Remember, if the person holding you hostage is over your shoulder looking at the screen while you order, you can still call for help - just order the pizza with extra anchovies! You will either get the police, or at least Patrick Dempsey!

I bet they will patent all our genomes and then we'll be screwed: of course you can have children without paying us, as long as they are not rectangular with rounded corners and do not contain these 20 amino-acids in our list...

I have been reading headlines for "Oculus Rift" on /. etc for years. I never read the articles apart from the first 1 or 2, since I found out that Oculus Rift is an "exciting" VR headset and that pretty much covered it for me. Maybe I am getting old, I don't know - for example I do remember me being excited before the Virtual Boy was released. In any case having seen so many headlines over the years, without actually paying any attention to them I had assumed this was a real product and modestly popular. But it is not out yet and not going to be until 2016? That raised my eyebrow and I clicked on the link to find out this "product" I hear about all these years "exists" only as some dark renders on an even darker background? Wow, that's it then, I MUST be getting old...

I also have an unsecured wifi neighbor for the last two years. It was very helpful when I first moved in, it took over 2 weeks for my ISP to connect me. Of course I installed a couple of repeaters to extend their network nicely, but this time secured! We don't want more people mooching off this nice neighbor! It's still my backup network if something goes wrong with mine (or I want to borrow a different IP for nefarious purposes).

They make you upgrade to the latest version, whether you want to or not, otherwise your software stops working. It is more obvious on the desktop of course. Every version they release, they remove at least one of the features I like, but in the end I have to upgrade otherwise a critical piece of software (e.g. Xcode) will not run. That would not be that bad (except releases like Yosemite which are that bad), but then they suddenly decide that your hardware cannot upgrade to the latest OS, without which your software won't work, ergo you have to get a new device.
So while on first glance it looks much better than the Android mess, it is not the best possible scenario either.
My favorite ever mobile OS was MaeMo/MeeGo (N900 & N9 owner) and now that I think about it it even had that right. You could install newer OS versions if you wanted, you did not really have to, but they were actually better by adding more features.

I do hope they have cross-checked this IP with their service centers...

In seriousness now, I won't make fun of the part where they went for the vendor with the most posh consumer tablet, instead of having something customized for this job.
But I am wondering, since it was just supposed to replace the paper manuals, why weren't those manuals the backup? Ok, don't carry them around all the time, but shouldn't they still be available as a backup to take them to the pilots if there is trouble with the ipads instead of just canceling the flight?

we are just talking about email addresses here, right? Or is it something else I am not familiar with? No, I will not RTFA to find out, who do you take me for?

I don't get it, you win an appeal on a higher court, but instead of giving you a ruling they send you back to the lower court judge, urging her to reconsider? Is this common and is there a specific reasoning on why it is done so?

You mean people would be furious Apple is not making sure nobody else can listen to the songs they have bought? Whenever someone is ranting about a particularly "bad DRM" they sure as hell don't mean it is not secure enough.

No, I don't!

So, Intel was paying Dell essentially up to $1 Billion a year to not carry AMD just for fun? They were not going to go AMD anyway, even though they were so much faster, cooler and even cheaper?
Back in 2003-2004 we wanted to buy a few dozen servers for our lab at my University. My professor who had gotten the grant had gotten offers from various companies, Dell offering Xeon-based ones and others (HP and Sun I think?) offering Opteron-based. I was given remote access to a sample Dell server and a sample Opteron server (sorry I forget exactly what it was), and was asked to benchmark them. So, I benchmarked with the actual software we were using. The fact that the Xeons back then were 32bit while the Opterons were 64bit added to the speed difference and made a devastating difference. Sure, our natural language processing suite written in Perl was not getting much of the 64bit benefit, so it was "only" about 40% faster on the AMD server, but any of the computational-biology C code was over 2x faster. I gave my report and the Professor was going to go with an AMD server, when Dell came back and gave him a quote at less than half the price. They were actually selling each server less than what just the CPU was supposed to cost. I could not understand how they could do that. Well, now we know how.
Oh, to finish the story, the Professor told me he would go with Dell and buy more since they were so cheap and we would end up with more processing power. I warned him about the fact that the Dells were producing more heat and having even more of them would be a problem. It was hard to say no to such a good deal though, so the school bought the Dells. Then they had to wait for an upgraded electrical and air-conditioning system to be installed since the head/power requirements went up. It was a State University so it took almost a year. Also, the Dell file servers had a bunch of disks too close together and a dual Xeon throwing hot air over them, so a second disk would probably fail before the RAID array could restore from the previous disk failure. But most of those 100+ Dell servers are still running. Sure they are about as fast as a P4 that your knowledge-able friends made fun of even back then, but at least there is a LOT of them...
To return from the digression, my point when I started replying was that if the market was free, Intel would not have all that money and all those years (eternity for CPU manufacturing) to surpass AMD. AMD would have been the one selling and making money in the meantime, which would have meant more R&D for themselves to maintain a lead.
Anyway, let's hope we will never return to the thousand-dollar prices for desktop CPUs we were enjoying back in the good ol' Intel-only days.

I don't get your point. Isn't *THIS* a slip-up that is much worse than the SpaceX designed-to-be-expendable barges?

Wow, that is the understatement of the century. AMD at one point did decide not to be a "mini Intel" and become a technology leader. Do you realize that while AMD had a far superior product for several years, Intel threw money (and threats - as was proved) to every retailer/integrator/etc out there to not carry AMD (and did other "interesting" things such as rig their industry standard compilers etc). Intel was allowed to use strong-arm tactics that "scream" anti-trust and after many years an almost bankrupt AMD was allowed to accept a small payment and Intel went scot-free.
If you have a product that is far ahead of the competition, you should be allowed to capitalize on that. If you are illegally not allowed by thepowerful players, there should be some sort of protection for that, before it is too late. But I guess the DoJ was sleeping at the wheel...
You have to remember, the Athlon was getting a firm lead on the P3 and Intel got out the P4 as a "response". The P4, the processor now universally known as the biggest "dog" by virtually everyone (even in its final and much, much improved incarnations), eventually abandoned even by intel to go back to a saner P3-derived architecture, was actually welcomed with laurels, both by (most of) the press and the integrators. AMD put all this R&D effort and they got nothing out of it, instead the were bleeding money for years, while Intel was making money with the current situation being a very weak AMD next to a behemoth. It is too bad for us, because the sole reason Intel CPUs are affordable is AMD - I won't remind you how much Intel charged per-CPU before there was competition. The sole reason Intel CPUs are this fast (or even that their consumer products are 64bit) is AMD. I only hope in some miracle for AMD to survive and get some competition going, otherwise there will be no-one left to keep Intel in check and consumers will pay for it...
So, yeah, the greatest industrial robbery of all time has been largely forgotten. AMD just "failed to capitalize", they were "obsessed with being a mini Intel"...

Pearson was Apple's subcontractor. Apple was supposed to get $780 out of every ipad (yep, you heard right, retail+ price) and Pearson $200. I haven't seen the contract, but if the various news sources is correct, it is Apple who is basically making the offer by bundling software of their choice...