Not necessarily.

Contracts do not shield parties from criminal liability resulting from recklessness (knowingly, and willingly placing someone at risk) or negligence (unknowingly, but unnecessarily placing someone at risk).

One might argue that installing a root certificate on customer computers, including the private key on that same computer, and using an easily guessed password to protect that key constitutes negligent behaviour by placing customers at risk cyber attacks. It may even be argued that such an act is reckless because anyone skilled enough in the cryptographic systems used should have been able to identify that risk from the surface of the moon.

What Lenovo did was so incredibly batshit stupid and irresponsible that it's hard to describe in better words.

Any sufficiently shocking display of stupidity is indistinguishable from malice

PC-BSD has its own installer. It's really quite nice and should be very familiar to anyone who is used to Ubuntu/Fedora/RHEL/CentOS

Very, Very accurate. I recall hearing that the Iowa class battleships could place a full broadside (9 rounds) within a 150 metre radius at maximum range.

The 2,700 pound shell can punch through 6 meters of concrete, that's why

Cost effectiveness. Air sorties are expensive, cruise missiles are even more expensive. Slinging 16 inch 2,700 pound explosive filled shells at hardened defences is extremely effective both in terms of damage and cost, if one can safely navigate a battleship into range of course. USS Wisconsin and USS Missouri both royally fucked up Iraqi shore defences as well as Iraqi forces in Kuwait during the Gulf War.

While battleships are extremely cost effective at delivering ordnance, they are very expensive to keep operational, even during peace time.

Um, no. The defining characteristics of a battleship are its high calibre naval artillery and heavy armour, guided missile frigates have neither of those.

A Ticonderoga class cruise carries an assortment of about 140 missiles of various design and purpose. An Iowa class battleship carried over 1,200 16 inch shells alone.

No particular hate, they were never replaced after WWII. While no one is planning any new ones, modern destroyers are getting larger and larger with the Zumwalt class destroyer larger than many WWII cruisers. I suspect that a battleship-esque design will be proposed sometime in the next few decades to mount powerful railguns.

Anyway, there are several reasons why battleship fell out of favour.

1. Battleships were often used as a fleet-in-being. Battleships are highly impervious to surface fire, so a single battleship was often enough to deter any fleet that did not have an equivalently armoured and armed battleship of its own from attacking while simultaneously forcing that enemy to keep a nearby presence to deter the battleship from doing the same. As a result, many WWII Battleships spent their time sitting in port as nothing more than a highly glorified gatekeeper.

2. Nations that did not have extensive blue-water navies often used battleships on their own, with little to no support fleet. This made them easy targets for swarms of aircraft laden with bombs and torpedoes. The USA used this tactic extensively against Japan and sunk many of Japans heavy naval ships. The battleship Yamato (the heaviest battleship ever built) was sunk this way along with most of its accompanying fleet; the USA lost only 10 aircraft in the assault.
Anti-airacraft systems advanced heavily after the war, so it's doubtful that similar tactics would work against a modern battle group.

3. Battleships are extremely expensive to maintain and operate during both peace time and war time. Extensive automation and improvements have lowered this amount dramatically over time, but it's still high.

4. Logistics are a bitch. Modern nuclear powered craft can carry enough supplies to last several months, and require refueling only once ever couple of decades, but hydrocarbon powered battleships required regular refuelling by either an oiler or at a friendly port. Bigger ships require more supplies and don't necessarily extend any additional influence

SPARC really excels at highly multithreaded and highly multi-process workloads. Its sequential throughput leaves a lot to be desired but it really shines on some enterprise applications.

You're absolutely right about the pace of the books slowing down but honestly, I really liked the depth and detail.

He died on my birthday.

Worst birthday present ever :(

As a devout user of VMWare Workstation I count it amongst the best purchases that I've ever made. I usually upgrade to each new version as soon as it's available.

There's no indication that legally made grey-market purchases were revoked, only those that were made using fraudulent credit card transactions. Ubisoft doesn't owe anyone anything for those. The original discussion was on what constitutes grey-marketeering.

Milk and cars have very high marginal costs. In fact, many grocery stores sell milk below cost. I used to work as a retail manager in my late teens and the store that I worked at lost about $1.50 on every bag of milk that we sold.

The line between the various divisions of your city is at best distinguished by city bylaws and zoning policy so there's no real reason for there to be a massive price difference across the border given that there's no real barrier to import. A national border on the other hand is subject to customs when importing physical goods. It gets really murky when digital goods are involved. Now, there have been several unsuccessful attempts to block the import of discounted physical goods such as textbooks but these have been mostly unsuccessful.

The comparison that you're looking for is the de-jure relationship versus the de-facto relationship. You're absolutely right about it being used to prevent employers from ducking their obligations under various employment laws. However, a shrinkwrap licence is still a licence. Courts are less likely to read deeply into it, but it's still enforceable to an extent. If the publisher claims in the licence that they have the right to refuse service if a product is used outside of its region then it's unlikely that a court will force them to provide that service. In the case of a physical copy, they're not going to come to your house and take that physical copy away; in the case of a digital copy, they usually won't erase it from your hard disk drive but they may refuse to authenticate your login credentials. Many modern video games are designed such that any tangible element is largely useless without a service element as well.

Video games include a terms of service agreement that is dozens of pages in length, a bike rack does not. It may not be signed repeatedly, but it is still a contract and both parties are bound by it.

Correct. They can however make locally purchased games incompatible with it and even refuse service within that region. I'm not aware of any companies refusing to provide online connectivity for out-of-region consoles but I do know of companies that have redirected online connectivity for out-of-region products back into that region. Blocking it completely would be an extremely crude tactic and it would spark massive consumer backlash but I'm pretty sure that it would be legal.

That's an incredibly naive view of business operations. Additional consumers are nice but if word gets around that a grey-market exists the vendor may end up seeing a decrease in net revenue even if they see an increase in customers. Any profit driven company will try to combat that. For example, the grey-market for post-secondary textbooks is huge and there have been some high profile lawsuits and challenges in recent years.

There's no counter argument to what is either trolling or sheer stupidity.