Wow, you've never heard of the Miller-Urey experiments, or considered that local entropy can decrease, so long as the entropy in the surroundings increases to match? There are a raft of real-world phenomena where molecules spontaneously self-organize given some energy gradient.

Ah, why am I bothering, if you can look up everything, if you're actually willing. The onus isn't on everyone else to prove some invisible sky-man doesn't exist...

Haven't they already taken the first step with compulsory driver signing in their 64-bit OSes? I hear there's a registry hack to disable it... for now. But MS would -love- it to be mandatory, they've been laying the foundations since the original "Trusted Computing Platform Alliance" days haven't they? I don't keep up to date on all this stuff so maybe it's not so true anymore.

... probably true (the part about the post being intended for India). However, the company then deserves whatever it gets. Last company I worked for had the bright idea of outsourcing to Wipro. Ended up costing them far more than they bargained for. That company would lie through its teeth about the skills of its 'consultants' and 'programmers'. I had trouble feeling sorry for my company, as they'd instituted a hiring freeze in the US and Canadian offices in order to try and save money outsourcing. The lost productivity cleaning up after the outsourced peoples' mess obliterated any savings they had hoped to get.

IANAL of course, but it's pretty common knowledge that corporations in the US are considered 'persons', and as such, truly heinous crimes such as this should merit the corporate equivalent of the 'death penalty' -- revocation of their corporate charter to operate in the U.S. and dissolution/seizing of all U.S.-based assets. So there -is- basis in law for it.

Of course this power has almost never, from what I've read, been used. Which means corporations are actually -more- than people, being immortal, immensely rich 'people' who are in all practical senses above the law.

I see it rather as an indictment against closed-source OSes, if XP turns out to be incompatible with these new drives and MS never releases a patch to add support. People will need to upgrade for no good reason to one of MS's new operating systems. People should not have to deal with a complete upheaval of their tested and true systems due to a small hardware change such as this.

I can imagine MS is quietly chuckling with glee to itself, if this issue becomes a deal-breaker for machines still running XP.

I wonder why they couldn't integrate a supercapacitor rather than a battery -- while their capacity is less, they charge nearly instantaneously and have no memory. Then the lifetime would be even longer, perhaps over a decade if no extreme temperature variations were present. The things are designed for short bursts between sleeps, so a supercap could be suitable.

Yeah well Apple also stomped all over "OS-9" (google 'microware' or 'radisys' if you haven't heard of it). The OS-9 operating system dated back to oh, 1981 or so.. but some butthead judge decided, when Microware objected to Apple's then-latest release, that since Apple was, well, -Apple-, there couldn't -possibly- be any confusion.. even though anyone on usenet's comp.os.os9 was already sick and tired of Mac fanboys posting newbie mac questions there thinking it was a Mac forum; even though OS-9 and Mac OS 9 were both operating systems.. for 68k (and, at that time, PowerPC) processors.. gee, totally different markets. /s