What crystalline Tritelluride could break little Tigger's symmetry?

Facebook as your primary point of contact is a blaring siren of FAIL (unless you're a hipster, in which case you already FAIL but you obviously need facebook to collectively fail with your failbook hipster "friends".)

Yes he (Leo Apotheker) did. And he was right. Also, he might have overpaid (granted) for Autonomy, but the whole so-called "fraud" that neither Whitman's board, nor their lawyers and accountants doing the due diligence spotted (because it wasn't), is the basis for a massive write-down that Whitman needed as a backdrop to make it appear as if her efforts generated any revenue whatsoever. Whitman's HP's devious avoidance of legal discovery is entirely congruous with a strategy of sweeping her crap under the carpet of that write-down, based on no discernible evidence and HP's accounting misunderstanding at best. She is possibly the most toxic HP CEO since Fiorina.

Apple managed it OK.

Here's one improbability that relies on so many coincidences Istill think its barmy anyone thinks this belongs in the realm of credibility:
probability of not getting caught with box-cutters x probability of being able to hijack planes without pilot mayday x likelihood of coincident military exercises reducing intercept aircraft availability x likelihood of coincident simulations to confuse controllers x likelihood of PC simulator and minimum prop training providing the ability to actually fly jet aircraft at speed into targets x airframe remaining controllable and not breaking x steel buildings not being able to sustain collision and fire of little remaining fuel and furniture x probability of a nearby building collapsing symmetrically at near freefall from fires and masonry damage x 19 committed alqaeda terrorists acting alone ..... is so astronomically unlikely and coincidental as to beggar belief.
Of course, certain well-placed insiders could remove a number of those variables, but what would I know, I'm just a lunatic conspiracy theorist.

Very good question. Equally, if we are supposedly (in) a simulation, what are we a simulation "of"? Could we ever have access to that (in order to observe a difference from the simulation) or are we just simulacra without reference to an ultimate reality? The appearance of numerical factors in observed reality is taken to imply a possibly numerical simulation, but this itself presumes that if observed reality were not apparently numerically-conditioned it would then not indicate a simulation (i.e. necessary but not sufficient to prove an unsimulated reality under this schema.) An unquantifiable chaos is an odd characteristic to expect of an apparently 'non-simulated' reality. Or rather, being unintelligible, it could not cohere as a reality or be recognisable as such at all, at least if we take quantifiability to be necessary for intelligibility and coherence.

This is HP technology in which case, if it finally reaches the light of day, it will most likely: 1) suck 2) break within 2 years 3) lose information 4) be "supported", if that's the right word, by a bunch of illiterate indians and 5) suck.

The student who learns .e.g 3DSMax - even though he got his software for free, is in fact expanding the base of available people who can use it, the "ecosystem" if you like, which indirectly benefits the maker. Companies choosing this software over others because of labour availability, will buy licenses. It actually makes sense for a software developer to surreptitiously allow piracy in most cases. Their real customer base won't be affected, but their market conditions will improve significantly.

When supposedly business critical applications are running on a db which, even at its most ACID, can't provide transactions for DDL schema evolutions (during updates, for example) - i.e. the MySQL schema is MyISAM and not ACID InnoDB. Which means, still open to corruption. Not my definition of business critical. Businesses which decide they want certain applications - their cms, erp systems etc. to be business critical, need full ACID compliance from their dbms, and the open source choice for that is PostgreSQL if they don't go commercial. Choose other applications on top of that by all means, but don't refer to any which offer mysql only as business critical (or, the IT staff who do are fools.) These will drive porting efforts for the inferior OS software which supports mysql only.

Obviously, you've never worked at "a large IT hardware and services" company then, as that's pretty much the norm unlike games development where it's an exception. It's not so bad, you'd be surprised how untroubled you become with all the Sisyphean re-doings and go-nowhere projects. Pass the time, work regular hours, make some friends and some decent money and enjoy your life outside work. I do.

Chechnya ... I think

Are you serious? Office Communicator on its own is pointless and when linked to Outlook is one of the worst software combinations ever. When either gets stuck, it takes the other out with it. Disconnect and reconnect to a VPN for example, and if you were using them together, Communicator will hang and you will have to restart Outlook and lose whatever you were writing because its obviously not multithreaded at some key point where it interacts with Communicator. As a Linux fan, I can still admit that M$ are capable of writing good software (excel isn't bad), but in Outlook and Communicator you have two dark minions of Hell. Avoid. Like the plague.

Well, once I get a patent awarded for a method of signaling, by "making a fist with the palm facing the signaler, then raising the middle finger toward the signalee", I will use it to signal to IBM what I think of their patent.

ah,but sun a really selling niagara on the basis of compute power over electricity consumption - equipping a datacentre with niagara is going to be very much less power-hungry (and require less aircon) than any cell-based equivalent.