R O A R !!! subtle. yeah. R O A R !!!

You know...they have laws about bullhorns, don't you?

The Dems were outspent 7 to 1.

Bold claim. Citation? According to this recent New York Times article (October 27), Democrats outspent Republicans, $119 million vs. $79 million.

Perhaps you are referring to third-party spending, for which statistics are scantly available, and you are therefore pulling numbers out of the same dark quarters of your anatomy from whence the rest of your rhetoric comes?

You can talk all you want about the parties that bought messages and how much they paid. You might then take some time to look at how the VOTERS voted, and WHY. But really, I suspect you have little belief in or regard for the voting public; that's a bit too close to a stark reality your rhetoric seems to avoid.

...a couple of years [...] not a single solitary honey bee [...] in the years since. [...] When you consider that honey-bees play an absolutely vital role in the food chain on which we depend

Two years, no bees, and no visible effect on our food supply. Am I to believe my eyes, or your alarming declaration?

Perhaps the "food chain" is not quite as fragile as you suggest? Perhaps, if we just do nothing, the bees will slowly recover while we will continue to observe no significant diminishing of our food supply?

I'm inclined to add this one to the list of possible but unlikely disasters. It's a very, very long list.

Best Buy sees no problem with charging for this convenience, even though it's something Sony provides to PS3 owners completely free.

Sony provides firmware for free, not firmware installation. Your words wrongly intimate that they are the same. Even more absurdly, you intimate that Best Buy should pay for the labor of installing people's firmware.

Since "it's" "free" why don't YOU install people's firmware without receiving compensation.

Absurd. Just absurd.

thinking with your dick is bad

Somebody [via highly suspect inference] mentions testosterone and you immediately start thinking about penises. I can trace your connection but find it even less salient and more dubious than theirs (which is very dubious and non-salient).

Anyway...that penis thing...you might do well to think a bit less with yours...it looks to be a tad bit hurt.

Certainly any such story on /. should point out the affected operating systems...

...and the hacker's religion, too (especially if he's a Muslim).

Well...now that we've given up on costing in dollars, and instead as a percentage of income, all I have to do is raise my income and the cost, of EVERYTHING, goes down.

And that would be about as true as it is unhelpful to know.

To anybody who feels incredulous at the notion of a single point of failure taking down a purportedly redundant system:I suspect you have limited experience with the issues and challenges of managing a very large system infrastructure. The complexity of such systems goes well beyond the knowledge of any individual, so notions of fault tolerance across the enterprise are highly theoretical. Even with extensive planning and testing, the gotcha is in what you don't know. Sometimes, one of those What-You-Don't-Knows reveals itself, and that is when it first becomes known.

The need for continued live operation of production systems typically precludes the opportunity to test them as realistically or extensively as one would wish. In fact, across large organizations and locations and departments and applications, systems managers don't even attempt to assert that they are free of single-points-of-failure, nor do they provide guarantees of non-stop operation. Real attempts at non-stop fail-safe systems are generally limited to narrower, truly mission critical applications such as aeronautical systems where lives or huge measures of capital depend upon system availability. Such criticality can rarely be ascribed to administrative systems, and they therefore rarely get the attention or funding needed to build and assure non-stop operation. And rightfully so...the cost of non-stop operation is not justified by the costs/risks of occasional failures.

So for those of you who assert that Virginia's systems should never go down, or shouldn't go down for more than 24 hours, I ask: How do you justify that assertion? Does it have a cost/benefit basis, or is it perhaps just a "soft" assertion?

NameXRef.com

Good luck escaping the web.

What if an Islamist group wants to do the same thing?

That would be fine as long as they don't drive the car anywhere near Ground Zero.

foxconn branded boards [...] fail in about year.

On what do you base this assertion (e.g. sample size)?

I've been trying out Linux desktop distros like every two years for about 10 years. Linux is my home in server-land, and I am eager to live on an open source desktop. But whenever I try, desktop Linux runs into issues...things like power management suspend getting confused under some border condition, or a touchpad delivering less-than-optimal response to scroll gestures. I don't believe any of the machines were certified for Linux by their manufacturers, so the presence of such issues is not surprising.

One could say that a touchpad is a touchpad, power management is power management, and especially that a Dell touchpad is a Dell touchpad. But such enduring but summary labels hide the differences that come from frequent, almost continuous [evolutionary] changes in hardware...a little change here and another one there. Without appropriate mods to driver software, some percentage of those changes give you an Oops! here and a Wuh-oh! there. Even within Dell's own "manufacturing" world (much of which is broadly subcontracted to other companies), the number of power management variations being produced at any moment in time can be dauntingly high.

In the same way that computer manufacturers (e.g. Dell, HP, Lenovo, Apple, etc.) depend on third party hardware technologies to fill their boxes (e.g. CPUs, memory, video, audio, network, power supply, motherboard, etc.), they similarly depend on third parties to build the software drivers (e.g. hardware manufacturers, Microsoft, third party integrators) that make all those evolutionary changes work. My guess is that Dell is shy of Linux because they're having a hard time getting the kind of third-party software support that they get in the Windows environment. If a computer manufacturer were to try to move such driver development capabilities in-house, it seems likely to me that to do so would be both expensive and inefficient (if practical at all).

When we look at Apple, we might see the elegance of design (with narrowed consumer choice). With Linux, we might see the beauty of development in an free software ecosystem. And when we look at Microsoft, we might see the beauty of product choice, functional and often priced to yield a high point in VALUE to the desktop.

Among all platforms, supporters of the Windows platform have most ably made all kinds of hardware work well enough that you could pretty much take it for granted: that shit works. Too easily, almost invisibly, that is taken for granted.

The suit never goes to trial. Apple settles. The lawyers get a cash settlement (to cover their fees). The class members (read: iPhone owners) get a dollar amount applicable as a credit against future purchases from Apple.

The winners: Lawyers and Apple.
The people who neither win nor lose: iPhone owners (who always want more Apple).
The losers: Everybody else who has to continue to endure daily Apple "news" stories as if they were any better or more significant than Angelina/Brad stories.

In glancing over your reference to "other ocean contaminations" (which you misleadingly point to an article about extinction events), I don't see any support of your murky point (which seems to be that arsenic or the BP spill will lead to mass extinction?). Could you please cite where in that article you see support of your point? (Or is this, like, you know...stuff in the water and, like, mass extinction and everything...kind of...like that?)