The SD card market is chock full of dodgy cards, even from reputable manufacturers, in this case it seems Microsft is not actually pulling our chain:
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=918

Also, they've done a KB explaining what happens when you change cards:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2450831

Agreed, the UK's IMR is more reflective of their society as a whole because the UK is full of middle class wealthy people walking around in bowler hats. What's more, they only have a tiny immigrant population, of which 98% are billionaire refugees.

They'd still get made because there's still money to be made by doing so. We already, to all intents and purposes, live in a DRM free world, where movies and music can be had for free, in all-but-an-instant. Yet, people still go to the movies, the still buy the dvd, the dvd special edition, the directors cut dvd, the special edition directors cut, the blu-ray... and so on.

e.g. X-Men origins, famously leaked before hitting the cinema, had a budget of $150,000,000 and grossed $373,000,000

Heck, I don't know why the media companies don't just give up and allow you to pay an indemnity which protects you from prosecution, but allows you to download as much as you please. The people would operate their distribution platform free of charge, with 99.9% reliability! If it was reasonably priced, I'd actually support them prosecuting those that don't pay as hard as they currently try to.

That's pretty much the opposite of my experience. I would say that it's quite often those that go away and examine the implications of any new information they receive, before making a snap judgement on whether they think they've 'got it' or not are often far better informed than those that assume they understand it straight away.

You must have seen it where people go away, read a book, think they've understood it all and start putting it in to practice and screwing a bunch of other systems up because they've not weighed this new information with their existing body of knowledge. They may have fully understood the primary information given in the book in an isolated sense, but running that information though future scenarios and weighing it up against what you already believe to be true and subsequently adjusting your beliefs/plans accordingly takes time. If you think you get something straight away, you probably haven't - in that case you've just understood things superficially.

That's not to say that group are completely dumb though, as long as they learn as they go along they'll eventually arrive at the same point as the deeper thinkers.

Wait 'til the teachers get told to start teaching this gibi crap at school. Suddenly all the recent graduates are talking exbi this and zebi that and you're still talking exa and zetta, and all of a sudden you're looking like a dibinosaur.

Unless you're South African, where the rigid cased 3.5's are referred to as, 'Stiffies'.

Echoing Tassachs point above, What I think everyone seems to miss in a conversation like this is that such beings would probably do not think like us at all. They may or may not have mathematics, or they may have some completely unfathomable method for describing natural phenomena. At one point amongst our species maths did not exist, then it did - a huge progression, perhaps such an advanced civilisation has discovered that there's something else which is better than maths for the purpose of describing things...? I mean even amongst ourselves, maths has gone through numerous revisions. Think Babylonian, Roman Numerals Heck the number Zero wasn't really in use until the 9th century AD... that's like a blink of an eye on a cosmological timescale... are we really so arrogant to think that we've now thought of every possible mathematical concept? Maths seems to have some shortcomings in itself... Infinity?? Pi?? These are a couple which say to me that even our best mathematics lacks a construct in which to describe apparently absurd outcomes such as these.

Electromagnetic waves as a method of communication weren't harnessed until 1886! (Thank you wikipedia!) That's only 124 years ago! Now go and draw a 'to-scale' timeline of the universe and put a mark where 124 years ago would be. Not very far from the end is it! That's our current cutting edge and so recent as to be an infantile technology. Imagine looking for aliens in 1850 or something, electromagnetic modulation would never even cross your mind, you'd be looking for lanterns in the sky or something. It's reasonable to ponder that, dependant upon their evolutionary environment, they could be using neutrinos or gravitons for the same purpose - good luck with detecting and then responding to that signal! It's my contention that there's loads more tech breakthroughs for mankind which will render electromagnetic comms obsolete, don't ask me what they are because if I'd been alive in 1850, I wouldn't have seen electromagnetism coming either. But once these breakthroughs come, we'll ditch our radio telescopes and just start assuming the aliens are using whatever comes next. Of course, it works both ways, and they may not have even noticed our electromagnetic bubble. In which case I hope we don't startle them when they stumble upon us ;)

Oblig XKCD

At my place we've got a bunch of MS stuff but the management and my colleagues all seem to be open source wannabe's. When I got here, the place was in a terrible state, the Terminal Servers were bluscreening multiple times a week, the file servers were thrashing constantly, basically our major incident board was lit up like a Christmas tree. Every time something went wrong, everyone would be "Bloody Microsoft, never works!!!!, viruses, malware, blue screen of death LOLLLZZZ!!!!"

So anyway I've set to work straightening everything out (nothing magical, mainly patches, firmware etc) and we've not had a terminal server bluescreen since July '09, and the helpdesk has received exactly 2 calls this afternoon, one was for a LOB app error, and the other was a user training issue. It's been this way for months. I can't actually remember the last time I've seen a helpdesk call directly attributable to the Microsoft platform. Now we're only a small org of 80 servers worldwide, so I know this run of good fortune probably wouldn't scale to some of the badass networks you lot are running, but it works for us, and works really well.

You would think this would have earned at least a little credibility on my part? Nah. I'm still the office whipping boy because I happen to think MS prods are a strategically good idea for the business. Every time something isn't working, they still straight away blame patches, Microsoft, a virus - when demonstrably the cowboy coding of our integration engineer, or a network issue or one of our LOB apps has got a bug. Pisses me off no end. We've actually had more issues with HP drivers/firmware than we've had with the MS stack, which surprised even me!

We're looking at some border gateway stuff right now, and the boss is rejecting anything without iPhone and Mac compatibility, even though it accounts for under 4% of our userbase! I'm also trying to virtualise some of the estate, but am hitting a brick wall because he wants to use anything but Microsoft, which we don't have the skills in house to properly administer. Insanity, IMO! Then again, he does insist on referring to our server cupboard as a 'datacenter' in front of vendors, I really cringe when he does that!

So anyway, don't always count on the fact that even if you come in and make all the right moves that you'll get any credit whatsoever. People's ingrained beliefs are hard to change, even when they have been proven wrong smack bang in front of their faces.

^ Wikipedia Admin

...cheap enough for everyone yet? Or am I missing something?

Trouble is, once free energy is out there in the wild, the entire world economy shuts down and becomes obsolete. The price of everything you pay for is governed by the amount of energy it took to create it. Whether that energy be the amount of food an engineer eats, or the cost of the energy required to extract metal from the earth, or the petrol it takes to distribute the product around. Once the cost of the energy required to create something is reduced to (or close to) zero, why would we still have money? Everything can be produce for free (as in beer), so who would pay for stuff?

We're in the middle of an interesting demonstration of this with the 'net, and the near zero per unit cost of replication and distribution. This means we get stuff like G-Mail, Linux, heck, even the Windows Live Suite, each of which has taken many thousands of man-hours to produce, and all this comes for free!

So, a free energy machine would not 'sell'. Or it might sell buckets, but that all money would be meaningless in no time at all.

NB this is why we should be investing a whole bunch of money in to things like ITER, cos if we can crack that, we aint gonna care about the cash it cost to get us there!

Umm, yeah but I think he means that we actually receive the energy as solar. i.e. that's the most direct method of input in to our system regardless of the transformations gone before. Then when we generate nuclear energy that's the most direct source of that energy stream.

Dude! How many times have you read it?

Wrong! A BSOD is caused by any unhandled exception which might cause corruption if the system is allowed to continue executing, such as some buggy software attempting to write in to kernel memory space.