HSUS is, bluntly, a money laundry based on the animal rights schtick. Since one of the AR goals is no more pets, making pet deaths as ugly and expensive as possible is seen as one way of reducing pet ownership.

My mom has that same trait I've seen in films of wild monkeys -- if she sees a snake, ANY snake, she immediately screams and points and jumps onto the nearest raised object. It's hardwired, totally instinctive reaction on her part.

I react the other way around -- if I see a poisonous snake, I instantly go into hunter/killer mode, and woe unto the rattlesnake that crosses my path.

"Were we directed by Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we would soon want bread."
-- Thomas Jefferson

(Don't know offhand where to find the whole statement, but...
http://stevengoddard.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/screenhunter_159-apr-26-06-08.jpg?w=640 )

He didn't say spying was good, right, or legal. He said it's reality among governments, and always has been.

I dunno if you were intending it to be the Funny it's now modded, but that's an interesting insight, which I hadn't considered in that light.

Telling how many of the responses are on the order of "don't blame Slashdot because you can't make up your mind". Not only that, /. rails at Facebook (which I personally detest) but praises itself as a source of opinion, as if moderation doesn't at least partly function as a "Like" system.

I've changed my mind (and become more libertarian myself) in part due to discussions on /. -- occasionally fueled by liberal elitism. It's useful to have bad examples. ;)

A lot of component prices have been "stuck there" for several years now -- we're no longer seeing the precipitous annual price drop in last year's model, in part because some components are already about as cheap as they can get and there's not much room for improvement. Frex, there's nothing commonly available and technically above a Blu-Ray to drive down that price. Unlike DVD drives, which are now in the $20 range (and unlikely to go lower, given there's a certain manufacturing cost that has to be met).

Then how it it LiteOn stays in business? They've been near the bottom of the price ladder since the beginning, despite having the best longevity outside of maybe Panasonic.

As I say above, I doubt HP's purchasing dept. really looked at the market options; rather, they went with one of the big companies because, well, they're like HP, rather than being some supplier-of-rebadges like LiteOn largely is. Which in my mind is not due diligence, as they could probably have bought 3 LiteOns (and had happier customers) for the price of one of the others... some of which might even have been rebadged LiteOns.

A wise AC says, "Can't say I've ever used the listed companies' optical drives when I can get one for twenty bucks retail."

I did note LiteOn was conspicuously absent from the lawsuit list. Makes me wonder not about the other drive mfgrs, but rather about HP's purchasing department, which clearly did not do due diligence in surveying the total options available. It's not like LiteOn objects to being resold/rebranded, either -- a large chunk of other-brand optical drives (including standalone players) are LiteOns in disguise.

I've been using LiteOn exclusively for ~15 years, not only for the lower price (tho not the cheapest available) but also the durn things LAST longer, often by orders of magnitude. (First one I ever bought still works, despite being worked like a, uh, slave.)

They need look no further than domestic dogs ... the way other critters (fossilized or otherwise) are classified is frequently akin to deciding that since they look so dissimilar in size and everything else, Chihuahuas and Great Danes are different species, or that white Dobermans are an uber-rare endangered species rather than just a rare color variant (to purists: yes, I know it's a single-source mutation). This leads to classification and rarity-status nonsense like the spotted owl (color variant of the common barred owl) and red wolf (crossbred of wolf and coyote, where the coyote had the dominant but not universal tanpoint pattern).

No, we let them max out our credit card, and when they threatened to stop making payments, we gave them a credit increase.

My college roommates' family escaped from the old Soviet Union for the same reasons.

Too many people don't remember what it was like before, and elsewhere. :(

I'm using Mail.app with Dovecot as the IMAP server - I upgraded to OS X 10.9 a few days ago, and haven't seen anything weird going on (yet). I sent myself a test email a few minutes ago while watching the Mail Activity window, and numbers appeared sensible. dovecot.index and dovecot.index.cache files on the server aren't ballooning - at 178KB and 11MB respectively.

The Fastmail article mentions Cyrus as the IMAP server. Is it Cyrus-specific, or have I simply not been bitten by this yet? (I get loads of spam, but it gets pre-processed by Spamassassin so Mail.app rarely gets to see any in the main inbox itself.)

I read a study recently which noted that some signifcant percentage of car vs pedestrian involved a drunk pedestrian, and that even more involved a drunk driver AND a drunk pedestrian. (I take this to mean one should not walk across a bar's parking lot.)

Are they going to repeal the gas tax, so people don't wind up double-taxed?