HDMI's not USB. The speaker jack is usually not USB. An external webcam with a bandaid over it to block it is really not much more useful than the built-in webcam with a bandaid over it.

External DVD, yes, if the laptop doesn't have one built in (my wife's ultra-portable doesn't; my work laptop does.) No, if there's a built-in, unless you really need the blu-ray burner. And yes, external hard drive sometimes (USB3 are becoming common enough these days, but there was a while you might use E-SATA instead.)

I'd prefer mouse and keyboard to connect over Bluetooth rather than USB, but most "wireless" mice and keyboards insist on using their own USB-frob to actually connect to the device, running whatever random standard or non-standard.

Sorry, you're not getting my caffeine until you pry my cold dead fingers off the coffee cup.

The other sweetener I've seen showing up in sodas lately has been stevia. I normally avoid the stuff like the plague - tastes worse to me than aspartame does, though in a rotting-organic-bad way rather than a metallic-fake way. Maybe cola flavors can mask that, though.

Oh please, one of the most common forms of self-delusion is to focus on one little thing you do that is contrary to your usual behavior or line you won't cross making you not such a bad guy after all. Like focusing on that your bacon-cheese, greasy meat and white bread tower drenched in dressing with lots of oil-soaked fries has a leaf of lettuce and a slice of tomato too. And you ordered a Diet Coke, it's not that unhealthy right? I guess some of them are honest with themselves, it's still a calorie monster just without the final topping. But I'm guessing a lot more are lying to themselves, I know I've been prone to do so.

That's the problem with being in the White House or State Department. Sometimes you really *do* want to read email from the corrupt ex-dictator of Nigeria.

Aspartame doesn't taste as bad to me as saccharin did, but it's still bad, and the soda companies usually use acesulfame K as well, which tastes far worse (but doesn't break down as quickly as aspartame.) Unfortunately, Pepsi's keeping the acesulfame K in their recipe, so it'll still taste bad.

When I want diet soda, I drink iced tea. Tastes better, and restaurants give you refills. (And if it's bad iced tea, you can add lemon and sugar.)

We are hemmeraging wealth because of what the fucking GOP did in terms of taxes combined with rolling back regulations.
Trickle down failed so badly, that not even the original ppl back it anymore.

You need to unhock yourself from the front of kock brothers pants.

Seriously.

See, here you're confusing two very different things. A shitty low end Android will let you access Facebook. The iPhone 6 will let you hang with the rich kids. Rich kids have expensive habits. Rich kids often have expensive habits to show off that they're rich. Our little fishing boat doesn't fit very well in a yacht club, am I now poor because I can't "fit in" with the millionaires? Sorry, but wanting to pose in an economic league you're not doesn't strike me as any genuine poverty. At least not severe enough to forcibly take my money to even things out.

This is exactly why we need the fucking GOP to get off their GD ass and resolve the fucking illegal issues.
The idea of giving ALL illegals amnesty is a joke. But even worse is the idea of taking kids that have grown up here thinking that they are Americans and sending them to another nation. It absolutely shows no compassion.

What is needed is a compromise in which the good kids are allowed to earn citizenship, the parents of any kids that remained here are allowed to have a 'pink card' ( basically, no citizenship and no social benefits such as SSI, Medicare, etc, however, they are allowed to remain and work), while sending all others packing.

Seriously, they are obviously nervous about what EVs are doing. Instead, they should all be focused on battery technology and lowering the price of EVs, rather than trying to keep ICE/Fossil fuels alive.

It's my impression that pro players often get amateur players through bet sizing, if your call/fold response doesn't match the equity of your hand they'll pretty easily see that they can milk you for value or push you into folding. Or that the amateurs are bad at getting the maximum value out of their good hands because they give the pros easy call/fold odds. Of course there's a lot more to bet sizing than your own two cards, but you can't bluff properly without having a pretty good clue about what you represent having and making credible bets as if you had those cards. Pros are pretty good at smelling stories that don't make sense where you're betting on the turn/river like you have cards that you'd never play that way preflop/on the flop because they're usually a bluff. Or a very well disguised hand, but they'll sure test if you're capable of that.

The rest of the world uses Windows and OS X on the desktop, Android and iOS on mobile and couldn't care less about Unity and Gnome-shell. Even Windows Vista got Linux beat on StatCounter. You can use the classic desktop paradigm that ~78% use (Win7 + WinXP + OS X + Vista), join the new touch paradigm with ~19% (Win8 + Win8.1) or you can go your own way. My impression is that they're trying to design a car driven by joystick because some UX designer thought it was better, what's tested and works is too boring.

How about winning over some existing, established markets before trying to chase the latest fad? And even if it's not a fad, open source never moves fast enough to be first because there's no overall leader. Sure you could slap Linux on a tablet like Microsoft did with Windows many years before Apple, but it won't work well until all the application developers feel having a touch UI is an itch they need to scratch. Sure we can have visionaries, but Jobs was a visionary with an army of developers to turn them into reality. A Linux visionary is a man with a powerpoint slide. Or actually a LibreOffice Impress slide, I guess.

An analyst is generally not a person eating his own dog food, it's a person trying to sell his insight of the market to third parties as investment advice. What it means in practice is that you're trying to make a lot of statements that make you seem smart in hindsight but don't compromise your credibility when they don't pan out. Like in this case, if the Oculus Rift doesn't launch in 2015 this won't even be a footnote. If it does launch, he can point to this statement and say "Look, I wasn't sure but I had a hunch this would happen". You don't need to make any elaborate theories of stock manipulation, this is simply one analyst trying to pump up his own career.

You use a lot of big words, I don't think you know what any of them mean. What I argue is that there's structural differences that makes this a better idea to to centrally than at home, regardless of how good or cheap the batteries get. If it's cost effective for you to store the power in a battery and use it in the daytime it's going to be more cost effective for them to store the power in a battery and sell it to you in the daytime. The very reason they sell it cheap at night is that there's no cost effective way to store the excess power for later, if there were the low night prices would go away. You're on the wrong end of the Dunning-Kruger effect here, buddy.

It's not about finding a solution. It's about taking what somebody has worked on, experimented with, done usability testing, put in a product and convinced the market to use and have a second company come in and say thanks for all the hard work, in a month we'll have a cheaper clone doing the exact same thing.

...and not knowing of any product using any of the MS patents, even if they were unaware it was patented and by who. Particularly in the same business, it's rather hard not to know what features the competition is advertising. It's certainly hard to prove you didn't know about them. Submarine patents are a different story, but for example when they made Android they probably couldn't claim ignorance of any features the iPhone had. Even the business requirements and feature requests can be "contaminated" by other products, it's not a feature you'd have added unless someone else had done it first.

Of course sometimes you get unlucky and develop the exact same solution, but that also means you're reinventing the wheel. Do you want a medal? Or you might feel it's obvious and widespread now, but was it that obvious when it was patented? Ten years ago is a long time in the tech industry, things that I go "well, duuuuuuuuh" to today maybe wasn't. If they were, I'd like to go back and redo my investments. I'm sure you all remember the warm reception the iPod get, boy was that right on the money...