Watch out, the "ends justify the means" crowd will be here shortly talking about how magnificent the pyramids are and how long they have lasted.

The graveyards of bodies are a small price to pay for such greatness!

The problem with solar is that it requires an upfront investment that pays back over a long term but does not significantly increase the value of your home.

It may surprise you, but some people buy homes to live in them. Not to flip in 3 years for a profit.

And I don't believe there's enough data in various markets to know whether or not solar panels would increase the value of a house more than their installation price (which is coming down, by the way).

Sure they do. Corporatist Democrats play for the same team of rich elitists than Corporatist Republicans. Why do you think that no matter what else happens to the economy, the bankers always get their dough? No matter what happens to the economy, Wall Street gets taken care of first.

And no banker ever goes to jail.

Will you pay more?

Pay more for what? Dedicated servers? They had that figured out more than 10 years ago. How much more do you think it would cost to add dedicated servers to a game today? And yes, if people would pay $19.99 for some DLC that gives your character new hats, I'm pretty sure they'd pay for dedicated servers.

The reason they are not included is because Sony is so scared that there might be some kid in Slovenia playing a pirated version of their game. Not that the kid would actually ever pay for a Sony game, but they are outraged that there is a nickel in some kid's pocket that doesn't belong to them.

There are, but the feature doesn't work as a theft deterrent unless almost everybody has it.

Every iPhone in use has this feature. iPhones are still the most-stolen phones.

Are you saying Android phones all have to have the feature to protect iPhone users? Because my understanding is that iPhone thieves turn off the phones immediately and keep them in RF-shielded bags/rooms until they're reprogrammed for the illicit market.

And I still don't get how you validate this feature if you're going to rely on it for security.

Yet I have not heard of a pandemic of hacker-led mass bricking of iPhones.

There are some psychopathic blackhats who just destroy for the sake of destroying. Fortunately these are few - evidenced by the near total lack of PC malware that destroys the computer.

Then there are hacktivists who would do something like bricking a million phones at once the first month after this bill's required new phones are on the market to prove the point that government mandates come with unintended consequences.

It will be interesting to see if they do that. It would be very unfortunate for the owners of those phones. They would argue that society will be better off for it in the long run. Not satyagraha enough for me, but I can see the thought process.

a libertarian country would be 100% toll roads

Uh, every road in America is a toll road. Have you ever heard about gasoline taxes? Does pre-paying your road fees at the pump make you happier for some reason (would love to hear what that reason could be) than paying the fees as you use the roads (ala EZPass et. al. - let's assume you can use them anonymously).

The difference is that now the gas taxes are not all spent on the roads (they get diverted to police pensions and political cronies' boondoggles) and the money that is spent on the roads does not go through a true competitive bidding process (again with the cronies), making the costs higher and quality lower than they ought to be.

I abandoned that stupid philosophy that day.

It sounds like you did so without understanding how roads are paid for. Look, it's hard to know how everything works, but the more people do know how things work the more likely they are to be libertarians. Because people suck, especially those who seek power.

I don't want to live in an ideologically pure world; I want to live in a good world, and libertarianism wouldn't lead to a good world.

It's an ideologically-driven stance to accept more expensive, lower quality roads and political corruption and waste for the sake of a particular revenue model. Also one that necessarily supports a worse world.

I guess if you stick it in your pocket Bambuser becomes audio-only. ;)

The whole premise is stupid. If they're 30 days from being in stores, then the media have already gone to press and the boxes are being loaded and shrink-wrapped and loaded onto cargo ships as I type this.

There's no mystery entry of a new operating system that's also going to be released at the same time. Microsoft doesn't do that. Heck, even Apple doesn't do that.

Somebody could speculate that Microsoft will be releasing Windows 9 with a free AI-enhanced Teddy Ruxpin, and find a Chinese leaker to "confirm" it, but that's also a stupid premise for anybody to accept.

Seeing the headline I almost skipped this one since IBM has such a tendency to build expectation and then under-deliver.

But since x86 is gone to Lenovo, I figured this one might be interesting. They might finally put out something I might need to know about - they might leverage their non-IBM-PC-encumbered mainboard designs to make something really compelling for disposable cloud computing and hire a few guys to make sure, say CentOS 7, is easy to deploy on it. I was reminded of the talk c. 1999 when IBM was going to setup Linux as an 'LPAR' (IIRC) and you could run 256 instances on one of their big-iron machines (this was when nobody was virtualizing anything and VMWare was still at Cornell).

I thought, "they might actually be coming out with a 4-U box with sixteen processors in it that a cloud provider could cost-justify vs. whitebox x86 pizza boxes and offer management advantages, or maybe a blade system that would make it easy to deploy a compute cluster with 96 processors on a shelf and a tuned-assembly library for HPC." IBM has the means to do all of those things and there's a tremendous market for them. Finally, without the x86 albatross, it's POWER's time to shine.

"2-socket system".

IBM POWER - disappointing the industry since 1989.

But yes, I'm sure that a legal attribute totally affects the digestibility.

For me, it does. Monsanto owning a license on a basic foodstuff makes me sick.

The idea of any corporation owning a license on the idea of a basic foodstuff makes me sick. That's something I just cannot digest.

And I can't imagine how improving food production will prevent hunger,

You don't know the story of "Golden Rice", do you?

Nonsense. Who even cares what party the Kochs are? Are they GOP or Tea Party or libertarians or who even knows how they vote. They're just corporatists, like Soros and Bloomberg.

They may not all be the same, but they all play for the same team.

manipulate the markets

You're full of shit. You think people who support Net Neutrality are the ones wanting to "manipulate the markets"?

The reality is italian bread and cold beer will tend to make you fat, if you don't carefully control quantities.

My point is that if you're restricting your diet to a very narrow selection of foods, you are almost certainly also controlling quantities without thinking about it.

It's not so much about what you eat, it's about eating thoughtfully. Be aware of what you're taking in. Know that drinking a 64oz Big Gulp is taking in a LOT of food. I'm sure there are people who sock away the soda pop who might say, "I didn't eat anything all day".

Whatever, something is making people hugely fat. Outrageously, amazingly, shockingly fat. Circus freak fat. Industrial accident fat. I mean, comic book supervillain fat. And it's not because they ate too much brown rice and vegetables, or even Italian bread and mozzarella.

I believe the food and chemical industries have been experimenting on humans for years without our consent. You never saw people this fat when you were little. Well, I don't know how old you are, but not when I was little. I mean, there were fat people, but they looked like, I don't know, Jackie Gleason, not fucking Jabba the Hutt in stretch pants. And not just one or two. If you move around the city during the day, you will see thousands of people who are not just a little plump, but enormously, freakishly fat. When I was little maybe I'd see one of those every year.

So, what's changed? I'm not sure people are eating that much more food. You know who else gets freakishly large in the past 20 years? Livestock. And you know what they eat? GMO corn. I'm not sayin', I'm just sayin'.