"while they cannot have a free for CC use they can offer a rebate to cash customers"

I assume you mean a fee, not a free. In any case, that violates the terms and conditions that the merchant agrees to with their CC processor and they can face sanctions, higher fees or even just be dropped by the processor altogether if caught giving cash rebates. Some of the smaller merchants do it anyway and rely on the goodwill of their clientèle not to rat them out. Then some sanctimonious prick who objects to a .04c difference paying by CC on a pack of gum comes along and pitches a fit to the processor and ruins it for everyone. And this is why we can't have nice things.

" If I can give him $100 and take $1 back vs giving him $100 and $0 back I know which I will select."

Then don't be surprised that the next time you go to the store you're paying $102 for the same amount of goods.... Merchants are there to make money, not run a charity. If the credit card fees and service fees gouge their margin, they'll get it back by passing it all along to us.

Actually ALL of those card benefits you receive come straight out of the merchant's pocket. Airmiles, purchase points and cash back are all being extracted from the merchants in addition to the CC fees which can be as high as 5% or more. There's a reason businesses prefer cash and why Interac is so popular in Canada with merchants as their fees are considerably lower.

Don't forget Mobilicity. Between them and Wind, they're scaring the shit out of the Rogers/Telus/Bell triopoly. I've been with Fido for ages because I used to have the old pre-Rogers acquisition City Fido grandfathered in on my account. When I went to renew in December they finally had something better for less money. I'm paying $60 a month now and have basically unlimited Canada-wide use of my phone, except for data, which is a 2 GB cap. I can literally walk from one end of the country to the other, talking 24/7 as I go and it costs me just that one flat rate. No roaming, no long distance charges. Something like that from one of the Big Boys was unthinkable 2 years ago, but when they're competing with metro-area plans from Wind and Mobilicity that are all you can eat for $25, they gotta do something.

Or you can bring your own to the party, like a shiny Nexus 4 that you bought for $300 straight up.

You might want to point out to us where you saw "for non-commercial use" because I don't see that anywhere. I was always under the impression ESXi was a crippled first-ones-free method of getting companies to use VMWare and then upsell them when they realize there isn't central management, live motion, or support for more than 32GB of RAM/VM

60 hours a week is NOT a "comfortable gig" unless you're fresh out of uni with no appreciable outside life. I did that for almost 10 years and looking back on it can't believe I did it as long as I did. There are plenty of tech companies around that "get it" and don't squeeze every last waking minute out of their people. One thing I definitely noticed was that the longer you make people work, the less work/hour they did since they were planning to be there for 12 hours a day anyway. Or if they were being pushed hard during those 12 hours, toward the end of the week they started to make costly mistakes that took hours to find and correct. In both cases the company was making minimal gains at large personal cost to the employees.

All of these violations make the assumption that the drone/RC craft was actually under remote control at the time. In the last couple of months I've purchased one of the cheapo AR Drone quadcopters and in the course of enjoying it have been doing a lot of looking at other peoples' adventures and mods with both the AR Drone and other quad/hex/octocopters. I've seen no shortage of videos where someone's sent an AR Drone up to the limit of its normal radio range and the drone loses connection to the controller then wanders off with the prevailing wind pushing it, still at 100+ meters altitude until it runs out of juice. In a couple of cases those drones ended up miles away from their launch point and took days to find. The AR drones can record video locally onto a USB stick so there's no need for them to transmit back to record video. And I've also seen other copter drones that have internal GPS and fly a preset course, also eliminating the need for remote control.

" It can fast charge in an hour or so to 80%, which isn't so bad,"

At a Tesla Supercharge station. Can you name even one track in the US, let alone the UK that has a Tesla Supercharge station installed at it? Without that supercharge station you're looking at hours to charge off a regular wall socket.

That said, Top Gear did exaggerate the scope of the problem, presenting what is more of a worst-case scenario than an everyday problem, but the point remains that going for a "track day" in a Tesla will more likely be a track couple of hours.

Even more reason for a *double* barreled shotgun. Your fancy AR-15 with the 30 round clip isn't going to do much if the first round in the chamber misfires and jams, but the chances that both barrels of a shotgun will not work is pretty tiny.

"That means you'd get 2 shots. Hope you don't miss or your ass is dead."

This isn't nearly as stupid advice as you'd think. Any competent person only needs 1 shot with a 20 gauge shotgun loaded with the appropriate ammo, especially inside a house or other structure. On top of that, a wound from a single shot of a weapon like that is far worse than a couple of rounds from an AR-15. I shoot you in the hip twice with an AR-15, you're in a lot of pain and probably down for the count. I shoot you once with a 20 gauge at less than 10 yards in the hip, you're going to need reconstructive surgery assuming you don't bleed to death on the spot. Plus, I guess you've never fired a shotgun indoors. They are LOUD. Like bowel-voidingly loud. If there are multiple burglars I really don't think they'll be sticking around to see how many rounds you've got after the first shot deafens everyone and puts one of their number on the floor with a fist sized hole in them.

" I am doing it, on my own, for my own business. That I sure as hell did build. Without your or the government's help."

This kind of attitude really annoys me. The government helps you in MANY ways. Let's break it down, shall we?

" am here at 2 in the morning, reading a little /. after testing a hard drive for errors so I can install it in a customer's computer in the morning."

Why does that customer want their computer? Probably to do either work or recreation on the Internet. Which wouldn't have ever come into existence without taxpayer dollars. We've seen how private enterprise did when they tried to make their version of an "internet". Compuserve, GENie, AOL, all isolated little walled gardens. "The government" that didn't help you actually created an entire industry, and your little PC business most likely wouldn't exist without it because prior to the internet age, the number of PCs sold was a fraction of today since the average Joe didn't see a need for them. Take a look at how many businesses like yours are in the area and ask yourself how well you'd be doing if you had to compete with all of them for only 30% of the current customer base.

But let's step back and have an even more granular look. How much did you pay the local mob boss this month to prevent his boys from coming into your store and trashing the place? Oh, that's right you didn't have to do that because government law enforcement prevents shakedowns like that in first world countries. And those computers and equipment you plug in at work, you don't have to worry about their power supplies being so shoddily put together that they might start the place on fire when you're not around, why is that? That's right, government standards being enforced on those same goods. When your suppliers deliver goods to you, they can't turn around and demand an extra payment for any random reason because you have a contract with them, the provisions of which are dictated by the laws of your country, and enforced by the judicial branch of that country.

Or on an even more basic "life" level. When you go to the supermarket and buy milk, you don't have to worry that the manufacturer spiked the milk with melamine to artificially raise the protein count on quality tests. Your parents didn't have to pay out of pocket up front to send you to a school to learn to read and write. You don't need to worry about roving gangs doing home invasions on your house (OK, this can happen, but it's not a weekly event like in far too many parts of the world).

The big bad government provides the framework that allows your business to even EXIST. Try imagining your life if you were born in even a relatively stable country in Africa like Nigeria. You really think you'd have even close to the same level of success?

A quote by John Steinbeck sums this problem up perfectly:

“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

And that's really the issue. You'll have Americans who are poor as dirt voting repeatedly against their own self interest because they have been conditioned to think if they work hard enough their ship will come in one day, and when that ship comes in they don't want parts of it chopped off to help OTHER people out, Never mind the staggering odds against that ship ever arriving.

And how big and loud is your machine compared to this one? Is your machine heat efficient enough to have its cpu fan turn completely off at idle like this one? Is it the size of a standard tower? The point of this machine is in no small part that it can play 1080p video, be quiet while doing it and fit in an entertainment unit is the same type of space that a video game console or DVD player would. Just like a laptop or a rackmount server, part of that cost is from condensing the form factor.

"He had no responsibility or right to attack the software a second time, call it "testing" if you like, he choose to attack the software using the exact same exploit he warned them about earlier."

Because it's not like he was a student at that university and his own personal information was at risk or anything, right? Oh wait...

I guess the appropriate course of action was to instead anonymously hint that such a thing is possible and then when someone else takes the data, start a class action lawsuit against the university. Lesson learned.