In this specific case, BMG was a separate music company that Sony purchased shortly before the scandal. There wasn't a guy working in a Sony office in Japan who approved the rootkit. It happened nine years ago, it didn't actually act as a backdoor to people getting hacked, and I think it's time for Slashdot to get over it.

That's like the first the paragraphs, you should read the rest of the article. It's interesting and informative.

And is an interesting point that the stock market views yahoo as a negative three billion company with a thirty billion investment in Alibaba.

It was pretty obvious what they meant even without looking at the hyperlinks.

That's not how copyright works and I ask you to disclose that law. Anyway, Guardians of the Galaxy is less than $20 for a DVD, less than an hour's work for most people here, and is the mostly popular thing getting pirated. I seriously doubt you can stretch any law to mean "things have to be really cheap, like maybe just a buck or two, or you can take it without paying."

According to the FBI complaint against Benthall, he registered the black market bazaar's servers with the email address blake@benthall.net.

Lucky they had a mole on this inside, or they never could've taken down that criminal mastermind.

Piracy promotes ideas, innovation, allows good things to spread

I'd link to pirate bay if it wasn't down...they showed the top downloads and literally every single one was a commercial movie or game or TV show from a major publisher. The exact same sort of thing that is popular without piracy, only now you don't have to pay for that copy of "Guardians of the Galaxy."

I don't know if wild Slashdot speculation that Microsoft might fundamentally change their business model to something word that everybody would hate is enough of a reason for them to move to an entirely new OS.

I don't know, I have a second browser and a second office suite and some old-school games and some programming tools and some translation tools and still have like 12 gigs left. If I want to watch downloaded videos I stream them from my desktop computer. 32 GB is fine if you're not using it for modern games or to house all your media.

Not quite 15", but the HP stream is a $230 14" laptop with a 32 GB ssd. Windows, office, and the various bundled apps take up about 15 gigs of that. I have the 12" version and speed is fine, you just can't use it for games, and if you want to keep a large collection of music or pictures (or whatever) you need an external drive or SD card.

What would these fired workers possibly say, that these theoretical severance packages don't allow?' "I had a job, and then I lost it," or something to that effect? Big deal, that wouldn't make it to the front page of the Times or even Slashdot. And isn't there some kind of communication tool out there, which allows people to anonymously relate something that happened to them, and then have it widely distributed by computer?

Sure, losing a job to an H1B worker is no fun. This post is imagining something sinister is being hidden in severance packages, but leaves the sinister happening so vague as to meaningless. Either say what it is or shut up.

Being a felon means he committed a serious crime. It's kind of like saying "I killed a guy and got a couple of parking tickets."

I'm a little confused by the phrasing. Being a felon is a roadblock to a career. Having misdemeanor convictions probably isn't. If you're a felon, why even bother mentioning that you've had misdemeanor convictions?

Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den is from the early 1910s, meaning it pre-dates pinyin by 50 years. It does look especially stupid in pinyin, but the joke works just as well for theoretical Chinese people who aren't aware of roman characters at all - making puns of words with different tones is very, very common.

I'd need to see a little more background than this article gives, because (as the article does state), puns are just a basic part of Chinese culture. This is probably just an over-interpretation of some vague proclamation given by some no-name politician, aimed at stopping Internet users from posting pictures of crabs wearing wristwatches.

Of course it's anecdotal. It was posted in response to a +5 past where some guy asked about people's experiences. Was I expected to break out a pie chart? Now I see that my honest, on-topic responses have been nodded as troll. Maybe nobody hears about Mac users with problems because of willful ignorance?

The articles you link to are hardly scientific. People who install boot camps are a different subset of users than people running a cheap PC. They're going to be more knowledgeable about computers than the average pc or Mac user, for one.

Ultimately, I value my time enough that I will generally not purchase things I think will break and require fixing or taking to a repair shop. I'll spend extra on a dependable product. Apple computers have shown to not be dependable, despite being more expensive, and despite not having an OS that revolutionizes how effective you are with your computer or whatever Mac OS is supposed to do for you.

Even a warranty isn't a real solution, because obviously there's time required to deal with Mac and find out what the issue is, and then get the computer replaced. They don't send a technician to your house while you're away at work. Personally, a friend of mine had a Macbook refuse to respond after a standard OS upgrade. Eventually, after speaking to customer service and driving to the genius bar a couple times, he was given a new computer. My friend charges by the hour (not a hooker lol), and with the amount of time he put into it he could have charged several hundred dollars. At the prices involved, it makes more economic sense just to buy a mid-priced non-Apple laptop and throw it away every time anything goes wrong.