Given that it costs you nothing to upgrade to the latest OS X now, why are people still running the old version?

I have a MacBook Pro made in 2007 that I bought from a friend last year because I needed a Mac, not because I wanted the bragging rights that come with the latest shiny. It came with 10.6 (Snow Leopard) - because he was lazy, and I gave Apple the vast amount of 13 British Pounds to upgrade to 10.8 (again, because I needed it - Xcode didn't like 10.6, and the guy with the latest OS X DVD was on holiday). I did all this only because I needed the stuff there and then an Apple was taking its time with the latest shiny, so I wasn't planning to upgrade to 10.9 if they wanted more money for it. But since they offered it for free I didn't wait long.

If it costs money to upgrade I understand the reluctance - that's what's keeping XP still alive and kicking (it has an even more incentive to stay around as the upgrade costs a hell of a lot more than Apple used to charge), but it's free people! You don't even have to get a cracked copy off the Pirate Bay!

Waiting for the responses that "company policy", "IT department won't approve", bullshit. Kick the IT department in the nuts. They're the ones that will need to fix your Macs when your VPN login details get pastebinned.

[Neo sees a black cat walk by them, and then a similar black cat walk by them just like the first one]
Neo: Whoa. Déjà vu.
[Everyone freezes right in their tracks]
Trinity: What did you just say?
Neo: Nothing. Just had a little déjà vu.
Trinity: What did you see?
Cypher: What happened?
Neo: A black cat went past us, and then another that looked just like it.
Trinity: How much like it? Was it the same cat?
Neo: It might have been. I'm not sure.
Morpheus: Switch! Apoc!
Neo: What is it?
Trinity: A déjà vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something.

Interesting form of dictatorship you got there...

So if they rebel against the Dictator^W Speaker, they get kicked in the nuts by their party leaders. Why do you need members of Congress again? They should just stay home and let the Speaker vote for them.

Which part of the law allowed the Speaker to impose this "majority of the majority" rule anyway? Wikipedia says it's "an informal governing principle used by Republican Speakers of the House of Representatives since the mid-1990s to maintain their speakerships". I take "informal" to mean "because that's how I like it", but not like "and you can't do anything about it". USA being the land of lawsuits, I'd assume this would have gone to court by now - or something.

(That's from Speaker of the United States House of Representatives)

You what?

The Raspberry Pi's main mission is education. I have no idea where they're at with that, but the commercial aspect of selling boards to the masses is a very slick way to raise funds. Would you give them money just because you like their cause? Not so readily. Intel isn't competing in this market and most likely won't do so any time soon.

If this board had an Nvidia card that did VDPAU, instead of that GMA cruft, I may have been interested - because I need VDPAU, and it works awesomely well with an Atom CPU and 1080p H.264 video on the ION platform. Not an ION? Not interested. (to Nvidia: wink, wink)

If people actually do switch to Intel's "competitor" board in the detriment of the Raspberry Pi, it's going to hurt Raspberry Pi Foundation's goals, the people who buy Intel's stuff will be a lot more out of pocket for not much in return (can you get the same or more power if you give the $200 to Raspberry Pi and build a cluster with their boards?) I somehow don't see that happening though...

Bottom line is that if you want a Raspberry Pi you get a Raspberry Pi, and if you want a crap x86 computer - just because it is small - you get the "competing" board from Intel.

Actually, you don't pay for TV. You pay for cable. The copper and the shoving of signal down said copper. There are places in this world where you don't have to get cable if all you want to see is free to air channels. The channels you do pay for don't show ads.

Is it me, or is Microsoft trying *really hard* to lose customers? And the idiots just won't leave! Of course, they can't just say "stop buying our stuff".

Feels like MS got a friendly letter about their dominant position from the DOJ or the EU, and they're trying to tell them that even if they build high walls and put large chains and locks on their gates* people still want to get in.

*somebody, somewhere, is now imagining Bill Gates with large chains and locks around him, and smiling.

Can this discovery of old stuff be patented today, or is the fact that the romans did it so long ago constitute prior art? Or will the argument go like "We don't have a treaty with the Roman Empire regarding Intelectual Property Rights, an nobody did this in our country yet, so sure, go ahead an patent it"...?

If I were an alien and saw a rocket heading my way, I think I'd use my super high mega giga tech to do this to it: flip its trajectory so it comes back to you. Let's see you flip it back. I'd probably EMP it just to be sure too. You'd be mighty busy trying to hit it with other rockets before it gets near you. Some foes we are.

"We've discovered a new tiny pulsar orbiting a main sequence star. It's located in the habitable zone of Sol. We'll call it Sol-III. We find it fascinating that we found a pulsar where we expected a planet. One so tiny too. This paper will get us the Nobelzebyx prize in Astronomy! We'll be rich!"

Nuclear power plant in my back yard? Yes, please! I'll finally be able to power my dream lab at zero cost!

No, you can't have my electricity. You can have a coal plant, in YOUR back yard.

Now that's a _very_ interesting way to build a singly linked list at compile time. And you can append to it at runtime as well. And manipulate it. And all without a writing a single line of linked list management logic yourself and without bringing STL in. Just (ab)using language constructs.

No, Ido, derived from Esperanto, but without the weird characters and sounds that can't easily be pronounced by everybody.

Don't make scrolling text and a talking guy compete for attention - I couldn't pay attention to either of them. Play again, and again? You wish.

I was about to suggest you do what "Hide/Show Transcript" does, but I noticed it before I submitted this, so I deleted 2/3 of what I wrote. :)

All that money spent in the courts to get ISPs to block the Pirate Bay from direct access, and by the ISPs to implement the ruling, and for what? It appears only the lawyers won. The artists aren't any better off as a result, the "industry" isn't getting any fatter, and the pirates were only slightly inconvenienced for the five minutes it took to find a way around the blockade. You know, given this perspective, I'd suggest that the "industry" spends that money helping people in Africa or poor regions of the US (yeah, I crack myself up sometimes).

Thanks man. I haven't laughed so hard in a long while. My normal mood is grumpy, but in the last 5 minutes I've been full with laughter. Cheers.