"pirates can come in the side door and it really doesn't matter what the state of their Windows license is, they can get Windows 10 for free."

I own three licenses for Windows 7 Pro; two vanilla OEM system licenses, and one Dell OEM license.

Does the above mean I can install on additional systems, not enter the serial number and go past the grace period (including the three allowed grace period resets) and download Windows 10, and suddenly legitimize those licenses, and keep the legit licenses installed on my existing systems?

If so, I'm going to finally build the HTPC that I've been keeping a home-theater-style PC case hanging around for.

I hope this doesn't result in the removal of parody reviews. Manually take them out of the weighting algorithm, sure, but please leave them, for the likes of Monster cables, Denon's ethernet cable, uranium oxide samples, reviews which pop up when a price gets bumped up by 33,300% due to occasional glitches in Amazon's dynamic pricing algorithm, and so forth.

Also, PLEASE kill the reviews which rate items a 1 because UPS destroyed the package. That isn't Amazon's fault; it's UPS's fault for shoving 65,000 packages per hour through a conveyor system designed to handle 27,000 packages per hour, resulting in UPS sorters/pickoffs "accidentally" pushing packages (usually the higher ticket items) off of 25' high conveyors onto the ground below out of anger and frustration. Yes, this does happen, and it's not Amazon's fault; it's UPSes for not running longer shifts, poor planning, and putting unrealistic demands on UPS hub workers. The reviews which are based on UPS's malfeasance should not apply to the rating of the product, because the reviews are supposed to be about the product, not the shipper. Same goes for when UPS sorters mis-pick an item sending it to the wrong part of the country, making the product late. That isn't Amazon's fault either.

OMG, Amazon sells plastic spoons? JUST WHAT I NEEDED! Okay, here's a review:

"Best spoon evar! All other spoons suck!!!"

SOLD!!!

Indeed; when /. readers want to share something we generally know how to copy & paste. Now, there are always exceptions to the rule but they are in the vast majority.

Besides, /. already HAD the share feature; it was just horribly broken. Fix share, put it back where it was, and bring back the Read More link.

Now, I realize that slashdotters are your product, not your customers, but by not listening to us you're pushing us to continue to choose reddit or even (ugh!) fark over /., thereby reducing the value of product making /. less attractive to your actual customers (advertisers).

Hey I have an idea - why not take this whole trend one step further and start posting stories about the kardashians, other train wrecks like Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, and other child stars who delved into hard drugs or alcohol and ruined their lives, thereby increasing readership, and the all-important ad clicks?

I'm not so sure a lead injection into the skull qualifies as a cure, nor as an improvement in condition.

Try again, North Korea!

I'd be happy with upgraded logic in 51% of the population. :D

(Yes, I'm going to hell for that one.)

That is all.

Windows Phone OS (whatever it's called this week) just had so many bad details, it was like walking around and constantly tripping on things.

One example: I wanted to run with a white background instead of black. When doing that, the white-on-transparent icons disappeared.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/15o7...

Things like that might have been fixed in 8.1, but 8.0 was the third major release of this UI (after 7.0 and 7.5) and they should have caught a lot of things like that by then.

There are a lot of places where an overuse of transparency and other effects causes more harm than good. In trying to make something that looks better than iOS, they went a little too far with the effects.

Here's another place where white text on top of random backgrounds -- which happen to contain white -- falls apart. (The one on the left looks OK on a big monitor but they were pretty bad on the phone. And you can see how if the photos had more white in the wrong place, it would be even worse.)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/cke1...

For what it's worth, I think iOS 7 was a big step back from iOS 6 in a lot of ways too -- too many thin lines; not enough contrast.

What you said was exactly my idea -- for $59, it was WAY better hardware and software (from a stability point of view, at least) than some generic Android-based media player, but every single task I tried to do had some obstacles. And it wasn't just a case of being used to iOS -- I use Mac OS and Windows every day at work -- it was that everything MS did differently, they did worse. I just returned it after a few weeks. If someone gave me one for free, I still wouldn't use it.

lol. I knew about DHMO, didn't know they had an MSDS for it. nice.

BOILING POINT: 100 C
MELTING POINT: 0 C
SPECIFIC GRAVITY: 1.00

Wow, such nice round numbers. What are the odds? :-)

The A/B/X tests which proved botique cables are no better than coat hangers used multiple coat hangers, obviously. I'm not saying I would do this because they would be a nightmare to set up... .but based on your post I can only assume you fall within the autistic spectrum, or are simply being a pedantic nitwit, as it can be inferred that there would be a 1:1 replacement of coat hanger for each respective conductor. Duh.

Last year I got a phone with Windows Phone 8 for $59* (I still can't believe it that's possible) just to mess around with. Even as a hobby, I couldn't stand to use it. The OS was JUST THAT HORRIBLE. It was stupid and annoying and deeply flawed. If my choices were a) that phone for $59 or b) an iPhone for $650, I would choose b) in a heartbeat. Oh, wait, actually, I did. (I'm on T-Mobile so I actually pay full price for my phones.) I returned the phone within 30 days.

Paying $700 for a good phone vs. $200 for a crappy one is really not that hard to imagine. Look at what people spend on cars.

Note: I haven't used Android heavily, so I can only speak of Windows, but from what I've seen of Android, I'm pretty sure I'd still stick with an iPhone. My point is, price is NOT everything.

I'm not saying iPhones are the best for everyone, or that everyone should buy them. Apple has grown their desktop and laptop sales greatly in the past decade despite "perfectly good" competitors existing for ~1/2-1/3 the price, so I have no reason to think a flood of dirt cheap phones will greatly harm their iPhone business anytime soon.

* I got a Lumia 520. This current one is similarly specced and priced. http://www.microsoftstore.com/...
The hardware was awesome. I still can't believe you can get something that good for so little. But the Windows Phone OS is just so, so, so bad. Not even worth keeping as a toy.

Thanks for tarnishing Slashdot's previously unblemished reputation for flawless editing. :-/

> a bottle of $100 window cleaner that has
> specially aligned atoms that will reduce wind
> resistance and increase speed on your car.

link please?

Aside from noise rejection and the lack of impedance matching coat hangers work perfectly well even for analog gear as input patch cables (but due to sensitivity to impedance differences you wouldn't want to use in place of phono patch cables). They work supremely well as speaker cables, providing the gauge is heavy enough for the current (so driving the speakers at a Pink Floyd gig may not work out too well but for the average bar, wedding, etc. they would be perfectly fine).

Benefits of fine strand OFC cables:

  * they look nice
  * The interconnects are usually constructed better
  * They are more flexible than cheap cable, allowing for easier cable routing
  * They handle repeated stress better (so they're better for speakers mounted in doors)

I use fine strand OFC cables for auto sound systems because they fit into tight spaces without worrying about hitting bend radius limits.

That's because the power supply was dipped in epoxy resin - which is actually the major cause of C=64 power supply failures. The power supplies were very prone to overheating due to the epoxy encasement and were pretty much unserviceable due to the difficulty of getting to the components.

Yours didn't fail due to spillage of sprite because the power supply was in effect waterproof.