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For the authors: one quick nit - did you mean Batman Arkham City, and not Arkham Asylum? Arkham Asylum never had support for Directx 11 or tessellation.

The point? On the surface, maintaining the illusion of Security Theater. On the down low, perpetuating the money flows of the Military-Industrial Complex.

The USPS has been losing money (in the billions) for years now, primarily because it owes huge chunks of money to funding its defined-benefit-pension plan. The accounting is a bit dodgy at times (as is all governmental accounting procedure - check out how DoD does it for a big laugh), but the...

"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws." Tacitus of Rome, 117 AD. This guy knew the score nearly 2,000 friggin' years ago. Some politicians, they embody the famous Lord Acton quote, "Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely." They might start out wide-eyed and...

There's a joke among trial lawyers that only the stupid get selected for jury duty. The smart get unselected for jury duty. :D

Agree. The First Amendment has to do with governments suppressing free speech. Not corporations. You freely and voluntarily choose to go work for a company like Apple. Putting up with their admittedly lame social media policy is part of that choice. Whether a person chooses to give 110%...

+1,000.

And as far as the modern "market" goes, read up on High-Frequency-Trading algorithms and front-running. That's how markets move. The traditional, MSM-created story of the market moving on and reacting to "news" coming out of governments or corporate press releases is nothing more than a myth.

Because Groupon was a classic pump-and-dump, that's why.

The Eurozone monetary union is probably going to fail soon, given the problems in Greece, Germany, France, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, and Spain, so having a bunch of unelected bureaucrats try to determine a one-size-fits-all data protection policy for a region as diverse as Europe is nothing more...

This +1,000,000. I use cash whenever and wherever possible.

It's called "rational ignorance" in public choice theory. A single person can't really effect change in a vast bureaucracy, not without really large investments of knowledge and time. So if some piece of law affects him in only some small way, he ignores it, figuring it won't be a big deal...

Wow, Kyle, tell us how you really feel! :) [H] forever.

In a word: nothing. That's the American way.

Well, America only has one of "the lowest tax rates" because they deficit spend, because the dollar is the world's reserve currency. It's easy for pols not to raise taxes when government bonds are being snapped up, even though they're yielding near-zero-percent. And if you don't see how most...

Nah, it's just so that they can have two revenue streams instead of one. Because inevitably, some people will keep buying online and pay the taxes. A politician never met a tax he didn't like. The FedGov, by virtue of possessing legal monopoly over the issuance of money, can print (or...

It's called pump-and-dump, people. The only people that make money on IPOs are connected insiders and the investment bank that handles the details of the offering - in this case, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and Credit Suisse. Most of the IPO shares are bought at preferred prices by...

This +1,000,000.

"Damn you technology! Damn you!" Don't blame technology. Blame the crooked power-mongering politicians and their shock troopers for using it against you. When will a company develop a machine to read your thoughts while you're walking on a public street, I wonder...

They're just doing it for the lulz, I tell ya.

When I want to read an actual good book, I get it from my bookcase. When I want to read tidbits of news, and forum discussions, and see how badly I'm getting beaten in fantasy football, I want a scroll bar. No loss, though, since I don't use Opera anyway. And if this ridiculous idea gets...

Owners of common stock can vote on the company's board of directors. The board is the entity that determines the CEO's pay and benefits structure. Thus, a shareholder can punish bad board performance by "voting the bums out." In reality, all the CEOs and all the board of directors of all...

No, the 13" MBA does not bench better. Unless you count the tests like PCMARK that account for the improved speed from the factory SSD. It is true that the current CPU in the new Air is FAR better performance wise than the ULV Core 2 in the old one. Still, the MBP 13 has much higher turbo...

The ridiculous version numbering is a result of wanting to emulate Chrome. For reasons related to marketing, Chrome gets a new release number for updates that would traditionally only merit a point release increment. This makes stupid people feel good about themselves; "Ooh, I'm running Chrome...

"A la carte" programming would be difficult, if not impossible, to implement on old analog cable systems, so that's a quasi-legitimate reason why this option wasn't available. Now that cable is moving to Switched digital video, and U-Verse/FIOS are IP-based, there are few technical barriers to...

Well, to be precise, the government is the entity that gives a corporation its power. Corporations only exist, and wield the powers that they do, because of a number of laws that lay out all of the aspects and abilities and rights of a corporation. And who writes and enforces those laws? The...

All they needed to do was to throw in references to "paradigm shifts," "low-hanging fruit," and "leveraging opportunities" to complete the corporate mumbo-jumbo BS. I wonder if this market-disrupting technology is Microsoft Bob, v2.0.

And by the way, the author of the post is a woman - "Claire Blackshaw." Though I have met plenty of folks in MMOs whose avatars are of the opposite sex. Don't know what it is about MMORPGs that makes middle-aged male professionals want their in-game characters to resemble 21-year old elf...

I interviewed with a game company last year whose flagship product is a free-to-play MMORPG, supported by - you guessed it - microtransactions. The nominal game balance is horribly disrupted by the presence of super-powerful items that can only be purchased in the cash shop, leading to the...

I doubt this has anything to do with Netflix (a) getting "squeezed" by the studios or (b) wanting to establish ridiculous new price levels (and corresponding profit margins). If you've been following Netflix corporate strategy over the past 18 months you know that Netflix WANTS to become a...

I'd be all for this DVD-only plan (rarely use streaming), but Netflix DVD (and Bluray) selection has gotten markedly worse over the past year or so. Clearly all of their resources are being put into streaming.

I've read that July 14 is the date for both OS X Lion and the refreshed Macbook Air with Sandy Bridge. It's also supposed to employ a better version of the Samsung/Toshiba-sourced SSD that Apple uses. Unless you can get like a super-great deal on an existing generation Air you'd do better to wait.

The current sorry state of the US public education system is, in my opinion, the only logical end to a system originally conceived of in Prussia during the Industrial Revolution, a system expressly designed not to teach or to educate, as Socrates or Plato might have used those terms, but rather...

The Senate is probably enjoying the misdirection; it takes the pressure off of them to figure out what to do with the debt ceiling and Libya.

I never had a crash with Dirt 2 either. Even after I applied a no-CD crack, because, darn it, having to keep the disc in the drive was a pain. Dirt 2 wasn't nearly as fun as I thought it was going to be, based on the reviews. The big truck class was particularly annoying. I did like that...

Yeah, sounds like another chord in the opera of the military-industrial-security complex to me. As corrupt as America is, my expatriate Russian colleagues tell me that Russia is in a league of its own.

"The more corrupt the regime, the more numerous the laws."

Just like the ill-named Patriot Act has nothing to do with patriotism, the Protect IP Act has nothing to do with preventing piracy, and everything to do with regulatory capture. The hired stooges known popularly as "Congressmen" do the bidding of their corporate masters. Legal, illegal...

The "term" discrimination has lost all meaning. And those of you calling for gooberment laws to "protect" you, just remember: a government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have.

Didn't HP just can a few thousand of its rank-and-file? But they need some more managers? Probably to hold meetings to discuss when when to schedule more meetings.