I don't think I really deserve the "troll" mod... sheesh.

The idiom is "bald-faced"

Female's all over the animal kingdom use social exclusion instead of violence in order to punish other females. Exclusion is the primary competitive strategy for all sorts of female animals. Look it up on Wikipedia. Or google it. Its a widely known fact among researchers in the social science. That's how teenage girls bully each other.

Well, Alex can do sums up to 8 and so if we had 8 Alex's and an Meta-Alex that counted just Alex's and so on then you can see that we could build a quite complex Parrot Processor. This will come in handy in the post-apocalyptic world where there is no electricity but plenty of parrots because we will be able to construct vast turing machines that require nothing more than thousands of parrots and bird seed for power.

If a "hacker" can log in to your airline account and book a flight in your name, then all they need is to present a fake drivers license in your name to take the flight... and so once again we see that the TSA is actually only a ludicrous theatrical production being staged in Airports nationwide. Thanks for nothing.

I live in Chicago near both a MicroCenter and a Tigerdirect store. Even if I might often buy something online, I still like to wander the aisles and look at things and read the boxes. I get ideas from being there and looking at things. I suppose its a lot like bookstores in the past. It was fun to just go thumb through books every once and a while. Motherboards, for example, are one of those things that I would rather look at and read the boxes than shop for online. And computer cases. I want to actually look at the computer case up close. You can't really judge a good computer case based on a picture online.

As to the "why bother" question... I think you will get 5 years of support with Precise, which is a very long time. This is such long promise of support in fact that the changes in computer hardware will probably render the entire discussion moot by 2017/2018.

the whole point of the repositories is that they are managed and controled so when you sudo apt-get or yum install something you are getting software from within a walled garden. Of course, you might get goofballs just building things from sources infected/compromised, but how many people who build from source are going to that moronic? And how many computers could you infect by that method? The problem with Windows and Android is that software/apps are available to end users that is not in any way controlled for quality. Debian/Ubuntu and Fedora exist mostly because of the repos. Real people control those repos and control for quality.

Its only a matter of time before all these interactive phone voices get hijacked by commercials and say "Before I answer you question, did you know that you get a free cup of coffee with every McGriddles purchase today... now, the closest Hair Salon is..."

With Google+ they are building a google into a CRM system basically. The strict control over how you can identify yourself and your friends can identify themselves increases the value of the overall system of contact information and creates higher ad values. Which is of course why I quit using google as much as possible. It was all just good clean fun until they became the Death Star.

I thought the same thing. Do we really want millions of americans living in factory dormitories making barely enough money to send a few dollars a month home to their family's village, where there is likely no running water and everyone subsists on a diet of rice, vegetables, and a few servings of protein a week? Seriously... if an american factory worker has to compete against that, then there is no point in even bothering.

We need some legally sanctioned government buccaneers to sail the high seas of the internet and steal some good stuff on our behalf. It can't possibly be the case that the internet, the best idea in decades, is going to turn out to be nothing more than a content delivery tool for huge international corporations that want to peddle mp3s and movies. Sheesh. What a waste.

ipod, ipad, tablet... as long as its square, thin, and you can poke at it, then it seems to be worth at least $200 for no other reason than the word used to name it.

If I were home, I would use the desktop computer I have at home. So I wouldn't take anything. If I were at the beach, I would use a pen and a pad of paper. If I were on a train, I would read a newspaper or write on a peice of paper. I don't need to buy several thousand dollars of electronics to meet these needs. I think the cell phone contract is the model every company would like to emuiate ultimately. I pay almost $1000 a year for a phone + network access. If only they could get something like that kind of revenue going for what most people now consider to be a "laptop" then it would be golden. Of course, the idea would be to sell everyone on both (or muiltiple) devices, so that instead of buying a laptop every couple of years for $700, they get us all on the treadmill of multiple devices and network access for everything we now use a computer for. This idea that I need to take something like a laptop or table to the beach is sort of weird, but all they need to do is convince 20 million people globally that is is a necessity and they are making a lot of money off it.

Basically, our manufacturing and technological world has become a moribund treadmill of innovation driven by consumer whimsy. In an effort to reinvigorate the stale metaphors of capitalism, environmentalism is being advanced as the reason why we might once again buy some new things: new cars, new light bulbs, new energy efficient gizmos in general. If only we could all become convinced that we really do need to buy some new things for this absolutely essential reason, the whole ponzi scheme of capitalism would be able to slouch along for another 20 or 30 years... but THEN WHAT? Colonize Mars and start the whole thing over again.