Hows that write your representatives, organize, and protest working out? How'd running for congress work out?

Oh wait, you didn't do any of those things. I wonder why they don't care.

They don't realize that even if they drew some people in, they did PR damage to the rest of the populace. And THOSE future buyers are MORE inclined to never U2 album. They have destroyed part of their possible market place.

This is like in politics where you do something insane to get more die-hard conservatives on your side, but you alienate both the democrats and more importantly, the moderates! You've damaged your ability to attract more sales in the future, by playing dirty to get sales in the present.

Which one?

So a state makes a law that says only whites can open up shops, blacks aren't allowed to compete. Do you think the federal government would step in? Yes. Black people are allowed to compete in business.

A state makes a law saying only conglomerates can upon up shows, locals aren't allowed to compete. Do you think the federal government would step in? Yes. Local businesses are allowed to compete in business.

Just because you don't understand something doesn't mean it doesn't happen. It means you don't understand. The mere fact you didn't know firmware was upgradable means you are unqualified to tell us things aren't a big deal.

>But if you booted a different, known-good machine, then mounted the hard drive in question as a secondary drive, it seems feasible you should be able to read and verify the firmware.

No... no, you're missing it. The firmware isn't some magical OS. The firmware runs whenever it's connected. Not only when its booted from. Do you know what firmware is?

The firmware handles all requests. So clearly, you are requesting data from something that's tampered with, to see if it's tampered with. It's entirely possible that to make their firmware harder to catch, the firmware would only give you the "false" previous firmware data as you talk to it. Given the complexity of all of their groups viruses we've seen so far, and the fact they compress their payloads, this is not far fetched at all.

I mean, have you ever even used a microcontroller before? How do you think data gets off your hard drive?

Xfce's file manager Thunar (unlike my experience with LXDE/pcmanfm) works just fine. I have absolutely no idea what you're complaining about.

>IE 11 implements W3C standards better than any browser.

Yeah, it supports everything except their own products, like Dynamics CRM 2013.

Try explaining that to a fucking client. Pumping out version after version of half-assed enterprise software that only functions if you treat it exactly the right way. A house of cards waiting to be blown over by a moderate gust of wind. Meanwhile, we've got serious issues for the 2009 edition onward that still haven't been addressed.

Government intervention should be "as necessary" and "no further." Note how that doesn't mean "all government intervention is bad." The telecoms have a huge history of being assholes and they brought this on themselves.

I've personally had lots of trouble with proper 3-D acceleration pass-through in virtual machines. Vmware gives you half a driver worth, so things like multisampling aren't supported. Which is annoying if you're doing lots of primitive drawing in OpenGL like I was.

If they're empty, why are we scanning them?!

A bunch of Roombas with proximity sensors would probably be cheaper that a fucking flying machine that doesn't need to fly to do its job. There's this magical thing called a "tower" that lets you see things, and you only have to pay once to put it in the air.

The best life lesson you can give a girl:

"Judge a person not on what they say, but what they do."
and
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."

I plan in instilling that into my daughters as they grow up.

The problem there is that, as I understand it, the USA is a complete asshole and that 1) It believes its laws are enforceable in other countries, and 2) it has even less protection for non-US citizens (read: zero).

The US government is okay with bombing civilians to death for a good cause ("Oops, we thought there was a terrorist there!"). What makes you think they give a shit about your data?

The German and Japanese were war opponents who wanted to take over the world.

How the fuck can you compare another country's attacking military with me wanting my health care records private between myself and my doctor? Or my messages to my wife?

The NSA can not magically say, "We don't know if what you're doing is wrong, so we deserve the right to find out." That goes against every grain of Innocent Until Proven Guilty and moves us to a "Let us proof you're not doing anything illegal" system.

From the bottom of my heart: Fuck you.