by saying "you have to look up the processor codes" they let you pick between two i5s where they give the processor codes, and you have to have the codes memorized or look them up for that to hold any meaning. Is that a useful differentiator for someone trying to pick? Dell has the most useless "help me choose" links as well. Every one of them I've ever read was essentially "the more expensive option is better". That may be true, but it doesn't help one judge whether to put $200 in CPU or RAM or Video to get the best result for the same money.

You are paying the same for the same hardware. Apple is not more expensive. I just speced myself a laptop similar to a Macbook Pro, and the non-Apples came in as more expensive. Of course, the solution to that was tweak the specifications to cut the price in half without any noticeable decrease in performance.

But I'll take your comment to be "no, I've never had an Apple product fail me, but I still don't like them, so I'll make up whatever I need to agree with my opinion on them."

There are literally hundreds of books about that. When you correct for all other factors, a white person and a black person are just as likely to commit a crime, but the black person is more likely to be arrested, formally charged, tried, convicted, sentenced to more time, and serve more of that sentenced time. All those little pieces combine to result in blacks serving twice as long for the exact same crime as a white person. And nothing makes a criminal faster than putting them in prison. Once they get out, recidivism is worse in blacks (likely because they were treated unfairly the first time through, so they learn to fear/hate the system, and their time is harder, so they get out with the effect of having served multiple sentences).

But if you lived in a gated community populated solely by people who have never been charged with anything, you are more likely to die by the hand of a white person than a black one. And no, I can't cite it, you have to be able to understand statistics, or accept some expert at their word, and you obviously can't understand statistics, and if you'd take anyone at their word, you wouldn't go around confronting others for posting the truth. So there's no citation I could give that could possibly sway you, so I won't bother.

I have a number of friends who are immigration lawyers in the USA, and am involved (passingly) in the immigration community in another country, as I emmigrated from the US because it's filled with ignorant pricks like you.

That's entirely possible, but in that case it's because Apple brought a higher end market with them. Revenue with monopoly pricing is maximized by setting prices in relation to what the market can bear. Copyright is not a free market and filing antitrust suits over pricing or price collusion is specious; there is no free market pricing, there is no competition and that is by design.

If the DOJ was at all interested in competition they'd work to abolish copyright and let the Pirate Bay put some competetive pressure on the market.

It looks like the answer here is to keep HR away from the bartender and cut off the cocaine supply to those that let them run with this idea.

I used to like realistic combat rules like you, but then I took an arrow to the knee :)
It's all very much an abstraction and not very realistic to avoid the boring gameplay that would happen if your character gets removed from the game or vastly reduced in ability within the first few seconds (eg. an arrow to the knee and your character can never walk unassisted again). Realism may end up being no more exciting in terms of gameplay than a single coin toss. That's why we end up with a ridiculous "madoka magica" sort of situation where the characters come to no real harm, merely a bit of inconvenience, until their resources run out. It may have very little to do with reality but is more fun to play than going out in the first few seconds due to the pain from a spear wound in the stomach (from the madoka example). Abstraction is fun and makes it a game. Going for maximum realism turns it into a murder simulation, which is not necessarily interesting considing how fragile we all are in the face of fast moving sharp objects.

Whether the cutting edge of nuclear is viable or not Germany is not going to be putting up the cash for it. What they have is old plants that cost a lot to run, so their announcement to "phase out nuclear" a little while back was really a "do nothing" option - shut down the old stuff when it costs too much to fix and not spend vast amounts of capital in huge chunks to build new stuff.
It's a very simple argument and it's not even solar vs nuclear - it's things with very small capital cost and very short lead time (a few panels at a time or tiny little turbines running on natural gas) versus things with a large capital cost and very long lead time (nuclear or solar thermal - huge amounts of steam and theoretically low price per MW but huge installations that take a long time to build to get that economy of scale).

The German decision was about putting a "green" front on what they were going to do anyway for purely economic reasons. Consider Margret Thatcher's action on nuclear power in the UK for an example without the window dressing.

Ah, to be omniscient. You aren't one, and you don't agree with them, but you know what they really mean when they say something you don't agree with.

Perhaps it's that you can't define religious school. Any attempt at doing so will have a non-religious school opened up on school property, run by the priest/minister, with an assertion that it is non-religious. How would you get around such things?

I guess that's why I have trouble with these discussions. There is an actual economic definition, which is what the experts discuss, but people put their own definition on it. What you are talking about is Laissez Faire capitalism. Free market capitalism is where consumers have full knowledge and the barriers to entry or companies are low. But corporatism doesn't want either, so large government intervention is necessary to enforce informed consumerism and low barriers.

Yeah, NCLB, and anything the Republicans or teabaggers have said in the last 50 years about education or unions.

The one I'm typing on now is a 4 year old $700 special from Best Buy (Toshiba Satellite P505D, 2 GB RAM, discrete Raedon video, 64 bit Turion X2, and 18.4" screen). It's falling apart (broken hinges, failed HD, replaced with a bigger/faster one, loose power cord, loose battery of low runtime), but did manage 4 years and still running, even if I'm also in the process of shopping for a new laptop. Though anything with an 18.4" screen and modern processor and video card is more than double what I paid for this 4 years ago.