The sort of person who continues to believe these things work is the sort of person who believes that magnet motors can deliver "free" power.

Ah. We had the same problem with exploding cans of lunch meat. No, really, after being transported on a Hercules and stored in heat for a couple of days, we would often enough hear a "pop" or "pffft". And if we didn't clean the "savory juices", the stench would start.
The guys who smuggled in pizza made a fortune.

How do you use a portable GPS as a screen saver for your car? Or an X-Acto knife as a screen saver, for that matter?

I use Rain-X on top of the screen protector. It works wonders for resisting fingerprints, and lasts for a long time as long as you only use clean water when wiping it - never alcohol.

Carnuba hard wax is even better, but you have to mask the edges and speaker hole with tape until it's buffed, or you'll get white residue. Apply 2-3 times, and you'll have the slickest and clearest display possible.

And from this, ladies and gentlemen, we can conclude...

The problem is that your baby is not the only thing running on the system. When you waste resources, you do it on behalf of everything else that runs too. Even if your baby isn't doing anything critical when you waste it.

It only takes one selfish programmer to screw up an embedded system. You are he.

I'm glad I don't work with you, if you laugh at loud for every sentence you write.

Here in the US, the incompetent are called "victims". There's no shame to being ignorant, and, sometimes I think, no concept of shame at all. And the black-and-white thinking that dictates that if this guy was guilty, the buyers were therefore innocent.
Sure, the guy is guilty, and deserves 10 years in the locker. But so does every single buyer. You have to be seriously retarded to fall for a scam like this, and seriously retarded people should not be charged with buying military equipment.

No ifs and buts, there is enough guilt to go around here.

The problem here is to allow the siphon that private insurance companies invariably mean. Pay for the healthcare without the overhead of insurance companies. But no, that's against the law in the US, because that would be the government outcompeting private companies.

As for governments making money, there are plenty of examples. All in countries were governments aren't barred by law from making money.
(But then comes a wind from the right, and some populist right wing politicians tell how much better everything will be with privatization. He gets the votes, and the government sells its profitable businesses. Service goes down, prices go up, and everybody is happy. Er.)

Sure, it's possible. But why would they?
For Apple, it didn't cost much, if anything, given the high margins on their products and that a fair amount of gift card receivers could be expected to buy more than the gift card's worth while in the store anyhow, all of which would go back to Apple.
For Microsoft, the situation is somewhat different.

And why do people who bought something before a price drop feel entitled to anything? They bought at what they thought was a fair price. Whether to buy now or hold out for a possible price drop is always a gamble, and if you made the wrong choice, well, sucks to be you.

We need rules for these articles in the future.

Cyber-war/Cyber-warfare - take a drink
Cyber-weapon - take a drink
Cyber-warrior/Cyber-soldier - chug
Cyber-command - chug
Others?

Anyway, if this is such a big risk (aside from alcohol poisoning) then why aren't other countries switching to Linux and training their own programmers so that they can "harden" it?

If they have to use something that they did not write/audit themselves then that should be completely isolated.

Wouldn't the intelligent thing to do (if this is really a threat) be to develop a 5 year goal of moving off of software written by your potential cyber-emenies (take a shot).

I incorrectly thought that when people got zero results on the combined search, they'd try each of the words separately.

iwlyfmbp returns a boatload of WFMB radio station results on DDG, because Bing returns them. Whoever designed the algorithms for Bing was probably doing sabotage, cause you can't get that wrong by accident.

DDG has a way to specify a specific search engine to use, but it does not have a way to exclude one. Like Bing, which is worse than useless because of how it attempts to second-guess its users, and botches it.

Yeah, it's a search aggregator, and not a search engine.
I used it before, but stopped, because it uses Bing, which is maed forr pepple whoo cann nott speel. When I make exact and correctly spelled search queries, I get a lot of rubbish back because Bing returns results for "similar" queries.

Example query: iwlyfmbp deflate

Now run this through Google and DDG and see where you get the best results.