Tea Party "values" were the primary cause of a 2-week federal government shutdown. A complete shutdown. That wasted $26 billion. All of those salaried federal employees are still going to be paid for all that sitting around we told them to do. That is not fiscal responsibility, but the Tea Party was right there in the very middle of it. There is no contrived caricature here, the Tea Party is a fucking joke.

Ha! Did you know that Microsoft reduces "per core" licensing costs for SQL Server on AMD processors, because otherwise nobody could justify buying them?

This is the result of what happens when an advertising company makes an operating system.

Don't provide the verification tool to the client until they call. Support then loads a single program that verifies the integrity of the rest of system.. checksums of application code would just be one of the tests.

Wouldn't file checksums do a good enough job of identifying tampered code?

The first useful and informative comment in the thread gets no attention. This makes me think that OP's situation is not as unique or as stupid as most Slashdotters are making it out to be.

Given the shitfest that was the Nintendo Wii (tiny VirtualConsole releases, horrible Internet experience), the XBOX360 (RROD, XBox Live Gold) and the PS3 (Other OS removed) there's no way in hell I'm interested in any next gen gaming system.

No, quite literally, the name of my hidden SSID is "hidden"!

Please read this comment regarding aliteroflight.org - or at least check their "About" page first.

You have not always been able to cancel XBOX Live service using a webpage.

That's how I used to run TOR, until I found out about the Tor Browser Bundle a few months ago and made the swtich. That was the "secure" way to do it, they said.

Now I'm thinking I should have just stuck to modern Firefox Private Browsing + FoxyProxy.

I'd post anonymously, but oh hell what's the point?

You missed the most obvious option. Microsoft didn't 'give' that signature away to the state. They sold it at a very hefty price, boosting their bottom line without putting as much as a ding in our defense budget. That corporations would sell our sensitive secrets to a government that promises to protect them from any legal fallout is a given. Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, everyone, they're going to sell out that data and trust without thinking twice.

I agree with you that most people won't care. However, if that were my iPhone 5, I would have sued Sprint immediately had they refused to unlock it.

I used Sprint for over 10 years, always with "unlimited" data and texting. That same service over doubled in cost during that 10 year timeframe. They never once updated coverage in my area. One time last year I was stranded in the center of downtown Dayton, Ohio and couldn't even get a signal to make a call!

Shitty reception, shitty prices, shitty customer service, shitty marketing, Sprint is just shitty all the way around.

Astronaut pudding? My favorite!