Well, you're quite simply factually wrong (the law applies equally to everyone), but have fun with it.

Oh I thought you guys used cash. I actually canceled my debit card, they are just a terrible idea in the US. They do nothing for you credit score and if your PIN gets compromised it can be a PITA to recover your money.

I'm basing my view around all the rumours that are flying around it.

That's assuming the tablet Apple releases will be a touchscreen Macbook. The device they're probably going to unveil is, according to rumors, a large iPhone/iPod Touch running some variant of the same operating system. They're saying it's basically a large mobile device optimized for ebook reading and other media. A Modbook would be a different class of device.

You need something to deprive your body from water and sleep? How long do you plan to live anyway?

Not really as everyone on slashie-dot are basement dwellers which can only survive at the static temperature of their subterranean habitat... Not to mention they would have to ask permission from their mommy and we all know what she would say...

apple->music industry: conquered

apple->movie industry: hostile natives, sending in missionaries and evangelists of the "future"

apple->print industry: conquest being launched, lift off seconds away

genuine future:

internet->music: free*

internet->movies: free**

internet->print: free***

*creators will make money from live gigs, promotions, advertising, personalized content, etc. no distributors needed. distributors will evolve into hype machines and portals/ gateways delivering mass audiences to content. creators will continue to sign contracts to them for a cut of revenue, for delivering audiences. but its not necessary to sign a contract at all to become successful, its voluntary and usually for the pop bands

**the movie industry has always, and will always, despite every new tech threatening to kill it, fill cinema houses and make money thataways

***ad revenue is real and genuine for newspapers and will always exist. it will be a lot smaller, yes. and some superstar reporters will spin off from newspapers and become their own internet reporting gateways (see nikki finke: http://www.deadline.com/hollywood/ ). in this way the internet will "atomize" some newspaper reporting where the departments/ individual reporters will report directly to readers, unrelated to any particular newspaper, much like musicians don't need distributors anymore. despite all the doom and gloom about newspapers, nothing on the internet can ever or will ever replace the service, for example, the poughkeepsie journal delivers for the residents of poughkeepsie, new york ( http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/ )

Even if your car had such a bizarre tank, I can't see any "orders of magnitude" difference there between 1/2 and 1/4. You do?

Care to back that up?

I also work for an IT contractor, although fairly small so I can go smack the sales guys on the head a few doors over as needed. I go for option B/E all the time. In my view, IT is kind of like a a bottomless pit you throw money into. You can throw more and more, but there is ALWAYS something else you can do. There's always an extra backup system you can add, an extra redundancy, an user experience you can improve, etc. But businesses have finite IT budgets, and all the slick sales guys in the world won't change that. So seeing as how there's a practically infinite opportunities to spend IT money in an organization that will have tangible benefits, I don't see the point in letting the sales guys get away with wasting their money. If I feel its a waste, I tell them that, and point out 2 or 3 things to them and the sales guys that should be higher priority. In my experience, the sales guys in IT are some of the most easily influenced by other salesmen I've ever met. A vendor comes through, gives a demonstration of their network appliance or software package of the week, tells them how all their customers will be knocking down the door to give them their money to buy it, and uses every tired old pitch technique in the book. The same techniques the sales guys use on their customers every day. And they buy it hook, line, and sinker. They go out and tell all their customers they have to have X, even when they themselves don't really understand what it does, but the vendors salesman told them so. Someone needs to inject some reality into the situation, or you wind up with a customer that has spent their entire budget on the latest buzzwords and their basic IT infrastructure is a disaster. Whether we spent their IT money on buzzwords, or we spent their IT money on things they needed, we still got their money. But one way leads to the customer saying at the end of the year "We spent $x on IT with you guys, and we still have tons of problems! Our PC's crash, our network is slow, our backups don't work, wtf?" and the other way leads to building a long term relationship with the customer that will keep them as our customer.

    Uncontrolled greed is the enemy of IT contracting in my mind. We are all in business to make money, but wanting to make money and being blinded by greed are very different. If every time you went to the doctor, he tried to sell you some new wonder drug you can only get from him, the first you might be inclined to believe him, after all he is the doctor, he knows more about medicine then you do. So you would buy it, and the doctor would make extra money. But when the medicine didn't make you feel better, and everytime you went back he wanted to sell you a new, different wonder drug, that THIS time would solve all your problems, pretty quickly you would find a new doctor. Next thing you know, the practice that doctor has built up over a decade is gone. The same thing for IT. Most of our customers don't know what they have, they don't understand it, they don't know what they need. They rely on us to tell them. But if we tell them lies, we will make a lot of money in the short term, but eventually they will get tired of shoveling money at us and seeing no results.

Besides, is helping some sleazebag salesman make an extra $1000 in commission (that he would not share with you even if he saw you laying half dead in the gutter) worth your professional ethics?

Isn't "terminal velocity" lower than the speed of sound?

The problem is that M$ gets the timeline wrong so often. It should be:

1. Find bug
2. Patch bug

Not:

1. Find bug
2. Ignore bug for n months
3. News released about exploit
  compromising customers installations
  causing international incident.
4. Release self serving announcement
  that other systems are not affected
5. More exploits appear
  affecting larger numbers of customers
6. Patch bug

Until this irresponsible behavior stops there should ba a lot more stories. These guys need to have the light shown on their absurd practices as brightly as possible.

They get to pay extra to use email, of course! Clearly this is an "advantage" that everyone will want..

/Mikael

Care to provide some references. My understanding is that RAMBUS had an exclusive design RDRAM which wasn't all that great mainly due to unfair competition from DDR producers.

-Wikipedia

If you believe in the science that brings you modern medicine to begin with, then more knowledge is always better.

It's not the science I object to; it's the politics. The Vioxx study, subsequent FDA action, and subsequent lawsuits resulted in nearly every COX-2 inhibitor being taken off and kept off the market, despite the tiny magnitude of the risks. Given that, I think it's better to not seek out knowledge of such small risks rather than risk that kind of overreaction.