If Microsoft is anything like the big record labels, they'll go after the individuals for huge sums of money claiming loss of profit.

Surely all these people who 'stole' several thousand dollars worth of MS Points would have purchased them, had they not been able to obtain them by generating codes, therefore Microsoft suffered financial damages.

I used to be part of a HAM club that provided communications to coordinate an annual community event. The club had it's place back in the day, but realistically with the widespread use of FRS/GMRS there's really no reason to have a HAM club do it anymore. Maybe it made sense back in 1960 when the average Joe couldn't get his hands on a radio.

Don't forget the minimum 3.7 GPA requirement.

There are several other large companies in the same region as Google who provide similar benefits to their employees. Normally I'd be concerned of the potential doomsday scenario which you speak of, however these employees could jump ship to another company which offers the same benefits.

I'm not super-old, but I really am amazed about the difference in generational attitudes about privacy.

I'd have to agree with you there. I'm not super old either; I've been out of college for about 10 years now. I recently had a discussion with some current college students about privacy and they casually said, "this is 2010, just accept the fact that you don't have any online privacy or any other privacy for that matter." These "kids" just don't seem to care anymore - as long as they get their energy drinks, marijuana, video games, and social media, life is good and there's nothing to worry about.

On the otherhand the handsets present a new playing filed where it looks like lockdown platforms are going to be the norm for a variety of reasons.

I'm just not seeing the benefit of watching movies on a sub-4" screen. Movies on a "handset." Am I just an outlier, or is this the 'in' thing right now?

I have one of these fancy android handsets with a big (4.3") screen and I don't use it to watch movies yet. Mine even has an HDMI output. The only problem for me is that I'd be lucky to be able to watch an entire movie without the battery running out. I could always plug the charger in, but then what would I do if I was watching a movie and I got an incoming phone call? There is a benefit to not have all you devices bundled into one.

Yes, I know that, I made a typing error

LibreOffice/Lucha Libre -> "Libre" is the common demoninator, that's why LibreOffice made me think of Lucha Libre, and it's not nearly as stupid as WWE

That is why even diesel locomotives run a generator and use electric motors to haul a train.

It's certainly *a* reason, but not the only reason. Electric motors are easier to control (think traction management) and they also eliminate the need for a complex transmission.

Clean, renewable energy is the way of the future.

Though it's nice to have and good for the environment, we don't even need 'renewable' energy. Safe and clean nuclear energy technology that produces very little waste already exists and has been proven. Any waste can be safely managed, but for some reason clean and safe nuclear power generation does not seem to be much of a priority.

The only problem is that electrical energy can't be stored with the same convenience and density as petroleum.

Or maybe an oil company will purchase the efficient engine manufacturer and disallow it's use by anyone, citing it's intellectual property rights.

"We don't want new sources of energy that are going to make the greenhouse gas problem even worse," House Oversight Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., said in a recent interview.

Despite CA getting tons of attention by being 'clean' and having stringent air quality laws, Big Oil still has a huge presence there and operates several refineries.

Why do politics always have to get in the way of real progress?

I just want something that works, is NOT from MS, and is dirt cheap or FREE (even better!). When it comes to Word Processing and reading/editing .doc files which everyone still seems to use, I found OO to be cumbersome and not always 100% compatible with .doc/.docx files created in MS Word. I found Abiword and never looked back.

Oddly enough, when I read "LibreOffice" the first thing that comes to mind are a bunch of leather masks (Lucha Libra for those who don't get it).

I ran into all these timezone issues when I installed OS X, Ubuntu, and Windows 7 on the same machine. If I remember correctly, OS X treats the BIOS clock as UTC and displays the OS's local time as an offset of that baseline according to timezone and other silly daylight rules. Windows 7 (and all other Windows versions) treats the BIOS clock as the local time. Ubuntu would normally treat the BIOS clock as UTC, however tries to make dual-booting Windows simpler and therefore assumes the BIOS clock is local time (a friendly 'work-around' to play nice with Windows).

My clock kept changing nearly every time I'd boot into a different OS, and I finally figured out that to fix it, I had to change the Windows registry to treat the BIOS clock as UTC, and then make the same change in Ubuntu.