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.

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.

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...

Impossible? No. Economical? I don't see how, if it were why isn't the power company doing this centrally? Then they could average it out across everyone on the grid, instead of just you as the problem is usually production not transmission capacity. I guess it might make sense if you're producing your own power with solar panels and don't have to transfer power into the grid when it's sunny and out of the grid when it's dark, but the price seems steep for what you're getting. I mean this tech already exists but only for solar powered cabins off the grid, it's really expensive per kWh and usually just to power light bulbs and such.

Does your computer have a HDMI/DisplayPort or DVI port made in the last 10+ years? You got DRM. Nothing keeps you from running the RMS-approved distro of choice and play all the creative commons content you like though, you won't notice it's there until you try to play protected content. And that's why boycotts won't work, the only reason to buy a DRM-incompatible version of the same hardware is so you can try to play protected content and bitch about it not working, kinda like buying a Mac and complaining it won't play PC games.

You must understand that the entire movie industry is in a "now or never" mode, DVDs was broken, BluRay was broken and these 4K discs will rival the cinema master (DCI 4K) in quality. If the standard is established enough they can't just ditch it and the DRM is broken, they won't be able to do one better. So they're trying to make this the most unholy DRM abomination ever, because if it fails it's game over. It's really that simple.

He shouldn't have said in the home - probably more the school yard and campus. We used to pirate stuff on floppy discs and later burned CD-Rs with MP3s. Before online activation was possible as a requirement you could just install as many times on as many PCs as you wanted. And it wasn't like we hoarded it, here's my collections of MP3s for your collection of MP3s just pick anything you like and if you don't want the rest just delete it. But I think that's a bit 80s and 90s thinking, then you had Napster and the 00s. If there's "casual copying" like we did today, it's a secondary effect of a torrent download, one downloads and spreads it around to friends and extended family. That seems quite likely to still be going on.

Lucky you, I averaged with the sun as my frame of reference and over a year my average location is the center of the sun*.

* Assuming a spherical and not elliptical orbit, if you don't get the desired results tweak the model.

Careful what you wish for, the flip side of war being declared is that all the war-time powers of the president, FEMA etc. are invoked. If you don't want that to happen, you have to somehow define it as non-war military action and then it wouldn't be in violation of the Constitution, you can't have it both ways. And the amendment says only Congress can declare war, but the President is commander-in-chief of the military and there's really nowhere that explicitly states he can't commit acts of war without approval by Congress. It seems implied, but technicalities might matter.

By the way, if you're arguing the person at the top is violating the law then that naturally flows down the chain of command and as we learned in the post-WWII trials, following orders is no excuse. So if the President should go on trial for violating the constitution, the soldier shooting should go on trial for manslaughter. Possibly even murder, because you clearly meant to kill and that you happened to kill a few that weren't the target is like an assassin's collateral. I doubt that goes under manslaughter, really.

Your understanding of "easily" may differ from most people, besides you're thinking too limited. People want access to their data on the go, visiting friends and family, at the cabin or on vacation or business trips or whatever. Sharing movies between the upstairs and downstairs TV isn't exactly the biggest problem. Even though you might hate the buzzword "cloud" they certainly want cloud-like functionality. And then you're talking an Internet-facing service with all the fun that entails.

Almost all desktops computers are able to do decent software virtualization already, at least for a single user case. Who is really waiting for ESXi outside of enterprise servers?

Only if it's done by another process they don't have access to, just like backup files they can't alter. They steal your credentials, so if you can delete your own snapshot so can they.

They'll stop providing HDDs when the market stops buying them. Lack of choice isn't going to sell a lot through extortion, because unlike Apple buying their hardware isn't the only way to run the same software (Hackintoshes excluded).

Except it doesn't exist. Except consumers often treat their media like shit. Except it's that manual process users never bother to do. Most can't even be arsed to copy-paste it to a thumbdrive/second HDD/NAS/whatever as backup. If you got one online backup (anywhere but at home) and a disconnected USB HDD next to your PC you're better off than 99% of the population. The chance of a fire/theft destroying your offline backup and a virus/trojan destroying your online backups at the same time are pretty slim.

You can't backup a 4TB drive to DVD-R. Or I guess you can, but it'd take forever both to do and restore. Same with tape backups, you're not going to swap ten tapes to back up/restore one drive and the kind that could back up large parts of a drive is $$$.

Unless it's too useful for some, like say an investment robot that has figured out the ROI on dirty business beats clean business, ethics be damned. Or that they don't want to look a human in the eye and say no money, no food for you but a sales droid won't be bothered by it. Or that it provides too much control, like a despot using AI to weed out dissenters and eliminate political opposition. And if the killer bots have a bit of civilian collateral, they're just too powerful not to have. There's plenty of reasons why "bad AI" might be allowed to grow, they're the perfect opportunity to let out the worst of humanity without getting your own hands dirty.

New technology like DNA, deathbed confessions, evidence found or witness statements withdrawn years or decades later can show a ruling, no matter how correct it seemed at the time to be wrong and without there being any active investigation. Sure if I've been ensnared by unfortunate circumstances or framed I'd rather you find the truth straight away, but I'd rather be wrongfully imprisoned than wrongfully executed. As long as there's life there's hope that I'll be a free man again and you can't conclusively say it won't happen until I'm dead.

Sure, it almost certainly won't happen but proponents of the death sentence is using the likely outcome to justify the means. It's like basing a warrant on the assumption that you'll find something to justify the search. Yes you've lost the presumption of innocence, but when humans make decisions on worldly evidence and testimony there'll always be a smidgen of doubt left. Posthumously clearing a name might not matter much to the dead, but it matters to friends and family and helps prove the system isn't perfect. And though it can't get better it won't be perfect and we can't turn back time, but we can give the innocent every chance they can get. And that ought to be enough.