you're inside. My S4 is a bear to use outside because you just can't see the display worth a damn in bright sunlight.

But small companies with a few machines in a co-lo? This could get ugly.

It doesn't have to. Just set up a cheap hardware firewall and keep the IPMI ports on local addresses only accessible via VPN. If the firewall/router can handle the traffic, it's often a good idea to NAT the servers' public interfaces as well so that if you have to change your public IPs all you have to change is the firewall/router config without touching the servers themselves.