The solution to this problem lies with management, not technology. Replace Facebook with "Playing cards" and the solution is the same. If you have somebody who wastes time at work it should be up to that person's boss to stop that behavior and get the person back to work.

"Did company add feature to product to make more money?" Google is a corporation with a duty to its shareholders to try and increase profits. If they release a function to their search engine that both increases its utility to users and lets Google generate more revenue: what's the problem and why is it newsworthy?

For the record I really like the instant search. Generally I don't get my search terms right the first time. The quick feedback to search terms is really nice.

As it is, by the time companies get a software patent, there's little value to them because, after six years, the industry has already moved on.

As messed up as it is, the current system creates more value for patent trolls. If it takes six years to get my patent approved, that's six years "infringing" technology getting baked into competing products.

DRM reduces the value of your product; getting rid of intrusive DRM adds value.

Really? Go to one of your non-technical relatives and ask them what DRM stands for and what it does. It may add value to people who are knowledgeable, but to most consumers it does not.

While I agree with your point that every pirated copy is not one lost sale, surely some of them are lost sales. Also most DRM doesn't cause the system-exploding nightmares that the internet makes DRM out to be. I have a copy of dragon age on my PC and it hasn't burst into flames, given me the plague, nor sent my SSN to EA yet. I'm also an avid wow gamer and I'm well aware that blizzard's background monitoring tool is pretty invasive. I'm part of the majority on this one, I don't care so long as the software works. Software developers should be allowed to try and protect their software. People who really want to pirate the software will do so, but DRM raises the bar for piracy such that your average customer is more likely to pay money for it.

I've dabbled in 3D programming, I haven't done anything amazing, let alone made my own game, but I will say that D3D is much easier to write working code than OpenGL. With OpenGL I got about as far as a spinning triangle on the screen. With D3D I was able to get to the point where I was rendering a model on the screen and manipulating it with pixel and vertex shaders.

Somebody earlier hit the the nail on the head when they said that because it's easier it's what people will start and subsequently stick with. Not only that, but as a business if it takes your programmers 10 months to write a graphics engine in D3D and 12 months to write one in OpenGL, which one are you going to go for? There aren't many instances where I will go to bat for MS, but DirectX has a better graphics API compared to OpenGL.

You're using hardware that is close to twenty years old. I don't think it's fair to say that because linux has kept up with current technologies (CD-ROMs and USB drives) that it has become bloated. Some other people have pointed out, correctly, that you should be looking for distros from the era if you expect it to install easily on your hardware.

The decision said that it wasn't sufficient to prove that Rambus lied or harmed competitors; the FTC had to prove that it harmed consumers in order to fall under anti-trust law.

Isn't harming competitors harming customers? I mean less competition means more monopolies/duopolies, and that's never good for prices. I mean it's ok to screw over your competitor by offering a superior services/products and equal/better prices, but it's totally different to deceive a standards body so you can sue its members for patent infringement.