This is true as far as it goes, but the behavior when overclocked is telling for more than how well you can overclock: At the risk of stating the obvious, the chips the overclockers are having heat issues with are the ones Intel is manufacturing. That means Intel isn't going to be able to ramp the clock speed very easily for the same reasons that the overclockers are running into trouble, unless there is some significant and avoidable flaw in the chip or the process that they can remove in future revisions.

On the plus side, this gives AMD a little breathing room to try to catch up a little.

Certainly. When you pass laws that are vague and non-compliance results in outrageously expensive litigation, you can easily predict that the response will be inefficient prophylactic measures. Ignoring that and passing the legislation anyway makes you responsible for causing the response the legislation induces.

I want to clarify what I'm advocating here. I don't really see a problem with a law that prohibits you from discriminating in hiring on the basis of race, as long as the law doesn't allow the conclusion that you have done so based on a collage of cherry picked circumstantial evidence. But some of them do. (Especially the ones at the state and local level which are often carelessly drafted and passed with minimal debate.)

The problem is that you're not taking into account how businesses react to laws like that. They don't just say "we're not racists, so no problem, we'll just keep doing what we've been doing," instead they put together a huge bureaucratic compliance process. In many cases they establish quotas because in the past people have argued that underrepresentation of minorities is evidence of racism, leading to hiring of unqualified applicants in order to satisfy the quotas. Even without quotas, there is often internal pressure to hire questionable minority applicants whenever they are nominally qualified, to the exclusion of those who seem to be a better fit but are the "wrong" color.

Racism is not an effective method of fighting racism.

The Microsoft case was a very different set of facts: Microsoft did agree to a license from Sun, and did call their version Java, but then violated the license contract by making their version incompatible. Moreover, Sun sued Microsoft for antitrust violations, and Microsoft settled the case rather than Sun winning in court.

The Google case is about copyright and patents. Oracle is claiming a copyright over the API (which is ridiculous), and for a collection of patents the majority of which have now been rejected by the Patent Office and the remainder of which appear to be non-essential performance optimizations that in the worst case could probably be worked around without breaking anything serious (and it has yet to be decided whether even those claims will hold up in the end).

The whole thing feels like Oracle just being extremely petty and vindictive because they overplayed their hand in the license negotiations, Google called their bluff and now Oracle is butthurt and acting irrationally. (I mean lets face it, the invalidation of the majority of the patents they've tried to assert has already hurt Oracle more than the lawsuit is likely to hurt Google, and that had to have been a predictable outcome of all of this if Oracle had been thinking clearly.)

The open source implementations of Java are licensed under actual open source licenses. There is not one word in the GPL that says you can't use it on a mobile device. The way Sun/Oracle maintains control over "Java" notwithstanding that they released their own implementation under the GPL is by licensing the trademark. If you want to call it Java(TM) then you need a trademark license. Sun has said as much. But Google isn't calling it Java(TM). And given that, it seems like they could pretty easily have done away with the copyright claims going forward just by licensing one of the open source implementations which inherited from Sun's GPL'd implementation, if they wanted to. Apparently instead they've decided that the copyright claims are silly -- it is an independent implementation -- so they'd rather fight it. (I can't say I blame them. Oracle is a bit of a jerk. "We want $6 Billion dollars durr hurr.")

Google doesn't have a license from Sun for Java (or Java(TM) or whatever), the negotiations broke down and Google decided to do their own implementation instead. What do Sun's license terms have anything to do with anything if Google hasn't agreed to them?

The copyright question is very much whether they "need" a license to do what they did, i.e. creating an independent implementation that implements the same API. (I think there is also another question about a few lines of a range check function that is line-for-line identical between Sun's OpenJDK and Google's version... but it seems to have come out that the reason for that is that the code was originally written by a Google engineer and then accepted into OpenJDK. Way to reward your contributors, Oracle.)

Are you seriously suggesting that they bought off the judge? Give me a break.

Do your friends not have their own money? Also, play Starcraft. It has spawn copies.

It's 2012, is this really a thing? You can get an AMD A-series laptop which is faster than any existing console for like $400. What kind of Pentium 4-era dumpster bait are your friends using?

So let them use your other computer. Most people with computers have multiple computers: Either you have a desktop and a laptop, or a new computer and an old computer, or your computer and your brother's computer, etc.

And don't be such a pedant. An alternative doesn't have to be 100% better at every individual thing in order for it to be better on net.

Have them bring their laptops?

Your argument generalizes to the idea that any product for which the seller pays for shelf space has negative value. This occurs pretty much anywhere that distributor intermediaries have sufficient market power to abuse it, specifically where customers choose the distributor intermediary based on more considerations than solely which third party service (e.g. search engine) they offer.

Kindly troll elsewhere.

I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong about Steam, but it's worth keeping mind that today's minor inconvenience can easily turn into tomorrow's accursed blood-boiling permanent loss of every game you own.

Let me give you an example: Suppose this app store model catches on in games, and Microsoft, Apple or Google creates a Steam competitor that really storms the market, and Valve and Steam go the way of the dinosaurs. Really, even regardless of the reason, this is bound to happen eventually: No company lasts forever. Maybe it goes the other way and DRM dies out entirely, and they ultimately decide they aren't even going to support the legacy ones anymore.

One way or another there is going to come a day when they turn those servers off, and a day after that when you buy a new computer and can't install a single one of your games on it because the Steam servers are dead and gone. You have to make the decision today as to whether you want to have to tear your hair out on that future day or not.

As for me, I won't be buying any game with DRM. Ever.

That'll show them.

Voting is necessary but not sufficient. The vote comes too late: If the incumbent wins, he thinks he's got a mandate to keep doing what he's been doing. If the incumbent loses, the new guy thinks he's got a mandate to do whatever he wants. In no event does voting send the right message, unless your vote actually changes the outcome of the election -- and good luck with that.

You need to make sure they understand what you need them to do before the election, that way they can actually do it. We didn't stop SOPA by voting anybody out of office -- we stopped it with millions of letters and phone calls, threatening to vote them out. If it actually comes down to you having to make good on the threat, you can certainly vote them out if you have the numbers, but by then it's already too late.

You can't just make a credible threat and then execute it. You're missing the most important part, which is to make sure they understand that you're going to kick them to the curb if they don't do what you want. So get off your ass and write a letter to your congress critters.

You're making the mistake of trying to use external facts to determine what somebody meant. None of that actually matters unless it went into Lindholm's thought process when making the statement.

And it remains the case that the most obvious interpretation of the statement is probably the correct one: "I'm not a lawyer, but we can probably just throw money at someone and make it go away, right?"

Which, of course, is useless as evidence of anything. Discussions regarding the option of paying off a troll are by no means admissions that the troll has a valid claim, and even if they were, Lindholm isn't even a lawyer qualified to make that sort of a determination.

Meh, same problem as the boycott. You've got a collective action problem. You're assuming you can get a group of people in every city to coordinate this. (And you're assuming that what you're proposing isn't either illegal or grounds for the stores to refuse the returns.)

The solution is much simpler than that. Just don't buy games with DRM. Who cares whether they keep using it or not? There are prolific alternatives with no DRM; pay your money to people who don't treat you like a criminal.

Was it? I don't see the word "patent" in the email.

Yeah, I don't understand why Oracle's attorneys ask such stupid questions. I mean obviously there are multiple Java implementations other than Sun's which they could have licensed if they didn't want to go the route of creating an alternative internally.

No, boycotts end. If you choose not to buy products with asbestos because they're poison, you aren't boycotting asbestos. You're choosing not to buy it because it's harmful to you. That happens to provide a market signal to the companies making things with asbestos (or DRM) that they should probably stop including it in their products, but when you're making the purchasing decision, your goal is not to make them stop building products with asbestos. Your goal is to not have asbestos (or DRM) in your house.