What makes you believe MS is not evil?

The actions of MS are what make MS evil: not the actions of others.

Being unprofitable is not the same as being a non-profit.

Ugh, if they have buzzwords on their resume, shoot them.

Using buzzwords is a cover for lack of actual experience.

Right, and the "custom 1GHz Apple A4 chip" uses an ARM core....

http://www.osnews.com/story/22805/Apple_s_A4_ARM_CPU_GPU

Citation for this?

I've only seen D&H with legal threats (and since they didn't ship the fakes in question, it's very understandable that they are upset with the "fact checking" that wasn't done).

Your link says that D&H, not Newegg threatened legal action.

Considering that D&H did not sell the fakes to Newegg, well, they are justifiably upset that people are wrongfully blaming them.

IANAL, so I don't know if they have an actionable complaint, but your link doesn't show a Newegg legal threat, and, again, D&H is understandably pissed off that they were blamed when they had nothing to do with it.

I'll third this.

I have SB2's in the living room and bedroom, a Boom that gets moved around, a Duet in the Office and Radio at work.

All sharing from the same library. Great WAF.

One of the best purchases in my life was my initial SB2, which is why I keep expanding the player count.

And, yes, they can sync.. or not: each player is capable of playing its own stream so if you want one thing in the living room and another in the bedroom that's fine.

Not happening here in Oregon, either.

CBS Records that published Michael Jackson's Off the Wall is NOT the same company as CBS records that published the NCIS soundtrsck.

RIAARader's database does not know this.

CBS sold off their recording labels 20 some years ago.

CBS Records was "resurrected" to sell TV show soundtracks... specifically NCIS.

It has no relation at all to Columbia or CBS/EPIC etc etc. NONE.

So your link to RIAARadar points out mostly records owned by Sony, not CBS...

Wrong.

Columbia Records is not part of CBS any more: they are owned by Sony.

CBS owns TV and Radio stations and networks, and a variety of websites.

But not records.

And not only are you trusting your business data to a third party, I see numerous companies trusting their entire web presence based on some flaky business models of third parties.

Perhaps Gmail won't vanish in the next month, but do you really want to trust some brand X hosting site that says they can make enough money to maintain and run your website based on a couple google ads running on your site? How long before they ad more and more ads... how long before they just give up can close their doors with no notice.

Not only are you opening yourself up to the cost of making changes to your site ("oh, sure we can rescale images on upload, but that will cost an extra $2000 to write the handful of lines of code to invoke ImageMagick, and we'll have to bill you more each month to handle the immense CPU overhead! That will of course mean some CSS changes to move stuff around on the page to fit the smaller images, so that will be another $2000..."

Outsourcing some "services" may be fine: companies trust ADP with their payroll... but they are also aware of the risks. "Do we want to give ADP our payroll? What happens if they go out of business? (again, not likely with ADP, but with a smaller payroll company? It could be a real risk.)

This is all very obvious, though, and RMS is spot on. In cases where you have an alternative: Do It Yourself or hire someone local to provide as much as possible and insist on Open Source and ownership of data so if he sucks he can be replaced with someone else that knows the platform. In cases like Payroll, bite the bullet, grumble a lot, and hope that some day you won't be trapped into a contract because "well, we have no choice... if they raise their rates 20%, well, we will just have to eat that loss."

I once saw a website that was not only stupidly expensive for what it did, the code was encrypted, the data formats undocumented, and even better: the contract allowed the software company sole authority to place ads in the web page and collect all the revenue.

They went under a year later, leaving the site owner with... nothing.

I bought a 6' power strip for the kitchen (got tired of looking for outlets, so now I have one every 5 inches...) The UPS driver noted that the box itself was bent and insisted I open it to make sure it was okay... it wasn't, it was damaged, so he took it away and marked damaged on his computer. I had Amazon call me about it, and they not only had received the UPS damage report, they shipped out a replacement that day. I had it the next day. Even their third party sales, Amazon backs up the sales: I've had them refund me for CD's that were never shipped by the seller, I've had them provide receipts for warranty repair... in all they have always been very effecient to deal with. If I can wait a few days for a purchase, I almost always get it from Amazon.