Well, the parent said -
"Fortunately there were not turns involved during that portion of the trip."
Which implies that, if there had been turns, that would have been unfortunate. Which implies that something bad would have happened - namely, the parent getting lost.

Personally, I could never understand people who relied solely on GPS for directions. Yes, it's very handy to have. But what if the battery runs out? Software or hardware error? Or, these gaps in coverage, which I didn't even know happened? Before any trip to a new place, I always trace the route on Google maps, and print it out. This way, not only do I have a hard-copy backup of my directions, I am also able to customize my route (which is oftentimes better than what my GPS picks). Not to mention, looking over the maps beforehand familiarizes me somewhat with my route and what's around it. This is ESPECIALLY important if I'm going on a long trip through multiple states that I'm totally unfamiliar with, like the parent.
You just don't get any of those benefits when all you do it get in your car, turn the ignition, and wait until the robot voice tells you when to turn.

Indeed - losing 21k domains sounds impressive... not so much when viewed in the light that the net loss for that day was only 1k (one twentieth of the number being paraded around in the headline). To make this article even MORE useless, it fails to give any baseline for comparison... How many do they typically lose in a day? How many do they typically gain? This half-assed information for ONE DAY, makes for a, probably deliberately, misleading article.

It could be possible to track someone who's used Starbucks public wi-fi. Starbucks is going to know who was in their store at a specific date and time. They'll most likely have you on video surveillance. Say there were three people with their laptops on Starbucks wi-fi at the time the attack happened. It shouldn't be difficult to determine which one is the likely member of Anonymous through basic detective work. Or, you could set up surveillance on all three of them, and wait until the right one lets it slip that he did the attack, or is associated with Anonymous. This might seem like a lot of work to go through to catch the guy, these methods may even be illegal. But remember, this is the military-industrial-corporate-thinktank-government complex (aka BIG MONEY) we're talking about here. And, with the stolen CCs, theres going to be quite a few people who lost BIG MONEY in this. I wouldn't discount the lengths they'd be willing to go to get this guy. Some of these bigshots they pissed off may be able to pull strings at Starbucks to get the video surveillance tapes, maybe even data from Starbucks network itself (MAC addresses and more), if such data is logged. Or, they could just do their own dirty deeds and take it illegally from Starbucks. Some of the people pissed off in this incident may not give a fuck, like the Zetas. Maybe they don't even care to be sure they have the right guy - they're going to get him whacked, or plant kiddie porn on his computer, regardless.

Presumably, it would only take "Warner Music Group says so", if it works anything like the DMCA notices on Youtube and such.

Presumably a pyramid also builds up?

There's no way they did this intentionally. The execution of arbitrary scripts from an MP3 file has far-ranging implications for normal users. Someone's going to end up using this exploit to write malware. If that becomes widespread, you'll get "Kindles get viruses" into the mind of the consumer. They did not want this bug/security flaw. Coincidentally, it's a "happy accident" for people who want to jailbreak their devices (which are a miniscule minority with no impact on Amazon's bottom line). But there's no reason why Amazon would want this type of vulnerability in their device.

I think it's more of the lack of a sufficient space program that'll lose us "unique resources."

I sense you constructing a straw man. Parent post said nothing about Apple's tech, or their profits. He commented on what they are attempting to do to the industry as a whole. I assume he was talking about things like the anti-competitive suits they've been filing across the globe in recent years - trying to block their competitors from releasing tablets with rounded corners, for example.

Apple had an early jump on the smart phone and tablet markets, and I won't deny that many of their products are of great quality. But trying to shut out other companies from the market is anti-competitive behavior, and thus a "set back [to the] industry", which is what the parent said.

To me, it looks more like a Rolls-Royce Phantom. To compare:

http://www.worldcarsblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Rolls-Royce-Phantom.jpg

http://chryforum.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Black-300.jpg

The front of the car, especially. This particular comparison was immortalized in Katt Williams' "The Pimp Chronicles".

... and the length of the program (21 minutes) is exactly the same on "Tivo" (read: digital video recorder).

Indeed - DVD quality is limited by its reliance on MPEG-2 video codecs. I haven't done any testing, but it wouldn't surprise me if you could compress Blu-Ray movies down to 5 GB or less with no noticeable loss in quality, considering (1) the higher efficiency of modern MPEG-4 codecs, and (2) the high quality of the source material (your 50 gig Blu-Ray).

Now, you'd still want to keep the plastic circle around, just as a backup. You could have your 5 GB encodes on some type of media server, and just play them off that. You'll be able to get 400 movies on a 2 TB disk.

Ripping and transcoding the movies will take a while if you have a large collection, though. Personally, I don't watch enough movies for the 60 seconds it takes to load a disc to bother me... but if you absolutely must have all your movies "on demand", there's really no other option besides putting them on a media server.

I can think of several things:
Nuclear (or conventional) war,
Coordinated terrorist attacks across multiple states (like 9/11),
Threats from outer space (asteroids, gamma ray bursts, etc.),
The Large Hadron Collider causing a resonance cascade,
High-frequency trading machines develop sentience and take all our money,
The Republicans nominate a black man for the presidency.

I'm sure that IP blacklists (such as the ipfilter.dat for uTorrent) haven't been useful in a decade. It'd be no trouble for the plaintiffs in these torrent cases to secure a hitherto-unknown IP address (residential or business service) for a month or two for their purposes. The amount of money they extort from just one of the 23,000 downloaders would pay for a few weeks of internet service.

While a P4-era machine will certainly feel sluggish compared to a new one, I don't think it's a bad sign for the company that they give one to an intern. Simply popping an extra stick of RAM in it should make it suitable for common office tasks: Spreadsheets, web, email. Hell, even videoconferencing should work. My netbook, which sports a 1.6 gHz Atom (benchmarking almost exactly the same as my P4 2.0), 1 GB of memory, and Intel integrated graphics, worked fine for all those things. Skype worked. I even used Firefox on it, although opening multiple tabs or JS-heavy pages would feel sluggishly. In fact, I'd still be using it at school and at home today if I hadn't cracked the screen.

From a corporate perspective, providing this intern who may only be there a few months with a computer capable of launching Word a few seconds faster, makes no sense. If they didn't have any new machines on hand, it would be an expense of several hundred dollars, for no significant productivity increase. The prudent business decision would be exactly what they did: Get more use out of the old equipment that's just lying around.

Now, the extra ram is pretty much necessary to keep the machine usable for more modern apps (Office 2007, Firefox 3/4). But he just needs to ask the IT department about that. There's no logical reason why they'd refuse to let him put another stick in there. The only thing I can think of is that they have rules so stiff that they do not allow ANY modification of the hardware, even one that won't screw up their system images or present a security risk. That kind of inflexibility would bode much worse for the company than deciding to re-use old, but working, parts.

Of course, this is all assuming he's just going to be using an office suite and a web browser, maybe a few other low-profile apps. If they want him to do CAD, or software development, or image editing, something like that - then yes, they need him to get a new PC.

(By the way: Windows 7 won't even install on a machine with 512 MB. I don't think Vista will either, but I haven't had much experience with it. So I doubt they have those on the P4 box. I also doubt he's doing any computationally-intensive things either, those would run so slow on the machine as to make it completely unusable.)

I don't believe the supreme court judges are affiliated with any party. I know they are often classified as either "conservative" or "liberal", but that's just another false dichotomy. As for the elected officials, one house of our Congress is not controlled by the Republicans, nor is the office of the president. So, I do not believe it is fair to lay the blame for anything wrong with our country solely on one party. Expressing that sort of blind partisanship makes you no better than those demanding of Obama multiple birth certificates, college transcripts, and Certificates of Non-Muslimity. As much as I want to go further into this, I won't. There are sure to be political articles on Slashdot where this discussion won't be completely off-topic.