Are you kidding? He's guaranteed all the gun-lover racist political rally guest spots that he can book. I predict chief of police in some small southern town before he's old enough to retire. He is a hero to lots of people.

But they have a scrolling marketing blurb on their web site asking for help from interested nations. Let's hope some country with disposable income stumbles onto their site and decides to donate their whole tax return!

Only because criminals like him are pushing the lies down their throats. Is this any less evil than supporting Al Capone? I suggest that it's more evil, on a much greater scale.

Lawyers. Lots of lawyers and parents ready to sue over the slightest thing.

And what made them obsolete? Software did. Be it more memory for Photoshop, better graphics for Doom, faster CPU for watching video, there was always that killer app that you had to run, and it didn't run on your old machine. Since the software business has been going "cloud," they haven't been pushing the envelope of PC hardware. That right there is a sign of the PC losing it's pre-eminence as the device that everyone must have.

By gaining a monopoly through the good graces of IBM, backstabbing every partner along the way, and paying off half of congress to keep them there? That's how Microsoft became successful. Or has this all been wiped from our collective memories?

Never. Ballmer and similar sociopaths have no concept of cooperation. They get to where they are by back stabbing and brown nosing, and expect everyone else to do the same. The strong survive, and the rest are so much offal to be thrown away.

And Sun is being proven right. They were just about 20 years ahead of their time.

And "whom" is most certainly still a word. I'm sorry that you don't know how to use it properly. Try reading Strunk and White some time.

Not only universities, but slashdot in general. How many times have we seen CS majors whining that they have to take math and, horror of horrors, foreign language courses. In the US if it's not marketable, it's not worth doing. And math is HARD. :-P

A ton of staff, all drawing paychecks. Back then employees were assets. Now they are expenses to be avoided.

Dreaming, yes. Any idea what precision is required for electronics? Hint, a lot more than this printer gives you. Also, there are dozens of different metals and non-metals required to make even simple devices, most of which will not easily be formed/combined by such a machine. These printers do not do 1% of what people think they can.

Just try that in the enterprise. I have Linux servers in our DMZ at work that are constantly raising red flags to our PCI auditors. I am constantly patching those things, asking for security exceptions, etc. And this is with RHEL support, not a roll your own. Try running a mission critical application on such a box. Luckily they are just minor services like FTP.

I'm supporting Windows here. I'd rather have a Solaris or AIX server any day.

"In a special lab, that formula can then be inscribed on a bronze disk to artificially reproduce the smell." What, is this from the Church of Mormon?

The answer to both questions is the same: because subscription revenue alone no longer covers the costs of content and distribution. Advertising is why XBL is $50/year for all of the services they provide instead of $200 for fewer services. Or to use a cable TV example, it's why every channel producing scripted content isn't $15/month like HBO.

Which is not to say it's a great outcome, but the public has shown time and time again that they'll accept advertising in exchange for staving off service cost increases. As MS has found out, all of that content that makes users flock to XBL (and hopefully flock to XB1) is expensive.

What do you give to society? That house, the food you eat, the media you consume, all these things are due to people in society interacting, from the food that's grown and resources that are mined to services provided. You can't just hide away from society, and yet expect to live with the benefits of it. Now maybe there is some way that you are giving back, part of the whole working organism, but I'm not seeing it. To me you seem like a cancer in a living organism, and you should not be surprised if you are cut out and thrown into a waste basket. Just to use the "meat" metaphor that you seem to like.

Seek help.