While at first this may seems to be a strange notion, it is actually quite a logical thing. Since the dawn of nationalism(and thus conscripted armies) it has been known that wounded(especially heavily maimed) soldiers negatively affect morale much more than a dead soldier.

The reason is pretty much clear: A dead soldier is a hero and an inspiration for revenge, a wounded soldier is a person who can tell you about the horrors of war and about the things that are waiting for his brothers if they are sent to the front.

In order to prevent armies from disabling soldiers instead of killing them for the reasons listed above, a large number of countries expressly forbid weapons that non-leathally maim enemies(like blinding lasers) so that people would not become to much anti-war(in the war that a nation is fighting) and also anti-war in general(which inhibits a conscipting nation in the ability to wage war).

Furthermore, it's Her Majesty, not her royal highness. It's like calling Barack Obama Speaker of the House of Representatives, it simply makes no sense.

"Can anyone here name a computer manufacturer with a 97% failure rate of a computer line and then try to cover it up and continue to sell them?"

Shuttle with the K48 series. The power supply is way too small(100W) to support (almost any) hardware decently. It usually ends with the components using 95-97W and when the power supply degrades it is overstressed and burns out. It costed us a lot of money, mostly from shipping costs.

Our failure rate: 70-80%

"This is kind of like saying "I flip a coin. What is the chance it lands heads facing up?"

And you say "50%."

And I say, "Incorrect. There is a very small chance it will land balanced perfectly on it's side, so both the chance of heads and the chance of tails is under 50%."
"

You never specified anything about the coin. If you would say it was a fair coin, I would indeed say that the chance of head coming up is 0,5.

In any other case you ask me a question without giving any information. The coin might well be 1cm thick, which increases the chance to land on its side by several orders of magnitude. It can also be a coin with two heads, making it (near) 1 chance of heads facing up(then again, is this a theoretical coin or a real one).

Furthermore, the chance of a (real) coin landing on one side more than the other is 1 due to the inequalities in a real coin.

Citation Please

And no falsehoods about the Betamax vs. VHS war, the porn industry played no role in that.

You are just jealous because you were stuck with the C64 while all the cool kids had a C65

Unfortunately, in the case of 2 girls the full potential is reached at the first cup

Read the GP's comment. He is not saying that it will be 'better' next year, he is clearly stating that it will be 'butter'. I cannot understand that you didn't bread that correctly.

Isn't x264 (heavily) patent encumbered? And does that mean that the makers(or distributers?) have to pay a licensing fee? I know that it makes me weary to roll this out in a setting other than my home computing enviroment.

Anyone to easy my mind/confirm my suspicions?

I currently volunteer at a student based non-profit shop that mostly sells computers and computer parts. 21 years ago, we started as a shop selling pretty nothing but old 5.25" floppies and we made tons of money doing it. We even had a rivalry with another non-profit shop who could sell the things at the lowest price so we had volunteers doing 400km drives just to get floppies at a lower price than the competition.

At the moment, parts are crazy-ass cheap and webshops drive down the margin to nearly zero. Making money was a lot easier back then and PCs costed small fortunes $2000 was normal.

Nowadays, we still have some tangible memories left: some old 5.25" floppies and a copy of MS-DOS 4.0 still in the original box.

We also have an unsold copy of Windows Vista. We decided to add that one to the collection too.

"As far as I'm concerned real capitalist make money within the system NOT change the system so they can keep making money."

And as far as I'm concerned, real Scotsmen don't put sugar in their porridge.

it's the only way to be sure

"Bipeds are much slower, tire much easier,"

While the first statement is true, the second is most certainly false. Bipeds actually have a more efficient way of walking(and running) which allows us to run greater distances than quadrupeds.

In fact, some tribes in Africa use this advantage in their huntings methods. They simply run after a prey(I believe they favour fleeing prey to fighting prey) and chase them until the prey tires and then they strike when it is exhausted.

This meager Wikipedia article has some information about this fenomenon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting

I am a geek and I still bite the heads off chickens you insensitive clod!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDe1gd-pBRo -- There have been ARM-powered tablets on the market for quite awhile now, and they don't have the limitations you mention... Unlike the iPad, this one not only supports tethering to cell phones, it even steps you through BT pairing and configuring the DUN connection during the out-of-box setup wizard. You can also dual-boot different operating systems (Android, Ubuntu, Mer, etc.) stored internally or on removable SD cards. Not bad for something that costs less than half the price of the iPad. There are surely better ones available if one were to look around.