Selling "nothing" for a high hourly billable over an extended contract term is the pinnacle of selling. Don't minimize IBM's profit-generating prowess in this respect.

Aaaaaaand.... there's the inevitable guest appearance by our favorite Alliance Mon Calamari admiral.

Il est dangereux d'avoir raison dans des choses où des hommes accrédités ont tort.
(It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.)

You've highlighted the fundamental issue of Apple, post-Jobs.

Tim Cook may or may not be a fine CEO if executing the business plan is all you want. But he can't market for shit. If The Sainted Steve had yanked that speculative crap out of his skinny ass, his RDF would have Jedi-mind-tricked the tame press into believing it, evangelizing it, and providing any post-hoc justification he needed.

Apple stopped being a religion with the passing of Steve Jobs.

"compile by hand" and "assemble by hand" means "write out the results on paper".

After that, you have to get the machine code into core. That's what the front panel is for.

Is this somehow new to you? Are you really that young, and that unfamiliar with computing history?

Of course, if you have a functional operating system you think you can trust, you can poke the machine code into a file using a binary editor (that you think you can trust), and then execute that file as the compiler.

Read about bootstrapping. It's a real thing, or at least was. Cross-compiling has kind of eliminated the need, except in the rather exotic use case that you don't trust the compiler (à la Ken Thompson).

Hand-compile, then hand-assemble, and finally poke opcodes into RAM with front-panel switches.

No, I'm not kidding.

the mayors of several crime-plagued cities release a joint announcement that reporting apparent crimes in progress to police would result in the arrest and summary punishment of the person making the police report.

"If you losers would stop reporting crimes, we wouldn't have so much crime," one prominent mayor stated to this reporter. "We're going to push down crime rates the only way that works: make it impossible to report a crime."

When asked for a comment, the aforementioned mayor's Chief of Police muttered "Whaddyawant, I'm busy here" through a mouthful of donut while pocketing a thickly-stuffed brown paper envelope proffered by an unidentifed man flanked by several apparent bodyguards.

What you call "honesty", sharp players call "foolishly giving away tactical surprise."

Cuz, you know, some of the suckas making them rich might object if someone explained to them that they were being suckas.

Never forget that "dumb" fits nicely between "fat" and "happy".

This breakthrough finding also explains why photography adds 10 pounds to its subjects. Flash photography, probably even more.

Surely (well, hopefully) there is more to the legal system than "I know you are but what am I?". Someone please tell me there's more to it than that.

Well, sure, Citizen, rest assured that it's much more substantial than that.

In fact, the legal system is "I know you are, and I can afford better laywers."

One of the first "pay to win" games.

1. Agreed.

2. You'd still get sued for confusing similarity and passing off, since tau only has one leg less than pi. It's INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, you just CAN'T TAKE ANY CHANCES!

You're right. There's just no telling what kinds of incalculable damage is being done to the reputation of Slashdot and the psyche of its membership by being denied another Bitcoin story, a Dice slashvertisement, or another Bennet Haselton blog post masquerading as a slashstory. Because, you know, bringing one inappropriate story to the front page is clearly denying the really important stuff the critical editorial attention every story deserves.

"Whoosh": the sound a basketball makes going over your head.

Basketball, as a sport, already has some familiarity with this problem.

Good point. The Sirius Cybernetics Clonomatic Person Dispenser would probably decant something almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Natalie Portman. And don't ask about the grits, hot or otherwise.