Why don't they come out and call a spade a spade...the Chinese government aids, at worst, or allows, at best, this activity. Ask anyone who has spent any time living in China. It's pretty difficult to do anything that they don't like and if when you do manage to circumvent the rules, it's only because you're greasing the palms of someone inside the government. "Hacking group".....riiiiiiiiiight. (rolling eyes)

Just another reason not to spend your money with Verizon.

I love all the chatter about how Tesla is "harming the industry" by selling direct. **rolling eyes**

Directly selling cars to the public is only harmful to the middlemen in the dealerships that ARE indeed greasing their state legislators with fat political contributions. Why should auto manufacturers be forced to deal with middlemen to sell to the public? How in the world does direct sales "harm the industry"? Are large home builders forbidden to sell houses directly to consumers? The whole concept of protecting a parasitic middleman is just ridiculous. It results in inefficiency and higher prices.

Kissinger had an actual body of work to show for it.

When Obama got the peace prize for pretty much just showing up, I ceased thinking of the Nobel prize as a meritocracy and haven't even kept track of the winners since then. It's become a bit of a joke.

Far more likely that the folks in the White House would rather this issue goes away until AFTER the election...and then they'll continue cashing those checks from the monopolists and let the merger happen while they throw up their hands and claim they used that extra time to "really stick it to the man"....

Last time I checked, I didn't see any store fronts that were talking about accepting biotech stocks as currency.

And it was over $1000 in November 2013 and just a few days ago it was in the 300's. It's whipsawing up and down at the whim of the Russian and Chinese mob. Way too unstable to be used as a currency. No thanks.

Look at the drop in the value of bitcoin (in dollar terms) over the last year. The same goes for any of the alt coins, at least the ones with enough volume in the market to be remotely useful.

It's all over but the shouting. The pump and dumpers are making some money, but as a currency it's just too risky to hold since the value is tanking.

I picked up an Acer C720 about a year ago that was good enough that I don't even carry around the Mac Air that my company gave me. 2GB RAM, Celeron 2955U haswell processor, 8-9 hour battery life, hdmi/USB3, SD slot, 16GB storage, same video resolution as the HP above. All for US$199 and in a 2lb package.

I thought I'd need more storage, but it's a year later and I haven't used more than about 10GB of the internal storage. One of these days, I'll upgrade it to 32GB or 64GB, but I've just been storing my personal files on either a 64GB SD card or 64GB USB 3.0 fob.

Having something this thinly provisioned running the bloat that is Win 8.1 wouldn't be attractive for me at all, regardless of the price point. However, it's great for ChromeOS and Ubuntu Trusty.

For those needing another reason not to purchase Microsoft products...they just fired 18,000 people but are lobbying the government for an ever increasing number of wage slaves from India and other countries. They can hire these poor saps at lower salaries, bully them into working long hours for no additional pay (it's that bad 'ol offshore middleman that's blamed for the sweatshop hours) while backhanding profits to cronies in these offshore companies. Meanwhile, they whine that they can't find any qualified local staff. Actually, they just can't find local staff willing to work for third world salaries while living with first world expenses and taxes. Just say no.

The flip side of posting the most innocuous details of your life online for all to see. What did you THINK would happen?

Actually, the law is ambiguous. You ARE permitted to sell your handiwork, but you can't do it with the "intent" of being a business. So passing down that milled 80% receiver that you used to roll your own AR-15 to your heirs or selling a one-off seems to be within the law. Milling one a week and selling them on ebay...that's likely to lead to your arrest.

I rather like the status quo where they need a usable navy to get to resources that they will eventually want to take by force. They're about out of fresh water and other key resources aren't far behind.

A few years ago, I had a car stolen right out of my gated/locked driveway in NJ (cue the Jersey jokes). It wasn't an expensive car, but still worth about US$10k. When I reported it stolen and informed the police where they could ask for surveillance video that would likely show the crime and culprit, they treated me like a nuisance and never investigated the crime. I know they never investigated because the owner of the surveillance cam was never even contacted, even when I followed up with the cops a couple of times. The insurance company just paid out immediately and the adjuster said the odds of ever seeing the car again when stolen from northern NJ was almost zero.

So I can only chuckle when I'm told that the cops will show even a cursory interest in helping someone recover a phone, even if the EXACT location is known.