Here is my idea (Apple would call it an invention and patent it). All banks, instead of bothering with nonsense like my mother's maiden name, should ask a series of questions like "Are you an Apple fanboy?" They could protect themselves and me from a lot of grief and fraud by recognizing that there are a lot of customers who would be glad to share the fact that they will never buy an Apple product and don't want their card to be used for such purchases. I would gladly list other biases that I have that I never want my credit card involved in financial transactions for. Compiling that information from those who voluntarily contribute it could go a long way to stopping and catching this kind of fraud.

Many decades ago my HS "guidance counselors" told me that I would need two years of a foreign language to get into college. My first effort was Latin, which was the only grade school / high school course that I ever failed. (I'm my defense the teacher only knew two languages and they were Latin and German, he couldn't have passed English any more than I could pass Latin. Many others failed, and some students did pass and even excel, but most of those had previous exposure to another Foreign language earlier, the damn nuns never taught us a foreign language, they wasted too much time on teaching us their fairy tales.). So I switched and wasted two years in Spanish, which I got Bs in (dragging down my GPA slightly). In my senior year I applied to three engineering schools, including Carnegie Mellon and was accepted to all 3. I ended up going to Purdue.

I had a pretty full high school schedule. I had doubled up on sciences my junior and senior year, taking both Chemistry and Physics in my junior year and Chem II and Physics II in my senior year (there were only 7 students in the school with 600 seniors that took Physics II). I didn't have time for some electives that I would have liked to take such as mechanical drawing and drivers ed.

Then I went back to the high school guidance counselor, for who who I had a question. My question was: "You and your predecessor told me through all of my "counseling" that I would need two years of a foreign language to get into college. Now I've been accepted into three top engineering schools. Yet none of them ever asked or cared about a foreign language. What's going on? Why did you have me waste two years (actually three counting Latin) for something that nobody cares about? The counselor looked over my file, and my acceptance letters and my applications that I had brought copies of, and then said "Oh, you went into Engineering. You would have needed the foreign languages in you wanted to get into something other than engineering." All I could say was "you idiots, I've always said I was working to get into Electrical Engineering. You're not doing your job."

A bunch of Chinese are testing their understand of the concept "You can never underestimate the intelligence of the American public". The result: "currently running a Kickstarter project looking for $50,000 by March 7." They could certainly scam people out of that money. People have even given Hollywood money to make movies. Off course, it will never work as promoted, but that is completely different than another Kickstarter scam succeeding.

This isn't about Miss Ogyny (she didn't win the pageant anyway), but if I sponsored a similar bill in my state that directed schools to make sure that black males didn't dominate in Basketball, I would be labeled a racist. How is this any different?

not just a locker room attendant but... an elderly locker room attendant

Well, I bet he'll never work again.

Nor need to.

... to help determine if a drop in temperature — a slowing of the air molecules inside the football — can explain the low pressure ....

The National Felons League (an organization of Billionaire Team Owners that is considered non-profit so that it pays no taxes) is just looking for an excuse here. The patriots were laughed at when they tried to pull the temperature excuse out of their ass, so they want a University to back up the "pressure goes down with temperature" excuse. They need to do this because even die hard Patriot fans are not buying the "a locker room attendant did this all on his own" story. And lets completely ignore why this supposed temperature drop affected only one teams footballs and not those provided by the other team, or why the problem was only observed when the opposition intercepted a ball and not by any of the Patriot players as they handled the balls.

You don't help Alibaba by pointing out what they already know. I'm certainly not going to defend the Electronic Bay of Thieves' business pratices, but Alibaba has built their business on telling you that you are dealing with crooks. They go to great lengths to warn you that the people they hook you up with are not trustworthy and that they will hold your money in escrow for you, while warning you never to deal with the seller directly. Then, when you get cheated, they always side with the seller.

Don't try to kid us that they didn't know crooked things like fraud merchandise is going on. Only in the case of Alibaba it is as likely to be counterfeit SD memory cards or chips as it is to be designer fashions.

I never before heard a claim that the ZX-81 held a record, and I don't believe that it did. Back in the 70's (1975 or 1976) I received a copy of a chess program from Fairchild for their F8 computer prototype board, It fit in 1K of 8 bit memory (sorry, I don't remember how many bytes were left over, if any). I don't remember if it could under-promote, but I'm pretty sure that it could castle and allowed en-peasant moves. This was a novel and interesting microcomputer (the CPU didn't even have a program counter - but the memory management chip did!) and it certainly wasn't popular with hobbyists (although it was used in the Fairchild Channel F video game that came to market before the Atari 2600), but they did sell some $100 prototype boards and I bought one, mainly because I was so impressed by the 1K chess program.

Game companies have been doing lots to negate the right of first sale for quite a while. But this is different. They created a product then didn't like how some sellers were taking advantage of arbitraging how they bought it. Rather than try to deal with the retailers legally (if they even had a legal option), they decided to just punish innocent customers who have no good way to know all of the details of the Ubisoft wholesale and retail structure. Good for you Ubisoft, thanks for driving another nail into the damn DRM coffin. Do this enough and maybe the sheep will learn not to buy DRM products. (Yea, I don't really believe that the public is smart enough to learn, but I can hope.)

As long as they promise me emphatically that this isn't all a dream or that they are all already dead, and then in episode 9 it turns out that they all were dead, then this will have fulfilled my expectations.

Implying that if I have a bag of groceries and someone offers to replace it free with a bag of garbage, maybe I shouldn't take them up on the deal.

Yup. For Windows 7 users it doesn't look like it will be free or an upgrade. Typical Microsoft.

We all know that IE is tightly integrated into Windows and the two can never be separated Microsoft testified to that under oayh, and we all know that they would never lie to the court or congress. So making IE open source would demand that Windows be open source. Clearly Microsoft can't open source Windows, so they will have to keep IE closed source too. That's too bad, because I was looking forward to that piece of crap working it's way into other projects.

This ignorant AC actually got modded up, and for posting bad information???? In a vacuum all electromagnetic radiation travels at the same speed, you never see the speed of light listed as X for frequency F, just a single speed is ever given.

In Soviet Moscow the police track YOU!

just like they do here.