Wait, RT doesn't stand for "Real Thing"?! :-O

Exactly this. When I decided my 2008-ish MacBook Pro needed replacing, all of Apple's decent hardware was locked down in ways I hate.

After searching for 15" laptops with decent display resolution (hint: 13whatever by 768 is not decent; 1400x900 is minimum for a 15"), I bought an IdeaPad Y500.

Great laptop, with easily replaceable battery, RAM, and disk, and an optical drive slot that you can replace with a fan or even a second video card. To get a similarly configured (but totally not upgradable or serviceable MacBook Pro) would cost nearly 4x as much, although it would have SSD storage instead of a small SSD cache and a big conventional disk.

That's a common problem with old drives called "sticktion" caused by the spindle lubricant drying out (if you know what I mean).

The fix is to leave it running, or give it a good twist along the spindle axis before you turn it on... once it's going it's fine.

Technically, my XBox 360, my BlackBerry Z10 and my son's Nintendo 3DS also run all of my favourite Windows 8 apps.

Just wait for the next CEO decree, which prescribes an "open plan" office without walls, or offices, for everyone to "encourage collaboration". 'cause that's what all those cool startups who can't afford proper office space do out of necessity...

It's especially fantastic if you're in the sort of position that requires some kind of concentration and you're near folks who are on the phone constantly.

Use a list comprehension:

print '\n'.join(['%s likes censorship' % (c) for c in us_tech_companies if c != 'lavabit'])

That's akin to saying you should ignore people with colour blindness when designing your UI. Or you should ignore cultural differences in meaning when you're designing icons.

Back when Apple (and a few other companies) actually adhered to user interface guidelines, they paid attention to these sorts of things. They're well-documented problems.

Get off my lawn.

Wait, wait, wait. "Almost out of warranty" means still in warranty. You're crowing about getting normal warranty service?

I mean, sure, a lot of places will screw you around to try to get out of warranty service, but those ought to be the exception, not the rule.

NO CARRIER

Apple may have had a problem with the CDDL; they had a finished (as in, good enough to release in beta format in various developer previews of OS X; I forget which cat though) port of ZFS, and pulled it just before release. Which is a shame.

Stack overflow. Rights dumped.

Yeah, that's not going to happen. The fastest up-stream available from my home is around 50 Kbytes/second and has been for the past seven years. It would take something like 145 days for me to upload just my CD collection.

Also, I hope we all know better than to store anything interesting in The Cloud. The last couple of weeks must have been hard on folks like Dropbox...

They need to study the telecom oligarchs in Canada; they're doing the same thing for significantly less "investment" in lobbying!

I'm more concerned about companies ending up with monopolies on the world's wheat/corn/etc. supplies. The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi is set in a near-future world where "competition" between companies like Monsanto (in the form of genetically engineered diseases targeting your competitor's crops) has completely pooched the environment.