The exact same arguments you are giving can also be used to advocate getting rid of VMs. Why construct an entire VM if you're only going to run one application on it? You can just as easily run it on the bare metal and put the redundancy and failover and all that on the application layer. You don't need an entire virtual machine to just run one application in a single security context. VMs are useful because they allow you to be flexible in where and how you run your applications and operating systems. If you get rigid and only allow a single security context to exist on a VM, you are taking away the flexibility and therefore it's usefulness. People want the extra clutter, since it's easier and thus cheaper to use it this way.

These days, you can't get more features out of your gamer card by tricking the card or driver software into believing it is a "Pro" card any more. If you buy a Pro card now, it's usually based on the previous generation of chipset, with a well stabilized and thoroughly tested driver, compared to the very short time to market that top range gamer cards get. The big problem is that newer chipsets often are run on the same driver and iterations between the chipsets are often nothing more than a die shrink size and maybe some optimization in memory path, controllers and such. This means that drivers are essentially the same for all chipsets and the single code base requires both stability for Pro cards and bleeding edge features for the latest and greatest gamer stuff. Essentially, the Pro users of GFX cards like the CUDA and engineering people, suffer from the big pull of the gamer market demanding ever increased high resolution and frame rates because the manufacturers work with a single code base for both lines of product.

Except of course it isn't, save in the minds of the ideologically deranged.

I'm not clear. How does this disprove climate change?

The guinea pig/sacrifical lamb in our organization who has been testing Windows 8 for the last four months still absolutely loathes it, and has requested she be returned to Windows 7. Her most frequent complaints surround the jarring context switch between the desktop and metro.

Judging by the way Android devices are nailing PC sales, I'd say yeah, Linux has become a threat to the Windows desktop.

They think Gore is a fraudster because most of them are too pig-ignorant to realize all Gore is is a populizer. I get hit with "Yeah well, Al Gore!" all the bloody time, and ironically, I only watched about fifteen minutes of Inconvenient Truth. I frankly don't give a fuck what Al Gore says, any more than I give a fuck what the Koch Brothers and the endless parade of shills they employ have to say.

Yes, but I'll just cherry pick some date, oh I dunno, say January 2013 and say "See look at all that ice, global warming is a communist lie to make us give up our livers!!!!"

I've had the feeling that's been in the cards for a decade now. Migration would take a long time, but IBM is a long-view kind of company.

Sorry, but wine does change taste once it's in the bottle and even more so before it is bottled. Beaujolais Primeur is a wine that is best very soon after it is made, it deteriorates rather fast and is ready for vinegar after a year or so. Other wines are the opposite, they require longer time in the cask and even longer time in the bottle to reach their best taste. The famous French Bordeaux region chateau wines are a good examples of this.

Wine price is a combination of rarity, popularity and taste. Once wines get "expensive" the price of production, packaging and storage isn't a major factor any more, but for most wine, it is. The prices you pay in fancy restaurants are often way more than the same wines would cost in trade or in a liquor store. I don't know about the USA, but in Europe, many restaurants only break even on the food and have to get their profits on the drinks you order while you are in the establishments. That means that if you and your dining partner are in the shop for an hour, your bottle of wine you share will basically have to get enough money out of you to pay for the wages of the people caring for you during your stay and the profit of the restaurant owner. Don't be surprised if there's a $30 or more markup on that single bottle...

And doubtless when you're proven wrong you'll be back with more fabrications.

Give them time. Soon it will join the 4th in applying only to you in your home... with the door closed... and the curtains drawn... in your basement.. by yourself... sometimes.

It's amazing listening to people who think the only humans on the planet that count are the ones they can see from their front door.

I don't think it's a matter of ignorance alone. It's ignorance and callousness. There's a certain breed of conservative who doesn't even try to had their underlying pathology. They're damned proud of it. They're the kinds of guys who buy small arsenals and fortresses in the hills and masturbate to the idea of an apocalypse where they get to shoot anybody in sight and declare themselves king of their domain.

Oh bullshit. The world's largest economy could afford to basically arm its allies in a world war. The world's largest economy could fund a pointless decade in Iraq.

Don't blame the "liberals" (who are hardly the only ones responsible for the debt), and don't act like the United States, if it had the will to do it, could make significant strides. After all, whatever the economy is being banged about with now, in a hundred years will seem laughable.