When services like Google+ are shoved down my throat, I just treat them like a role-playing game's character creation process. You want me to join your half-baked nth-tier social network? Meet J. Pierpoint Flathead III, billionaire transsexual CEO and astronaut.

Whatever. Here's an idea, either respect the Constitution and its underlying values, or focus on repealing the Second Amendment using the process provided for doing so.

Legislative end runs around the founders' clearly expressed intents are not acceptable. Why not? Because they'll come for your favorite amendment next.

In eel-infested waters.

What people are missing is that market segmentation is what counts, not how many chips fall into which bins. If the company sells ten times as many inexpensive GPUs as expensive ones, but the yield on the production floor is more like ten good chips for every crippled one, then it's not hard to imagine that most of the cheap cards will end up with perfect chips.

The market detects this sales strategy as bullshit and routes around it.

It's not much of a stretch to guess that I'm less likely to hire someone who is more likely to bail out on the job for months at a time.

Those are private licensing conditions, nothing to do with the government except insofar as basic copyright law is being cited.

So much for the ideal of the borderless Internet. I guess it's more important to artificially prop up your own country's "content" purveyors, than to allow human culture as a whole to move forward unthreatened by the guns of government.

Well, if the dealership model really is better for consumers, then the dealerships have nothing to fear. Right?

Also, never mind sugar, have these rocket scientists decided whether or not salt is bad for you yet?

That was certainly Steve Ballmer's approach.

I'm also curious how they keep the helium locked up in the drive housing.

Hydrogen is more reactive, and causes some metals to become brittle. Not sure if either of these would be a problem in hard drive applications, though. Presumably the manufacturers have done their homework.

We are guided by consensus a thousand ways every single day, but it's only climate science where people seem to get bent out of shape.

Because trillions of dollars' worth of economic rewiring is being called for on the basis of climate science.

An environmentally-friendly scientist once said that "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof." I've never been a fan of that because at the end of the day, "extraordinary" is just somebody's value judgement. But when objectively extraordinary demands are being made, then it seems like a good time to start demanding extraordinary certainty. The language of consensus is not sufficient, because throughout history there are far too many instances of "97% of scientists" agreeing on things that turned out to be completely wrong.

The real problem would have been inadequate bypassing at the FPGA. From the point of view of high-speed logic, power comes from capacitors, not voltage regulators.

And this doesn't even get into the mysterious ability of senior NSA officials in the Obama administration to lie to Congress with no consequences whatsoever.

Lie about playing baseball on steroids, and you're in a world of shit. Lie about grave Constitutional matters, and you're in good company.

I still don't see the problem at hand. Is it so inconvenient to carry a few different credit cards that it's worth inventing some Rube Goldberg contraption to copy them onto one device?