This is the new meme of the week. My turn:

"Working for Microsoft is like being raped by a drunken billy-goat while falling down a three hundred foot high pile of chocolate chips."

...So it went for 400 million? ZING! Honestly, who would want to hold FB stock? I'd only take it as part of a deal if I could dump it the next day wall street was open for trading.

Also, what possible IP could Facebook want from Oculus that would be worth that much to them?

I posted in a prior article that I think this is Facebook making a play for the future Google glass market. Portable computing is the big thing now (iPad,etc), and Glass is the next market. Oculus is very similar in nature to Google glass, so if you want to get into the market without playing too much catch up, you dump 2 billion in buying up someone with knowledge and patents in the field.

2 billion seems like a lot of money to sink into a gaming headset....Think more about where you could go from where the product is now, and think that other companies are doing that is similar.

*COUGH**COUGH* GOOGLE GLASS

Facebook wants to compete with Google. They think Glass is the next iPad, and are trying to get in the game.

If you look at history, most 'empires' lasted about 200 to 400 years before they imploded, became irrelevant, or were burned to ashes by the neighboring states. The US is a bit over 200 years old, so we are probably shortly due a revolution or invasion, statistically speaking.

The sad thing is, is when it happens, the mouth breathing anti-government radicals will insist that 'they knew it was bound to happen, because gay black heathens have taken over the gubbermint, and baby Jeebuz wanted to see them burn.'

(Of course they are technically right, because Baby Jeebuz was a 8 foot long monitor lizard with pyrokinesis.)

Unless the L.A. PD is going to try and make the case that everyone in L.A. is suspicious....

....And they would be right. ZING!

Just because botnets aren't efficient doesn't mean they aren't worth running. Stolen CPU time is free, so some profit is still free profit. I mean, if logic and reason governed criminal activity, 95% of it wouldn't even exist.

"At a huge cost to Americans". Does inflation 'cost' anything? It erodes the value of money, but it also erodes the value of debt. 23% Inflation is lousy if you have a lot of money saved up, but it is great if you just took on a huge fixed rate loan. While inflation could create short term money flow chaos, it doesn't really affect the intrinsic value of production. I would say that the problem would be a predictable system changing faster than people are used to.

Russia or China couldn't create that much chaos by cashing in all at once. Likely there would be a slight dip in the value of the dollar, and then everyone else in the world would swoop in an buy it all up at a bargain price to make a killing after the dollar stabilized.

Aside: good to know that the US doesn't have a monopoly on blowhard nationalist idiots like Limbaugh.

Polygraphs do not test for nervousness. They measure baseline physiological stats and monitor for changes. Anything conclusions you draw from that data is pure conjecture. What would it mean if respiration slowed 3%, perspiration increased 2% and blood pressure held steady? Are they nervous? Starting to relax, but feeling warm? Starting to tense up? Having a mild attack of angina?

I mock your claims further:

I can burn chicken bones to detect lies. To claim that the ash patterns could never detect a lie is just flat out wrong.

Sure. That means they are imperfect. It does NOT mean their results have "no connection" to lying. Burned chicken bones are not perfect. Their accuracy is far below the "reasonable doubt" threshold needed for evidence in court. But to extrapolate from that and claim that they don't work at all is nonsense. They are "good enough" for preliminary screening.

Hey, flipping coins will get you 50% accuracy, so a polygraph is at least that good, right? Can you at least find a study that that proves that?

+1 snarky. Zing!

I believe that god is seventeen giant, 65 foot long orange lizards, all who are named 'Ralph'. They have mile long, glittering prehensile cocks that drag behind them. Ralph^17 will sail invisibly across the sky once per hour, where all humans on the planet must turn to the South, and bow while chanting, 'Rubber Button' for one minute in order to avoid Ralph's divine and righteous wrath. His son is a stop sign three miles south of Yuma, and all who are able must journey to see him once in their life, lest they be dammed to spend Christmas vacation in New Jersey for all eternity. I demand the same respect that these goofy christian mono-godders get, up to and including wording on American money acknowledging Ralph^17's almighty farts. BOW, HEATHENS!

I mock you sir, for failing to respect that some people's perspective and beliefs are that 'invisible shit isn't real, and that you should call out the Emperor as naked when he is'.

No they don't. They don't detect lies. They detect changes in the subjects physiology, which has no connection to if the subject is lying. If the subject is nervous about the questions being asked because, say, they are worried about failing the test and losing their job

Moreover, because they are relied upon as a method to detect lies, the real professional spies know how to defeat them. There were a couple of famous cases of Russian spies a decade or so back who passed all the polygraph tests they were administered, and got into quite a bit of classified material.

Trusting them for anything is foolish. They will give you false positives and they don't catch the people who they really need to catch lying. You may as well just brun some chicken bones and read the ashes.

You should go read up on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. What they did might qualify as a violation of that act, in that they might have been intercepting information w/o knowledge or consent. Having worked with digital certs, I can say that most people, (even tech savvy ones) usually don't understand the first thing about CAs and how they work, so 'accidentally' installing a root CA all over the place sounds like a typical n00b maneuver. Hard to say what their intent was. Further, when they changed the network policy, that might qualify as evidence tampering, depending on what they did and how they did it.

Someone (either the cops or the school board) should investigate what the hell was going on.

One thing that the OP said that I found to be kind of disconcerting: FXcop was a pretty crappy tool. it could spot some odd code patterns in syntax, but it cannot detect 'good' code. I could implement a bubble sort function that FXcop would give a giant gold star to. Weird syntax might be worth looking at to see if there is underlying problems, but that is about it.

This is kind of an interesting number. I have have found a vast majority of the mobile games to be utter trash, that attempt to cash in on in game purchases while failing to implement a set of solid basic game mechanics. I would gladly drop $30 (or more) just to play a good mobile game that wasn't a poorly concealed slot machine. I wonder if the general shitty state of mobile gaming is causing a disproportionate number of players to not spend cash, or it is just the nature of people being cheap when it comes to 'free' apps. ('I am not going going to spend money on a game that is free', or 'I am not going to pay to win')

As an aside, the 'Freemium' model is really the scourge of the industry right now, with devs looking for easy ways to extract more money from the player base while providing no real product in return.There are a few people who do it right (WoT, LoL, and TF, for example) and a huge pack of greedy shills who are following in their footsteps.

A lot of the free to play model games basically let you pay to win, does this 0.15% number line up with the percent of the general population that is incapable of delaying gratification? I bet you could correlate this number with the result of some psychology study on the topic.....