Virus infected warez have been a fixture of the PC world for well over a decade now, if not longer, and it hasn't really made a dent in piracy.

Read it again. Basically, retailers cannot stock only the English versions of games if there is also a French version available. If there is a French version, they have to either stock both, French alone, or none. The rule doesn't apply if there is no French version available. Since French versions of games tend to come out later than the English versions, this means those titles will have to be delayed in Quebec, forcing gamers to buy out of province and hurting retailers in Quebec for no good reason.

No, this is news for nerds. It concerns a comic book to movie adaptation, subject matter that is particularly popular among nerds, and peer-to-peer file sharing, a topic with technological and legal elements which many nerds find interesting. Given that the movie which leaked is expected to be a major summer blockbuster, this is definitely news. That makes this "news for nerds". Just because you don't like it, that doesn't necessarily mean it has no place at Slashdot.

That torrent link probably shouldn't have been posted here, though.

Not really a solution, since odds are very good that clients won't be able to open .odt files. Yes, there are Office add-ons that give it that capability, but very few of these clients are going to have it installed, and if we start demanding that they do, they'll probably take their business elsewhere.

He's also probably the only fan in their luxury boxes, and one of the only ones in the building. It still bugs me that places like Hartford and Winnipeg had to lose their teams so that Carolina and Phoenix could have teams that nobody watches.

I'm curious about what you do about dealing with customers using Office. I use OpenOffice myself for most of my personal usage, and I find it handles most average Office 2003 and earlier documents fairly well, but it tends to choke on stuff with a lot of weird formatting. Spreadsheets can also be a problem across OO.o and Office, and the handling of Office 2007 stuff still needs a lot of work in general. I'd love to make a case for switching our environment to Linux, but our sales people in particular need to be able to deal with clients, and clients generally use Office, so it's a bit of a non-starter. I have yet to hear a good solution to this problem.

You've clearly never worked in tech support. I went to college before winding up there because for all the stories about shortages in IT, it's still very tough to break into without experience, but among the people I met, I was the exception. For the most part, if you can search a knowledge base, and you can put up with very stupid people without exploding in rage, then you can do tech support. Most techs hate customers because they deal with stupid ones, and the inverse is just as true.

If you're only paying your janitor $10k per year, you're a fucking asshole. I made more than that doing part-time tech support in a call centre.

I'd like to add that teaching evolution isn't really an issue in the jurisdictions where Catholics make up significant portions of the population. For the most part, Boston, New York, Montreal, et al. aren't exactly clamouring for creationism to be taught in schools. Religion's not the only cause, of course, as these areas also tend to be better educated, but it does demonstrate that most Catholics don't consider evolution to be contradictory with their faith.

There are plenty of ways to have your kids socialise without going to school. Just because most of those parents are afraid of having their kids meet anyone else at all doesn't mean they must grow up without any meaningful social contact.

I taught one year. Teachers are good people. Go outside and play!

No they aren't. They're people, without the qualifier. Some are good, and some are bad.

Ballmer is trolling. It's what he does. The only difference between Ballmer and some dumbass AC here on Slashdot is that being an asshole made Ballmer a billionaire.

That said, yes, a big part of the price of an Apple is the brand. So what? That's valuable to some people, and it has been very profitable for Apple.

If it wasn't still a problem, nobody would still bring it up. It wasn't unusual for my work laptop to blue screen when I woke it from suspend in the mornings, or just reboot outright. This machine was sold with Vista Business. Since putting Ubuntu on it, the problem has disappeared.

You're not alone. I read recently that Apple is among the worst major PC manufacturers in terms of hardware reliability. The OS is great, but I'd never buy one of the computers. I guess it's a good thing you can build Hackintoshes now.

No, the third is free because regardless of whether she got it free, the first two would have cost the same. They may have overcharged for those two, but they would still be overcharging if you didn't get the third one for no additional cost. That makes the third one free.

Here's some simple math for you in case you don't get it.
If 5 + 5 = 5 + 5 + x = 10, solve for x.