I never hear names on the RIAA side when these things are reported. It's no surprise that the language starts to get interesting when journalists are still so evasive this late in the game.

I recently worked on a customer's Sony VAIO laptop. The system wasn't cooling properly and was shutting down hard with increasing frequency.

Sony support advised backing up the user's data before shipping it to them. Duh. However, I couldn't pull the drive to retrieve the data without voiding the warranty. The damn thing wouldn't stay powered up for more than 10 minutes. By the time we actually (hopefully) transferred everything we needed, it wouldn't boot the OS because it had been scrambled by so many hard crashes.

They should have been responsible for the customer's data with such a draconian policy. Not that I'd trust them to do it properly (or at all).

Unless it was staged by the "victim" to vilify this "terrorist group"

Just throwing it out there, who knows

This Barbie has a new hat!

Somebody should make that graph on graphjam. I would but I suck at making graphs.

Can you even correlate the deficiency in math with owning a calculator, or is this *all* just technophobic crap along the lines of claims that cell phones cause bone/brain cancer? Alarmists and cynics are a dangerous mix, especially when they become afraid of something and feel a general lack of purpose. Go back to the trees.

C'mon. Mod parent off topic. You fucking dorks and your irrelevant loyalties.

I've always been fond of the pre-logon scan feature that Avast has. I haven't seen that in any other free AV package, and I've caught many infected items that couldn't be detected with the user profile running. OTOH, I've also encountered weird rogue anti-viruses that could only be detected *while* they were running.

MSE seems like a good program but I haven't seen it put to the test yet, that is, finding or cleaning malware. A particular point in its favor is that its license allows corporate use. However, it's a management nightmare in an organization with many computers. Microsoft does state that it's not designed for business use. I had one client with 6 computers running a custom application. The computers' system drives were small, and there wasn't enough space to accommodate their usual AV client. A staff technician had installed MSE on these computers as a temporary solution. I had to remote to each machine to exclude the custom application's paths and its many processes because the SpyNet feature that submits new processes to Microsoft would cause it to crash. It also happened that a crash would ruin an entire days' work, since the purpose of the software was result collection in a lab environment. So, it's convenient for home users, Might be OK for small businesses... not recommended in an enterprise environment. And I'm eager to see how effective it is against malware.

That is a wild assumption. Where I come from, we learn about the culture before traveling to a foreign country to study, and almost all the foreign students I have met here did the same. I can't think of one from my own experience that didn't.

Eh, at least they'll finally find out that almost everyone and their grandmother smokes marijuana.

Would somebody please mod this guy offtopic? I don't see what Dungeons & Dragons has to do with any of this.

Erm... Have you ever been to Duluth this time of year..?

Before software, the idea of agreeing to any terms before you even saw the product was ludicrous. Anything that might begin "Upon the opening of this package..." would have been called a "grift."