individuals and businesses, made aware of the risks, can (and are supposed to!) make their own decisions

No, most individuals are at the mercy of whatever their employers decide, even if their employers decide that yes, they need to be at their jobs today even if it means driving in two feet of snow. Yes, they're quite "free" to quite their jobs, in the same sense that you are "free" to move to Somalia if you're unhappy with having a functioning government.

...less than any other ISP? No. Just like Google funded Mozilla this is more of a long term effort to push more people and more services online, where Google can get a piece of it. The "old media" advertising budgets are still pretty huge and people willingly sign up to Google's services so there's no need to get shady. In fact their roll-out is extremely slow if they were seriously intending to become a major ISP, they're really just trying to shame the rest of the country into demanding they get the same kind of service from their incumbents. Who needs cable TV when you got gigabit service and can watch any show, any time over streaming without hitting any caps? That's what Google is selling, of course it's out of self-interest but for tech geeks I think they're on our side in this case.

Well, I had an IBM PC-1, and yes and no respectively.

Clearing CMOS settings is still done with a jumper. I do wish that all flash BIOS devices had a write protect jumper, though, and it would cost little to add them.

I sure do, but any time I go visit a new contract or even just go on vacation, I shave it. It's not an attachment or an affectation, I just don't measure my value by the cleanliness of my neck. It's not my fault I was born hairier than the average bear.

But hey, thanks for recognizing how great I am. I could use the publicity.

Typecasting. They play the villain role so frequently, it's impossible to see them any other way.

Only the top ten or so even get space.

Here's another way to handle it. Whenever they appear on television, block out x% of their face and words based on their campaign contributions. Whoever gets least comes through at 100%, whoever gets most is just a wall of ads, and everyone else falls somewhere in-between

No, no it isn't. Just having non-transferable activation codes was that. This is a stupid and ham-handed attempt both to fight actual crimes and to dissuade people from seeking bargains.

Next time, consult a five year old.

Well, no. The license is something you enter into after you make the payment, hence the assertion that shrinkwrap licenses should not have any weight: you're not getting anything for them, you already got it. This online activation bullshit is a way around that: You're getting online activation.

I'm not sure they will do that. I think the majority of the gaming press will flame them for doing this (and rightly so, you don't punish people who are trying to be your customers, even if they are seeking bargains) and I think the majority of customers will feel however they are told to feel. And I think most of the rest of them will be pissed off because they won't have been able to play the game they paid for.

There's often legitimate discounts on games, so there's no valid reason to penalize customers for seeking discount prices. Likely some of those users made their purchases in ill faith, but I'd bet they were in the minority.

There's nothing more ironic than someone who has the luxury of having time to complain about someone complaining spending that time complaining about them.

Yes, I realize what this post entails. But I was just sitting here and noticed that instead of curing cancer or solving world hunger, you chose to spend your time trying to make someone feel bad about complaining by complaining about them, and thought maybe you could use a bit o' perspective.

Leftists including myself bring up Cuba's health care system to show that even a country which is totally busted politically and economically can manage a national health care system which provides outcomes as good as what we have now (which ain't that great, but bear with this argument) for pennies on the dollar. It's not that we should go commie, it's that even the commies can manage health care. Here in the allegedly greatest nation in the world, the only magnificent part of our health care system is the size of the bill.

Right now, any dickwad in America is free to put up a website advocating abolishment of the American government. And indeed, many of them have. Further, there is in fact a completely legal process for elimination of the constitution; you could pass an Amendment replacing it with another document. Nothing prevents anyone from starting a political party on this basis. I bet if I were less lazy I could find some really batshit crazy examples right now, but I equally bet that some people out there in Slashdot-land already know of some. I hope they will help out and link them here.

For real-time rendering of a simulated environment - that is, gaming - textures are generally stored as mipmaps so the more pixels it's going to take up on the screen, the more detailed version of the texture is used and thus the memory use rises accordingly through the entire pipeline. It's pretty easy to see if you keep resolution or texture quality constant and vary the other. If you're doing some other kind of simulation that might not hold, but for gaming what you said is pretty much false.

Hey, I'm still happy about my purchase but when I bought it I looked at the specs and thought: Hmm, they've disabled 3/16ths of the shaders, but it has the same ROPs, same cache, same RAM... if I buy two for SLI it should perform like the GTX 980 except for having 2x13 = 26 shader blocks instead of 16/32 for a single/double 980. Now I find out that's just not true, it has 0.5 GB quasi-RAM it can't access at the listed memory bandwidth, I feel I got very legitimate reason to feel cheated.

Apparently the ROP/cache isn't a big deal at it makes sense to use 7/8th = 14/16th to serve 13/16th the shaders, if only they'd listed the specs right. But gaming at 3840x2160 with SLI there's a fair chance I could run into a game now or in the future that wants to use all 4GB where it'll either act like a 3.5GB card or drop the framerate significantly underperforming compared to the GTX 980, I don't think that's just theoretical.

I'd probably still be quite cool with a 3.5GB card with 0.5GB of "last resort" memory that's still faster/lower latency than system memory. But they were in error and have admitted they were in error, I think that goes a little beyond "We said we're sorry" Paying some kind of compensation for falsely promised functionality would not be unreasonable (or swapping my GTX 970s with a 8-channel memory version, but I guess that's overkill). I'd be very surprised if there isn't a class action lawsuit very soon.