There was no voting bloc. Toni was tainted by unethical ballot stuffing. If she had done the right thing, like Annie Bellet and Black Gate did, there would have been a groundswell of support for her, and she may have gotten a 2016 or 2017 Hugo free of Vox Day taint. There was no way she was winning a Hugo this year, nor should she want to, considering how she got onto the ballot. (And I'm saying that as someone who actually voted for her)

Toni is an amazing editor, but Baen doesn't really push the boundaries of scifi in it's works. They're like Scifi Mac'n'cheez. Comforting, easily digestible, exactly what you wanted, guilty indulgence.

Wait, what?

The only cliques were the puppies. the 2500 no-awards were not organized, I voted no award for every category that had only puppy-backed folks on it, except for Toni Weisskopf, who I truly believe deserves a Hugo. I did it without some shadowy cabal of liberal elites telling me to, I did it because the puppies gamed the system, and the best way to discourage that sort of behavior is nuke it from orbit.

And I'm one of the people the puppies should be courting as an ally. I will read any Baen author sight unseen. I love hard scifi. I own every Heinlein novel published, and kept them, even after I converted to ebook only. They're the only paper books I still have. I love military scifi and space opera. I'm exactly the demographic that would vote for some of the things the puppies want to see on the ballot.

I still nuked them, and I would do it again if they attempted to stuff the ballot again.

And the very fact that they could stuff the ballot they way they did disproves the idea of there being a shadowy clique controlling the nominations.

Um, what? Citation needed.

They scan and flag pictures you send via outlook.com and hotmail.com, and probably upload to skydrive. If they didn't, they could be legally liable for distributing kiddy porn. they do not randomly scan your PC or thrash your hard drives, unless you're talking about the system indexer, but that isn't searching or flagging anything, and you can turn it off if you prefer long-ass slow filesystem searches.

Exactly, MS increases it's "rental" charge, the vendor increases their hourly rate to recoup the cost, and essentially, the entire $25 million MS "made", they already paid to the vendor in the first place. It's like if I give my kid a $100 allowance and then "charged" $10 for his rent. I might as well have just given him $90 to start with.

Ooh, unless I want him to move out, I suppose.

Wow, bet you haven't ever paid for a magazine then, or a newspaper, or how about cable television? The ads are allowing big companies to subsidize your gold subscription. You're welcome.

I would hazard a guess that the folks pirating movies on their networks are also the network's heaviest users. Dump those few people, and their infrastructure costs don't go up as fast. It's a win-win for the ISP. (A pirate pays the same monthly fee as a regular user, but they can support hundreds of regular users on a single pirate's monthly transfer)

Damn, I can't work out which one you're referring to...

Exactly, it's basically a preprocessor for javascript that allows your IDE to help you write better code.

Um, the Apache License is significantly more free than the GPL. Just sayin'.

Rubbish. Not a good view of the technology. You might want to watch the channel 9 video and see how the language works before sounding the war horns. Essentially it's an overlay on javascript code that allows the developer to infer useful information about their code. The output from the "compiler" is bog standard javascript, no microsoft extensions at all.

So if the "carpet" ever got pulled out from under you, all you would do is go back to editing the standard .js directly.

Except it is a clock in the phone, and if you watch the shadow on the second hand, it's clearly in three dimensions. And it's not copyright, it's trade dress, exactly what Apple sued Samsung for, with the difference being that Samsung's designs weren't nearly as exact a copy as this is.

Well. Windows 8 is one of the first operating systems in history that uses less resources than it's predecessor. That alone should be cause for celebration. There are a lot of changes under the covers, like a rewritten network stack, faster and better file copying and moving, class drivers for printers etc that most people won't really notice other than it just feels better in use. If you don't like it, stick with Win 7. I can't help but feel that if Apple had introduced the start screen concept, people would be hailing it as the most impressive invention in the history of computing.

Um, windows 2000 was released before Windows ME, and since they were based on two completely different codebases, you're stretching a bit. Windows 2000 is the successor to Windows NT 4.0. Windows ME is a hacked together in panic release in the Windows 95 codeline (when consumers found 2000 wouldn't run a lot of their games, they balked)

Sorry, it's you who didn't read the facts here. This administrative action is against _all_ buckyballs, not just the old 13+ ones (which were fixed in 2010)

You're looking at 2 year old actions and assuming they relate to today's one, but they're only tangentially related.

Here's the press release about the current action: http://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/prerel/prhtml12/12234.html
You'll note that in this release they point out that in both the previous actions, the company was cooperative. That is also pointed out in the actual complaint here: http://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/prerel/prhtml12/12234.pdf

The founder's bizzarre political allegations aside, they are not being misleading about the CPSC complaint.

Since any provision in this law that could affect your costs don't take effect until 2015, your workplace is just pulling the wool over your eyes.