Would it hurt to include a few words explaining what the hell Mint even is or why we should care there's a new version?

Completely false. According to http://www.advfn.com/p.php?pid=financials&symbol=NASDAQ%3AMSFT

Foreign Sales: $34,877mil
Domestic Sales: $38,846mil

Here's an article from 6 years ago, describing an (at-the-time) new feature which makes your technique obsolete:
http://apcmag.com/inside_vistas_new_imagebased_install.htm

Spend some time on:

http://fuckyeahmadeinusa.tumblr.com/

Story Musgrave. He was in charge of fixing the Hubble, and is a complete bad-ass. He has a "good-old farm boy" attitude, that is exactly what you want for fixing machinery in remote locations.

Sure you don't think thats relevant? If you've got your own transmitter, you are talking directly to it.

Not sure if they still do, but in the 90's, Microsoft self-insured employees (administered by Aetna, though). Makes a lot of sense when you have a young, largely healthy workforce.

This is apparently the logic that actual police use.

I don't think you're getting it. The inputs to the Kalman filter would be an encrypted GPS signal, accelerometer readings, magnetic compass bearing, wind speed and visual odometery. Now which ones are being jammed, and which spoofed?

Voting may have been common 40 years ago, but any modern system would use a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter#Example_application or something similar (and much less naive).

Chuck Schumer is one of the biggest pro-government control-freak assholes in congress. He has no qualms bending logic, twisting and lying to spin whatever propoganda he needs to in order to advance his agenda. He has never met a law he didn't like, and works to restrict freedom with his every move.

This is only latest in a decades long series of moves by him.

See:
Chuck Schumer vs. Free Speech

Schumer Among Biggest Supporters of Anti-Piracy Laws (He was a co-sponsor of SOPA and PIPA)

Schumer's racket: Lobbyists and hedge funds

Schumer proposes new federal regulations on grill brushes

And since the above links are all pretty recent, here's some Schumer history:

On the eve of the first anniversary of the Oklahoma bombing in April, 1996, Congress passed the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. The Democrats were very disappointed, however, because the bill passed without proposed expansions of wiretapping authority. In May 1996, Reps. Charles Schumer (D-NY) and John Conyers (D-MI) introduced H.R. 3409 "to combat domestic terrorism."

The bill, titled the "Effective Anti-Terrorism Tools for Law Enforcement Act of 1996," would expand the powers granted to the FBI to engage in multi- point (roving) wiretaps and emergency wiretaps without court orders, and to access an individual's hotel and vehicle and storage facility rental records. It also relaxed the requirements for obtaining pen register and trap and trace orders in foreign intelligence investigations.

Every major government around the world ALREADY has access to Windows source code. Starting in 2001, when Microsoft's security started being a major focus, they began a program to grant access to the code to interested parties.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/government-security-program.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/

Uhh, no. Windows DLLs have always been relatively addressed, and are capable of being loaded at different locations in the virtual address space (google "rebasing"). However, for performance reasons, most DLLs specify a preferred address the loader will attempt to slot them into. All system DLLs specify this, which results in their routines being loaded at predictable addresses (even across machines).

ASLR means that, on boot, a different location is chosen in the virtual address space to load DLLs into, so that system routines are not always at the same location, making certain types of security exploitation significantly harder.

the news in the US no longer has to present a balanced viewpoint.

I don't think you have a very good grasp of American history, and the form newspapers and tabloids have taken, over the past 200+ years.

. In other words, nobody is monitoring journalistic integrity.

Are you saying you wish there was a governmental department in charge of arbitrating truth, which would have the power to censor or re-write the news as it saw fit? That sounds like a much more terrifying option to me.

Hmmm, interesting to puzzle out the references:
Samarkand is a city in Uzbekistan.
Levodopa is a psychiatric drug
Corinth city in Greece.

His previous postings are not quite as good, and this gem sheds some light on his... condition...