Historically, our right to bear arms has mostly been meant as a deterrent to keep self-righteous, patronizing Europeans out of our business.

When was the last foreign ground invasion of the US again? And the last European?

Amazon, not to be outdone by Apple's genius marketing, has shipped a 50 lb. bag of fertilizer to everyone with an Amazon Prime account!

Best of all, it's totally free and slightly less pungent than U2's latest offering!

You might be shocked to find out, despite the stereotype, that a large number of nerds are interested in professional sports as well. When an important figure in technology buys a sports team, it is a newsworthy item. Otherwise, feel free to ignore stories that you personally don't find interesting going forward.

Everybody knows that since it is Microsoft software, you should wait for threepointonedrive.

Yep. See also products named with the word "Smart." My first thoughts whenever I see such a product are, "Ok, what the hell is wrong with it? How did they manage to screw up the 'dumb' version that is almost assuredly superior in every way?"

Moderation is important, otherwise discussion is reduced to inane blather. #yolo #swag #grits

I too have the Seagate Momentus XT 750 GB which is the second generation of these Seagate drives (the article being about the new third generation which teams 8GB NAND with 5400RPM drives while these were 8GB NAND with 7200RPM). My experience was apparently very different from yours. In fact, I was so impressed by the performance of it in my laptop, I bought a second drive for an aging desktop to use as an HTPC when it came up on sale.

Few people who are interested in these drives expect them to be stand-in replacements for true SSDs but the performance increase over a standard rotational drive can be huge while the cost difference is marginal. Sure SSD prices are dropping but seriously, how much did you pay for the Samsung 750 GB SSD? Right now, most SSDs in this storage range are still typically in the neighborhood of $800-$1000 while this particular drive has been somewhere in the neighborhood of $110-$150 for the last year or so. Of course there's going to be a performance difference. But if the bulk of the os/applications that you work with can live in the 8GB provided (which is true for most folks), these can be a godsend at this price point. On the other hand, if you work with large amounts of data in an inconsistent fashion, you're unlikely to see the benefits.

I do question Seagate's determination that 8GB "ought to be enough for anybody" but it does hit a sweet-spot for most people at this time (definitely not future-facing). My biggest beef was that we were promised NAND-based write caching in a firmware update (supposedly in early 2012!) with this drive that was never delivered and that alone may be enough to stop me from buying Seagate in the future. This write caching has been implemented on this new generation and it will be interesting to see the real-world performance (especially given the 5400RPM rotational backing it).

Then charge him with three counts of murder and 234 counts of attempted murder. Does it really matter that this was done with explosives? Would you feel better if he stabbed 237 people to the same effect?

Once again, the conservative, funyun and diet coke-heavy portfolio pays off for the hungry investor.

Yep, there's no problem that can't be solved with DRM.

True. Researchers (or more correctly, organizations that hire researchers) will just try to get funding in every other state first (where they can have their cake and eat it too) and then come to California. If they find it elsewhere, they will leave. Eventually, the type of research that will be done in CA will be self-selected in that there were no issues with open access to begin with. Perhaps this is acceptable, I don't know.

Hardly. While a bill like this makes perfect sense at the national level, all this does is encourage moving even more high quality jobs out of state.

Clippy: Would you like help generating an attractive cartoon face for yourself? [Yes]
Attempting to generate an attractive cartoon face...
Error 7923: Damn, you ugly.
[BSoD]