>>>Weee! Free market at its finest!

A patent-based market, by definition, is not a "free" market. A free market would not have any patents/artificial government-created monopolies, and people would copy each other liberally without restriction. i.e. free

More likely LOSE volument. I discovered I don't really need PlayStation Network. I bet other users have also found more productive things they can do (reading, playing solo games, watching hulu.com) during this downtime too.

I sincerely hope you are trolling (bkspc)(bkspc)(bkspc) Joking.

I'm using IE-8 and I've never encountered this SmartScreenWhatever? I've seen it plenty of times on Firefox though, and think it's a good idea. Maybe these warnings would have stopped me from downloading FoxTab (PDF creation tool) and infecting my laptop. Lesson learned.

Of course if users ignore the warnings ("DANGER: Malicious site. Proceed? YES"), then it doesn't do much good. I suppose they deserve whatever they get. Sadly my brother is one of those and I spend a lot of time cleaning-up his computer, because he just clicks "yes" to everything. I don't think he even bothers to read the warning.

- open task manager
- goto processes
- kill any programs that I don't need (like Compaq Assistant, Adobe Launcher, etc)
- kill any services I don't need
- make explorer High priority

It frees RAM and makes the computer run faster (less hard drive swapping). Hopefully this internet "IP recorder" service is one of those things I kill off. Although now that I know how to do it permanently, I'll do that instead.

This is good. It means they can no longer say, "Bittorrent is saturating our lines! We need Congress to ban these pirates." Now the blame is falling on LEGAL watching, and there's no way they can get Congress to ban legal usage of videos.

So instead they are implementing 150 GB caps. :-|

Bastards.

Powerline broadband also interferes with HD Radio, Digital TV, DAB, and TV Band internet devices.

It's possible it also interferes with cellphones and Wifi, but I'm not certain (the frequencies may be too high).

It should be up to each individual person, but speaking for myself, I don't use the second monitor. It starts to hurt my neck when I have to keep moving back-and-forth (or worse: a window popsup and I don't know where it went). I'd rather overlay all the windows, and then use "tab switching" to bring forward different windows as needed.

In fact even as I type this, I'm only using half the screen available to me (the window is shrunk to 2/3rd vertical and 2/3rd horizontal). I like to have everything directly in front of my eyes.

IMHO.

Thought Atom was supposed to be a lowpower chip?

In any case I'd love to have a cellphone-sized Windows PC. I wouldn't run it at 1024x600 (too small) but maybe the older 640x200 standard that I grew-up with (larger icons/text).

No doubt this is one of the things the US Government is pushing (just like they did before) as part of their strategy to "unify" cyber strategy.

All they did was provide the software. Just as a telephone company provided the wire (back then dialup was still popular). Should companies be able to sue the phone company? No. Then neither should they be able to sue limewire, or microsoft, or any other person's software that enabled song downloading/copying/burning to CD.

So subtracting 10 years off my birthdate is a Facebook offense?
Ooops.
:-|

>>>There must have been quite a bit of trial and error in nature for something to have perpetuated to this day.

That's kinda the point. Life wasn't "born" until 1 billion years ago. It took nature 4 billion years of trial-and-error to make it happen, and even then there were some failed experiments (like anaerobic bacteria that died-out when earth became oxygen-rich).

It's not about quality. Foreign workers are no better than Americans.

Corporations push for imported people, because it keeps overall US wages low. Else US engineers/scientists could demand $200,000 and get it. Having cheap imported workers keeps the salaries lower, and saves Microsoft, Lockheed, etc money.

Well here's my opinion on this Apple overheating situation:

On second thought, never mind. (runs away from AppleFans wielding the -1 mod stick)

$9000 may not sound like much, but if the guy writes multiple books each year, he's making more than a guy at McDonalds or Walmart. Also there's the opposite example of the man who earned ~$10 million by selling his books for just one dollar each.