I've been one of the collateral victims of one of the FBI's "grab everything and go" raids. Some of you might recall the FooNet raid back in 2004.

http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/foo021604

My shell host had their boxes colocated with Foonet, so when the FBI went in and just grabbed every single machine in the building my host was screwed. And by extension, I was screwed. My host ended up losing almost all their customers (Including me) when they neglected to get a backup online in a reasonable amount of time. As far as I know nobody else on my host ever got their data back from the feds.

Fun fact, the WoW API has an interesting security hole that's just being toyed around with since this was announced. The new RealID BNSendWhisper() function can be used to send a private message to yourself, whether you use the RealID features or not. This results in your real name being pulled from the server.

  Not too big a deal, until you consider any UI addon (And WoW has hordes of them) can do this. Here's a bit of script you can paste into your chat in-game to demonstrate: /script for i=1,100 do if BNIsSelf(i) then BNSendWhisper(i,"Whisper from myself"); break end end

  Just a simple matter to store the returned name with an event handler and pass it along via whisper to another player.

  Sure, anyone adding something like that to a UI addon would find their addon blacklisted off most of the UI websites, but it's definately possible.

Imagine if Verizon had gotten the iPhone what it would have been like. An extra $10/mo to even have the app store. A $.50 "service charge" every time you download an app. The only bluetooth that would work would be the $80 iHeadset only sold by Verizon. Oh, and the USB cable would work, but if you tried to connect to the iPhone using anything other than Verizon's pay-per-play software the phone would lock down.

A moddable hackable Verizon phone? Yeah, Ill believe that when I see it. And firmware-lock busting hacks that only .5% of the population can do don't count.

Thats because the DS started selling like hotcakes. Why wouldnt a developer choose to produce a game on a superior platform thats selling like crazy? And why wouldnt Nintendo choose to drop the GBA when their new platform was making them buckets of money?

ATI DOES make inferior software. Have you ever tried to use their driver packages? Eeeurghh...

Im suprised to be saying this, but Im actually impressed with Win7. It seems to be more responsive at "General use" tasks IE flipping back and forth between programs and that sort of thing. Not to mention all the games Ive tried on it have actually run at a decent FPS boost. Granted, I havent tried anything older than a few years, but so far Ive had no problems with the system. Which is an almost reversal of my experience with Vista when it was released. My dads laptop crapped out and humorously co-incided with Vistas release. So of course every single machine for sale at the box stores was preloaded with Vista, no choice in the matter. After tinkering around with it, grousing at its drag-ass performance and tendancy to hardlock whenever he plugged in his iPod, I upgraded the damn thing to XP. Of course even that was a chore, considering the laptop manufacturer had hilariously removed XP drivers from their website because "We just expect everyone to be running Vista" as a customer service drone told me. But oddly enough, after setting up 7 on my desktop after toying with it on a spare machine, Im a bit shocked. The folks comparing the Vista/7 releases to ME/2000 are dead on. Granted, if you run XP and it works just fine, why bother? But in my experience 7 at least isnt a pile of Vista.

More than that my friend. Im a CNC programmer, as in I write programs for CNC Milling/Turning machines that create a physical object. Linux support in this is absolute shit. There are NO good CAD program for linux (compared to Autocad and others), no good NC editors (compared to pico/ee/etc on linux compared to AutoEditNC or other freeware windows programs). Linux is lacking in many areas, other than general 'make it fucking work right away' categories. If you want to beat windows, you need quality, not just hacker friendly stuff that requires trolling to fix.