One of my customers is a Lenovo shop. All the Lenovo machines have DisplayPort. We have a bucket full of DisplayPort to DVI adapters since very few monitors have native DisplayPort adapters yet.

Apple, of course, just has to be different - they, and they alone, use Mini DisplayPort.

Also, back in the days of CRT monitors, in a large environment (2000 desktops) we would have one or two go bad each month. Occasionally they would even catch fire. Since the introduction of LCDs, I can't actually remember ever RMAing one that wasn't physically damaged. You can complain about a lot of things with LCDs - most notably, the way the manufacturers screw with the color representation to get garish, cartoon-like colors that make the demo look good but everything else look awful. It's the volume wars but for color.

When you say people, do you mean car manufacturers? Because when I'm driving, I usually turn on the one and only set of headlights my car is equipped with. If they are brighter than you'd prefer, blame Honda, not me.

Cage match: "senior network engineers" vs the government of China. Who are you betting on?

I think the drive to "have a storyline" is what's killing games, by turning them into movies. What was the storyline of Asteroids or Pac-Man?

The problem with modern games is that the gameplay is exactly the same across many many titles. Most FPSs have pretty much the same gameplay. The breakout indie successes are almost always about gameplay, not storyline.

Also, "I have some code on my machine that I worked on in 1979" is never prior art because there is no proof you didn't write it yesterday and backdate it. It has to be published or findable in a library or otherwise dateable. It's sometimes pretty hard to find prior art even for obvious things, because people don't usually write and store documents on obvious things.

What mail client is better? Gmail's web interface?

The point is that someone probably already has.

I'd keep the roommate who steals $2.50 out of my wallet every month for loopy dreams of space travel, and ditch the roommate who steals $100 out of my wallet every month to buy bullets and bombs with which he rains terror from the skies on some of our neighbors.

Or, depending on who you are, the usefulness might be that no-one else can.

Thank you for what I assume was a well formed insult. What does it mean?

Liberals don't think government has no problems. They just think the solution is to fix them.

Problem: Inadequate response to Katrina/Gulf oil spill.
Liberal proposal: Better funding and training so next disaster gets a better response.
Conservative proposal: Disband FEMA and cut taxes.

Only one of these proposals is actually a solution.

If only that were true.

The problem is that car crashes are boring but airplane crashes are exciting. So I know that a small plane landed on a highway in Kentucky and nobody was hurt, but I don't know a thing about the half dozen fatal car accidents that probably happened in my city this month.

It only took one airship accident for the entire concept of airships to be abandoned for generations.

Name another product which went from zero to 20% of all worldwide PCs in one year. Or three years.

In our world, the official system is still the path of least resistance. In the world you describe, that is no longer the case. Most people are lazy and just do whatever requires the minimum effort. So in your world, everyone is a pirate, because the official system has become more of a pain in the ass than using Bittorrent.

It's like countries with laws against non-official currency conversion, and an utterly ruinous official exchange rate. Everyone (*every* *single* *person*) uses the non-official system. Yes, sometimes the government tries to enforce its laws and throws people in jail. But this is viewed as a natural disaster like being struck by lightning. Nobody actually stops using the non-official system. They just accept the risk as a part of life.

When everyone is a pirate, the official distribution system stops providing any revenue to content creators. It no longer benefits Disney to declare a moratorium on a particular title, because when they open it up again, nobody buys it - they were watching it all along, through non-official channels. Disney, and all the other studios, either adapts to reality or goes out of business.

And that's why it will never happen. Any DRM so restrictive that consumers stop buying it will be dropped by the studios.

The reality is that there is always something to repair.