Here's a bit of helpful information for you:

Creditors who are expecting your monthly payments on time for credit cards, rent, house payments, car payments, and so forth don't take your knowledge and skills in lieu of payment. Only a fool walks away from his current employer without first securing a position at another, especially in this economy. There aren't enough employers out there begging for "top flight" talent to justify walking away from a job because management ran afoul of your opinion.

Furthermore, knowledge and skills are not job security. Rather, they play a significant role as one of the many facets of job security. Other factors, including attitude, ethics, productivity, and communication skills, play equally relevant roles in ensuring job security. You can have all the knowledge and skill in the world at IT, but if you possess only negligible amounts of any of the other aforementioned traits, then you're no better off than the kid flipping burgers for minimum wage.

I preferred Lewis Black's 3-level system he talked about in one of his comedy shows:

Level 1: "Jesus Christ!"
Level 2: "God dammit!"
Level 3: "Fuck me!"

Exactly. How is this "curriculum" relevant to producing functional citizens in our society in our schools? It doesn't teach them anything they can use in the real world. Is the RIAA expecting employers and higher education institutions to base acceptance on whether or not they received a passing grade in this?

Pretty sure that's Family Guy: Blue Harvest spoof on Star Wars that the whole "INTERGALACTIC PROTON POWERED ELECTRICAL TENTACLED ADVERTISING DROIDS" thing comes from...

I'm not sure what the purpose of these data mining contests are. However, as a member who prefers instant streaming over my XBox 360 over waiting for the mailman to drop off a DVD, I hope the contest yields a better selection of instant playback material. Instant playback on Netflix currently suffers from a mediocre selection of obsolete, boring, B-grade movies. One can only watch Dolph Lundgren's "Retrograde" so many times before questioning whether or not the Netflix membership is even worth it.

Agreed. The easiest solution to this problem is to simply run your own DNS server. I run both a Linux (bind9) and Windows DNS server on my own network and do not perform any lookups using my ISP's servers, OpenDNS, or Treewalk. Anyone with a spare junker PC kicking around the house and the ability to follow guides like those on HowToForge can circumvent this problem with minimal effort.

I'm not surprised this happened and, as much as I'll probably be modded "Troll" for this, I'm not really outraged by it. Everyone responding to this article is fixated on the fact that he got arrested because he was modifying consoles. What I think most people are missing is that he modified them for personal profit, charging people money to have their consoles hacked. IANAL, but it seems to me that had Mr. Crippen provided his hacking services at no charge, he would have probably received (at worst) a simple cease and desist letter or a minor slap on the wrist.

For the record, I'm not against modifying devices to allow them to do things that would fall outside manufacturer specifications. In fact, there's some pretty neat stuff that can be accomplished by using consoles as something other than a video game system.

In short, I don't see anything wrong with Mr. Crippen hacking the XBox, Wii, PS3, or any other console. However, charging money for the "service", knowing full well that content developers would wind up losing out on profits from the sale of games, probably wasn't a smart choice.

I demand a re-release of Full Throttle to be included in this.

I know I'll probably get modded as a troll for this, but the article doesn't offer any actual evidence that Microsoft is changing search engine preferences without users knowing it. Even the author himself doesn't say that there's conclusive evidence. He writes in his article:

and

The author of the article doesn't bother to conduct any meaningful research into the purpose of the Windows Search service or what it actually does. Now I'm all for throwing the punches at Microsoft for the stupid crap they pull and I wouldn't put it past them to do something shady and underhanded like this. However, this article is little more than the rambling conjecture of a computer illiterate who can't tell the difference between a system service and an online search engine. If you're going to post articles about the devious, dirty deeds of Microsoft at least have the common sense to post articles with at least some level of truth behind them.

I'm not seeing how this story or any other story about GM and their "Volt" is noteworthy. The Volt is not a marvel of engineering. It's not innovative. It's the same crappy "hybrid" concept that every other auto maker has tried to push. The Volt only goes 40 miles on a charge before rolling over to the gas engine. And at the nearly $40,000 price point, why bother buying it? If you spent a bit more money, you can buy a Tesla Model S, priced at about $50,000 (assuming you can get the rebate). The Model S doesn't even have a gasoline engine, goes over 7 times farther than the Volt on a single charge, can go from 0 to 60 in under 6 seconds, and looks a hell of a lot better than the Volt IMO.

If GM uses this new laboratory to produce cars with no gasoline engine (all electric), I'm on board. But if they use it to push this ridiculous Volt and other similar hybrids onto the market, it'll be just another waste of our taxpayer dollars.

Did you realize that you are completely wrong about this? The D900T is not MXM.

So the answer is no, I did not try purchasing an incompatible MXM video card to put in a laptop that it wouldn't fit in. I also said I didn't buy the laptop, nor would I ever buy Alienware. Please read the post and know your hardware before responding.

I think it was IBM that broke the 1Ghz CPU barrier.

It's not really a huge feat to break the 1Ghz "barrier" for a GPU anyway. And since it's AMD product, it'll run hot as hell and require a massive heatsink. You'll be able to barbecue a steak on your CrossFire enabled rig with two of these installed. Since it's also ATi, the card itself will be really awesome but the drivers released will be buggy and unstable, turning the card into little more than a giant red paperweight.

Couldn't agree more with this assessment. Alienware is hideously overpriced and their systems aren't really that good. I have an Alienware D900T that a friend of mine owns sitting in my closet. The video card stopped working and it's going to cost $500 for the replacement for a wimpy GeForce 6800. He doesn't want to spend the money so I've disassembled it for the good parts and junked the rest. In disassembling the machine, it's obvious that Alienware doesn't back up their bloated prices with anything resembling quality, too.

Nobody in their right mind should be buying Alienware. There's nothing about their machines that you can't get from regular branded PCs and custom built PCs, except for a huge price hike on the Alienware.

Oh you didn't get the memo? The Obama Administration is all about changing names! If you change the name of "War on Terror" to "Overseas Contingency Operations", it makes it sound SO much better! And those toxic mortgage assets the banks have on their books? Those are now "Legacy Assets". See, by changing the names from the old Bush-era ones to new, trendy Obama names they can just keep Bush policies like Warentless Wiretapping. Speaking of which, I wonder what new, confusing name the Obama Administration is going to come up with for "Warentless Wiretapping". Suggestions?

First off, AT&T is not a private company. It's a publicly traded company.

http://www.nyse.com/about/listed/lcddata.html?ticker=ATT

Second, AT&T cannot do whatever they want, even if they were a private company. There are laws in place that govern everything from employment to the actual business of communications that prevent "private companies" from running afoul of the consumer's rights.

Consider Comcast and their throttling of BitTorrent traffic. If we consider your theory of private companies being able to do whatever they want under the guise of it being a "business decision" to be correct, Comcast should be able to get away with bandwidth throttling of BitTorrent, right? Wrong.

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/08/fcc-rules-against-comcast-bit-torrent-blocking

Companies, whether they are privately owned or publicly traded, have laws and regulations that they are supposed to abide by. AT&T can't make a decision, no matter how good it is for the business, if it violates the law. While the system of laws and regulations doesn't always work, it does provide some measure of defense against companies trampling all over the consumer.