"'I'm going to the bathroom', 'the poop is coming out', 'meeting Bill and Larry for drinks'. That's not 'people with a life', that's inane and pointless drivel."

I dunno, it sounds like those folks are enjoying healthy bowel movements and meeting their friends for drinks while you are bitching about a social network on Slashdot. You might be a bit quick to cast the "not people with a life" stone.

To be fair, your AMD analogy would only work if AMD printed "Intel Pentium MMX" on their K6s, and they were packaged in the same PPGA package as a real Pentium MMX.

The chips that FTDI is disabling really are counterfeit - they look identical on the outside to a real FTDI chip, it's not just matching FTDI's VID/PID to use the same drivers.

The word was used properly. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published an apologetic for climate-change denial—a defense of their previous statements. Today, Climate Progress debunked that apologetic.

There has been no apology.

Words are important.

No, it didn't. Well, maybe by Linux fans.

It got panned for not running Windows software, and Linux netbooks had something like a 25% return rate, when their Windows counterparts were much lower.

Assuming it's working properly.

My VW's system is supposed to do that, but because it doesn't sense the door unlocking or opening properly, the alarm stays armed, and you then get the alarm going off when you try to start the car.

GP also mentioned that nobody is making anything better than 1080p, which is what I was refuting.

My frankenpad began as a T60p (15.0" 4:3, by the way, I forgot to mention that), with just the LCD swap, maxed out RAM, and a 2 GHz Core Duo, and I stuck with Windows 7 on that build (my experience on OS X being subpar, having used it extensively on an iBook G4, and being frustrated with the speed).

Then after a while, things were failing, the chassis was damaged, and I was getting sick of the RAM limitations, so I got a nice refurb T60 15.0" 4:3 cheaply, ripped out all the T60 bits, put T61p bits in (which is what required filing part of the chassis away), swapped my LCD over, and ran with it for a while.

Then, the screen started failing right before the MBPR was announced, so I jumped ship to OS X, and I'm liking it now that I have a fast machine.

It's not your only choice, it's just your only choice that's currently available.

Plenty of 1920x1200 options if you go back to Core 2, a few at Nehalem, and a couple at Sandy Bridge. (Some of those in the Core 2 and Nehalem days are even 15".)

Also, if you go back to Core 2, and don't mind some frankensteining, you can get an IDTech IAQX10, IAQX10N, or IAQX10S panel, a ThinkPad T60 or T60p, and a T61p 14.1" 4:3 motherboard, heatsink, Socket P CPU, and PCMCIA slot assembly, and put them all together. Need to reflash the panel's EDID ROM, and file some stuff away from the chassis, but the end result is up to the following:

2048x1536 IPS display
2.6 GHz Core 2 Duo Penryn
Quadro FX 570M (but crippled, and 128 MiB VRAM only)
8 GiB RAM
Whatever SSD you want, but IIRC it's constrained to SATA 2 speeds (maybe SATA 1, actually)

With less frankensteining, you can run the T60p board, and get up to the following:

2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo Merom
FireGL V5250
3 GiB RAM
Whatever SSD you want at SATA 1 speeds

And, with zero frankensteining, you can find an ultra-rare config of the ThinkPad R50p, which means up to (I think):

1.7 GHz Pentium M
Radeon 9200 or so IIRC
I think 2 GiB RAM?
Whatever PATA SSD you can find

The T61p/T60p frankenstein is what I ran before getting a MacBook Pro Retina, I'm a bit of a pixel whore.

There were certainly attempts at copy protection, though, largely relating to either weird disk track stepping mechanisms, disk defects that copying software didn't properly copy, and the like. I think there was the odd dongle, too.

Of course, Bumpgate hit all the x86 business laptops with discrete graphics, too. ATI didn't have anything competitive performance-wise at the time, so everyone went with 8000 series Nvidia stuff.

Basically, 2007-2008 was a bad time to buy a new laptop with discrete graphics.

Metal wheels on metal rail have significantly lower rolling resistance than rubber tires on asphalt or concrete, though. And, the infrastructure for rail is better suited to providing electricity to a train (partially because there's already metal to metal contact) than the infrastructure for roads.

The Republicans here in the US are often approaching Europe's right-wing terrorists, actually.

Literally, a lot of the right-wing rhetoric that gets spewed wouldn't look out of place in Breivik's manifesto.