As a specific example of intentionally slowing cars down in racing, consider F1 - they removed the turbos from F1 cars because they were just too damn fast. The body counts were getting pretty high and they needed to make it safer.

I like having a slim laptop (mine's a non-Apple ultrabook, but same build tradeoffs). The specs are adequate, it's fairly cheap, and failure rates are acceptably low.

I'm not firmly against the end of upgradability/repairability for laptops. It was always kinda spotty anyway.

Modern SSDs offer under-provisioning for just this reason.

Since 5% of people do not have disabilities, how is that supposed to work?

The problem with a large barge with a radio antenna on it is that it could charge up a discharge,

Less sweepingly, I propose that all traffic fines be pooled on a state level and distributed by population proportion - this will be easier to get passed, but will prevent shitty little townships from funding themselves entirely through farming their nearby interstate highway for tickets.

The fact that enforcing traffic law is wildly profitable means that the system is naturally and automatically corrupt and attracts corrupt people to run it. When you uncouple the action from the reward, bad behaviour tends to stop.

The idea that all corporate money eventually winds up being spent by a tax-paying consumer somewhere breaks down under these circumstances:

- The corporation just sits on the cash
- The corporation sends the money overseas to a tax haven somewhere
- The corporation outsources jobs.

It seems fair - if a corporation wants to have free speech like a person, have rights like a person, and own assets like a person, it should pay taxes like a person. Otherwise, people would be forming communal corporations ("financial guilds", if you will), and running all of their income through them in order to reduce their tax rate to zero.

The shift is, sadly but truly, because the original Slashdot "how should I mod this post" logic has been overloaded by Reddit's: "UPVOTE DOWNVOTE LOL" version of user moderation.

This is not the yardstick of customer support. IBM Thinkpad support used to be miles ahead of everyone else.

In general, the customer support in the PC industry is stupendously bad. Now Lenovo's support is also horrible.

After over ten years of destroying businesses and hurting people while hiding behind a blank gray wall of "policy", Paypal are kidding themselves if they think that they can ever recover the goodwill that they've burned.

The sly omission of Chrome on Windows 7 from the browser benchmark is face-meltingly biased.

This could not possibly be more patently false. The use of the GCC compilers has no effect of any kind on the licensing of the resulting output.

And that's because the software world moves on, too. Newer, better frameworks that let you deliver more per developer-hour are not evil.

A computer that will run Windows 7 can be had on Craislist for $50. I shed not a single tear.

Just because some greedy bastard says you're stealing doesn't make it true.

In general, stuff only has to be bought once. Any more and it's the bastard that's stealing from you.

I'm no Mac fanboy. I'd probably attract criticism for being a Mac hater. In any case, I think some negatives are just unfair.

TFS says that Light Peak doesn't have peripherals yet, and paints this as a negative on the MacBook Pro. Why do all reviewers feel a compulsion to make up shit if they can't think of anything negative? That's like some video game reviews I've seen, where they can' t find anything to complain about, so they take a star off because they just don't like the genre. That's a good reason to fire a reviewer, in my opinion.