Just because you're using something for sport doesn't suddenly make it not a weapon.

IIRC, ATI/AMD GPUs tend to perform better on benchmarks (due to higher raw processing power), but fall short on actual graphics performance (due to different architectures) when compared to Nvidia ones. That's why a lot of people wound up with Nvidia graphics cards for gaming and AMD ones for bitcoin mining (back when that was big).

It's pretty simple to protect against that on most implementations. Since you mentioned it, let's take Windows as an example.

To protect against rainbow tables on Windows, all we need to do is generate a 16-byte salt at the time of creation of the password and prepend it to the password pre-hashing. Then we store the salt in plaintext right next to the hashed password. Suddenly, a rainbow table is useless unless you happen to have a pre-generated rainbow table for that particular salt (note that you'd have to generate 2^127 times as many rainbow tables for a 50% chance of having a table with that salt).

Not that this protects against any other attacks, but it certainly does mitigate the rainbow table threat.

Not Android, but Nokia's 770, N800, and N810 tablets had a pretty strong following for a while.

I highly doubt it since they're already in the beta stage, so major version changes are a no-no at this point. You can however get the latest kernel in the Kernel ppa.

How is that relevant? Being a member of a state senate is hugely different from being a US senator or president.

I agree, but only if OP understands both the positives and negatives of using Linux on a daily basis. Unless you're a gamer, anything you absolutely need Windows for can be done in a virtual machine or under WINE (and many games also run pretty well under WINE). I personally use Linux at home for everything, starting in high school all the way through the completion of my university degree, and I've needed WINE for precisely two things: LTSpice (really, nothing else I've been able to find is anywhere near as good) and a few games.

Let's have simultaneous worldwide releases. Sounds fantastic to me. But while we're at it, I'd like on-par feature sets in every country. Phone manufacturers are worse about this than game consoles, but the consoles are bad as well. Seriously, why just because I live in the US should I not be able to order a Cricket game? (Similarly, why just because they're not in one of 14 blessed countries should my grandparents' Wii not be able to get online?)

Some hospitals use it in certain rooms that are shielded from wifi. I believe MRI rooms are one of these, but I'm not sure.

In that case, I'm installing Linux 1642 tonight.

According to him, Obama has a 69% chance of winning, but will only barely get a majority (not even 51%).

I think this is a case of where "overdoing it" is. There are some things for which just about any amount is overdoing it (e.g. cyanide). On the other hand, reading has a much higher threshold. Unless your reading is actively hindering another part of your life (e.g. you read for days on end without eating, drinking or sleeping, thus causing medical problems), it's fine. [Note: As I am not familiar with the subject, I withhold commentary about where I believe that line to be regarding cannabis use.]

As with most people on /., div_2n is probably one of the most technical people in his/her family/friends group. As such, he/she is probably asked for advice about this all the time (as I am). div_2n will probably affect the purchasing habits of 5-10 people. If a million nerds get pissed of with Apple enough to start a boycott, and each of those people directly influences the purchasing decisions of 7 others, that's starting to be a noticeable boycott.

The key is to figure out how to do it so as to annoy the fewest people.

It's still part of the metric system.

This is what I was thinking. All the command&control stuff is probably encrypted or otherwise secured, but what's the point in doing that for the data you're sending since it's going to end up publicly available anyway?