This. Actual stamps is mostly a consumer thing, I just checked our commercial postal service and they recommend a "stamping" machine if you send more than 40 letters/week where you charge it up like a prepaid cell phone, same thing for packages except there they normally print to labels they slap on the package. And for the big companies you get bulk pre-printed envelopes with logo that are collected at your place of business and charged to your corporate account, we have those at work. The potential for abuse is small since you can't drop them off at a regular mailbox and it'd be obvious who you're using to pay for your postage. A lot of the consumer-to-business mail is prepaid and rolled into the cost of business too, the few times I use stamps is to other people but most of that is replaced by email since you don't need a formal signature on anything. I guess there's the odd package, but if it's too big to fit a mail box you're going to the post office anyway.

Of the "let's frame it and put it on a wall" more than "I want one in my pocket" variety. I'll always have fond memories of Nokia 3210 and the state of the art in 1999, but it's not selling a new phone and it's not quite up to collectible/antique standards either. And Elop's little stunt sure didn't help Nokia's reputation as a has-been either. Not to mention that Nokia running Windows Phone might have some of the same hardware but there's very little in common between "old Nokia" and "new Nokia" anyway. I think this was a pretty easy call of Microsoft and would have happened regardless, if they'd ponied up a little more they could have gotten the Nokia name for good as it matters more to consumers than the commercial market the remains of Nokia serves.

Because Facebook is really interested in their stock value and not kicking the DEA in the teeth? They're not going to win any favors with anybody for actively sabotaging a criminal investigation, even an illegally conducted one. They want to have the public on their side which is why we're hearing about this in the news, Facebook couldn't win an escalating conflict with proxies and whatnot. If this becomes a big enough PR problem for the police though, the practice might go away.

> it is indeed the case that nonlocal businesses are more likely to use Maersk for shipping, since there are so many more of them.

Thanks for the confirmation. You really are an idiot.

I'm sorry, I didn't realise I was talking to an idiot. If local businesses are more likely to use Maersk for shipping, then it would be better for Maersk to use local businesses, for its own sake. Clearer now?

Supporting local business tends to increase local business, increasing local business. This is good for business. Do Korean shipyards get their ship parts shipped by Maersk?

3) Contractual obligations/customer relations, in the enterprise world people build systems they expect to last many, many years and not have the parts disappear on a whim. Which is is why Intel has launched Itaniums as late as 2012, whoever they suckered into buying it will get time to bail out. Don't underestimate the value of grudges in the enterprise, any executive who gets burned by IBM ditching it fast and dirty will be their enemy when the next big consulting/outsourcing contract rolls around.

Except they're not chasing the mainstream, they're chasing the hype wave of Apple/Google/Microsoft trying to be the "big next thing" instead of what is actually mainstream today with Win7/OS X. Instead of picking a market and staying on target to finish the job they still haven't finished on the office desktop from 1999 or the laptop from 2004 or smartphone from 2009 or tablet from 2014. And at this rate I don't think Ubuntu will stay in one place long enough to be relevant to anyone outside the ~1% of the desktop market Linux owns today.

While there'll always be exceptions I imagine it's usually a very short list of persons who want any one article removed, blowing the whistle saying "someone is trying to bury this article" should have the intended effect anyway.

Bullshit. Almost all games have had an D3D 9 rendering path since XP has been so massively popular, but a whole lot of games has taken advantage of D3D 10/11 where it's been available. It's very important to the number of games you can run on Linux, but it does not represent the state of the art. Speaking of which, WINE's support of D3D 9 through an OpenGL has been pretty good. Or rather my impression has been that if they can figure out what DirectX is doing, there's usually a fairly efficient way of doing in OpenGL. The summary tries to paint it as if OpenGL has been a blocker to DirectX support, my impression is quite the opposite. A gallium3d implementation is closer to the hardware and "more native" than a DirectX-to-OpenGL translation layer, but while it might boost performance a little it won't fundamentally support anything new.

I get my view of how the lower class is treated by the cops, from watching the TV show "Cops".

Understandable, then why you hold your views of the poor.

Generally the poor are poor because they make bad choices.

Some people, true, but not generally. If you're raised by poor parents, you're up against a very big wall. It's hard for them to buy school supplies, and if you're raised by a single parent it's harder for them to help you because they're probably working two jobs. Having a single parent is the result of a poor choice, but it wasn't your poor choice.

And a poor kid can forget ever attending college.

People who have bills to pay and have to go to work in the morning don't have time to be out causing trouble.

Most of the US's poor work, and are not criminals. But the cops still treat them as criminals; hell, society itself does.

Those folks working at McDonald's, WalMart, the corner convenience store are all on food stamps. That friendly face you see at the checkout counter is the face of poverty, not the idiots you see while watching "Cops" (that show is government propaganda, BTW).

So we are a classless society, in that you're not stuck in one socioeconomic class no matter how hard you work.

Rags to riches is extremely rare and takes a hell of a lot more than hard work. My late uncle was one of the exceptions. Creativity and hand-eye coordination runs in the family, and a stroke of bad luck was the best thing that happened to Dan.

He was injured in WWII in the navy, and became friends with a fellow patient in the hospital who had lost a leg in the war. The army gave him a prosthetic, and Dan saw it and said "I can make a better leg than that" when his friend showed him the new leg, and he did. They went into the prosthetics business, and all it took to sell one was for Dan's partner to talk to a recent amputee, who would invariably say "What could YOU possibly know about it?" All he had to do was pull up his pants leg and it was an instant sale, because you would never know that he was missing a limb.

But there were so many lucky breaks, including genetics, that his rags to riches story (both sets of my grandparents were poor all their lives) would not have happened had a single thing, especially meeting his future partner, who was a born salesman; that's something that doesn't run in the family. We couldn't sell a ten cent hamburger to a starving man.

The fact is, if you're born poor you're almost certain to die poor, and if you're born rich you're almost certain to die rich. If you're born middle class there's no telling; you could die rich, middle class, or poor.

If this society is as classless as you say, then why did no one spend a single day in jail over the banking crimes that brought down the economy? Why did no one from Sony go to prison over XCP? Why was OJ Simpson "not guilty"? Do you think a poor black man would have been treated the same? Hell, a poor white man would have gone to prison under those circumstances.

Excessively vague/misleading headline which you wouldn't have bothered to click if they'd made it informative? It's not bait if it's not a trap of sorts.

A transient reaction that can't be reliably reproduced despite recreating the same conditions to the best of our ability. Which might be because the conditions necessary are so extremely specific that they only got them right once by accident or because of some contamination or malfunction that somehow produced the necessary conditions yet attempts to recreate them fail. Or the results of the initial experiment were wrong, but here they've clearly put their desire to believe it was real over their good judgement.