This is precisely why I felt, long before it entered service, that the Raptor's "millions of lines of code per second" computer systems would be its downfall. Surprise, surprise, it almost cost 12 aviators their lives.
What would happen if that same central computer was damaged in combat? Would the pilot have to eject because his otherwise-OK aircraft had no communications nor navigation?
Actually, the version of XP in these screenshots lacks a service pack line, so therefore, it means the XP from 2001. That means the fair comparison is XP from 2001 vs Linux from 2001.
I'd rather have a company that I'm "paying for" start producing decent products, rather than simply attempting to protect the legions of drivel that's been flowing from them recently with overly-expensive and overly-complicated encryption algorithms that have nothing to do with the industry at all.
The point is to get these companies to change the way they think and do business so as to be more suitable to today's increasingly electronic world, rather than simply changing the locks on the door and tossing out scribblings on driftwood instead of a decent product.
My argument is that there are cheaper devices for the job that are much more capable, and that the iPhone's pros (touch screen, interface) do not outweigh the cons (networking issues notwithstanding) nor the hefty price tag (almost precisely that of a PS3). Though I'm sure someone raking in $100,000/year could easily afford one as what might as well be equivalent to pocket change. At that point, and especially if you're drooling over something like the iPhone, you're probably dropping a phone every month for the shiniest new one you can get your grubby paws on. Other than the "want" factor, there is absolutely NO reason at all to purchase an iPhone. If you can give me just one logical reason that anyone with half a brain should buy this turd of a phone over something far more powerful for an equal or lesser price tag, then I'll back off. Until then, bite me, and back off yourself, fanboy.
Unfortunately for the world, though, it's people with more currency than brain matter that make things like this a hit, at least initially or until a price drop. Unfortunately for me, it's these people who have mod points. But hell, I have karma to burn, so have at me, Apple geeks.
The answer to all this on the PS3 is Linux, though I don't recommend it.
Make phone calls Skype.
Send & receive text messages MSNIM, YIM, AIM, etc., plus e-mail
Function as a portable music player Winamp.
Function as a PDA, too Outlook.
Browse the web Firefox.
Multi-touch screen interface Tablet PC. (though that would be expensive, and that's probably the most expensive part of the iPhone. Is this really necessary?)
A UI that is actually good Debatable on the iPhone's side of things, but most PC interfaces are fairly decent.
Fit in my pocket (or a belt holster) The iPhone's freaking huge for a phone.
By the way, you may be a cheapass, but for some people, spending a little money isn't a big barrier to getting the form & function they desire. I wouldn't buy a PS3 for $100, and there's no laptop in the world that can work adequately as a mobile phone.
By the way, you may be rolling in cash, but for some people, $499 USD minimum is a massive amount of money to spend on something as fucking trivial as a phone, and if you find that you absolutely have to have one, then you're a complete and total moron. Case in point:
My $200 USD LG-8100 (an already expensive piece of hardware) does the following: -Contact list -Web browsing -E-Mail/Text messaging -IM -Image, MP3, multimedia -Calendar functions -Alarm functions -Fits in my pocket -Has a decent interface -Is more than 50% less in terms of cost than the iPhone, the only major difference being no OS-X/fancy effects, no high gloss finish, and no touch screen. Big fucking deal. The iPhone offers nothing special that would prompt me, a student, to go out and blow more than a quarter of my student loans on a piece of Apple hardware that has no functionality that I don't already have, especially when I could get something far more useful for that kind of money.
My point? It's going to sell to people like you because it's shiny, and it's Apple. There's nothing inherently special about the iPhone, and unless you can give me a compelling reason to believe otherwise, I doubt my position will change anytime soon.
The phone's still as expensive as a PS3, and half as functional. Since the damned thing is practically one big touch screen, you'd constantly be wiping off the smudges every time you make a call. And, as I've said before, no GSM accessibility around these parts, so it's entirely worthless to me, anyway, though even without that factor, I wouldn't buy one. Hell, you can get a decent laptop for that kind of money, and a laptop is so much more useful than this is.
They're storage media. Neither is inherently going to give you more or less quality on playback; It's all in the compression used. Geez. I hate articles like this.
You have to admit though, that a snowmobile is nowhere nearly as safe nor durable as a car, and therefore doing those kinds of speeds, even if the roads are legal to be travelled on with them, is absolutely insane, unless you have a big, flat stretch of open nothingness.
If you'll read TA - Page 1, paragraph 5 (last sentence) - it states:...
Drama and Cannon have in recent years been paid by the same companies that paid Kilgo to help arrest them....
So no, according to the NY Times, it is most certainly not bull, or at least, not Slashdot hype. The RIAA('s member companies) actually did do this.
Not that this was an overly serious post to begin with, I guess I'll start off by saying that's "masturbatory". But anyway.
The United States of America, as a country, is wholly dependent upon other countries for its own prosperity. Look around you; Virtually everything that you can afford to buy is manufactured in China, (SOMETIMES) Japan, Mexico, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and so on and so forth. Most of those electronics are also designed in Japan (Sony, Hitachi, Pioneer, Panasonic, Nintendo), Europe (Philips), Korea (Samsung, LG) and Taiwan (ASUS, MSI, Biostar, DFI). Why? Cheap labour. Do you realize how much it would cost to purchase a television whose manufacture was solely performed in the United States, with well-paid workers and stricter quality standards? Let's just say there's no such thing as a $20 DVD player in that sort of world.
Like it or not, there is a massive amount of interdependency between the United States and the rest of the world, and there isn't a whole lot that the average American could do with their lives were the United States to end the rest of the world as we know it, or even just cut off contact. Not only that, but the aforementioned brands that people in the 'States use every day would cease to exist in American society. Considering that these electronics companies are pretty much the staple of our electronic consumption for both appliances and entertainment, that means that entertainment as we know it would also take a nosedive.
As I type this, I'm using an Acer computer, with an ASUS motherboard, an LG optical drive, a Microsoft optical mouse (made in China), a Philips 17" CRT, and a Siemens (Germany) DSL modem. Were I living in the United States, and the USA simply decided that it were to isolate itself from the world, all of those things would simply cease to be. Well, that's not entirely true. Existing products would obviously still be around, but when it comes time to buy something else, or if one of those components should fail, I'd be SOL, especially since I don't know of any motherboard manufacturers based in the United States who make AMD motherboards.
My point is, American industry is mostly on the ropes as it is - General Motors, for instance, is scrambling to keep up with cheap, efficient imports of increasingly higher quality. Chrysler is now merged with Daimler-Benz, a German company, meaning that if ties with the EU were cut, the fate of Chrysler in the USA would be in question.
Like it or not, imported goods are a vital part of any economy, and arguably especially the USA's. Economic sanctions would devastate the American economy, and as far as that goes, I wouldn't underestimate the strength of the EU, China and Russia militarily. While not strictly a superpower even combined, they have more than enough nuclear weaponry to glaze over the entire US mainland, and China has more than enough manpower to launch a sustained conventional assault on the United States, as well.
While I highly doubt nuclear weapons will EVER be used by any sane government, it's still in the USA's best interests to avoid pissing off the neighbors.
... And have the UN come crashing down hard on charges of crimes against humanity, use of WMD's, etc. While the UN may not have the military might to slap the USA around, its member countries, collectively, do, unless the US decided to launch nukes at everyone and bring their own world to an end as well. And I'm sure that a nuclear winter in the vicinity of China would piss off a lot of people - Most notably the Russians, since they're cold enough as it is.
Besides, they'll just hack the missiles and reprogram them to make a happy face pattern in the Pacific.
128kbps is actually plenty in Ogg Vorbis or AACPlus. MP3 not so much so at that bitrate (transparent my ass), though LAME is really good on the highest "quality" settings.
Also, for high bitrate lossy, I don't think it's possible to beat MPC. I personally use Monkey's Audio for lossless, though, even if there's not much difference between the lossless formats. That said, CD audio might be lossless, but it's usually downsampled from 24-bit to 16-bit, requiring dithering and noise shaping to keep artifacts to a minimum. DVD-audio is better, but still not portable enough. We're in the age of eraser-sized MP3 players; As small as CD's are, they aren't small enough, and uncompressed PCM (Redbook audio/CDDA) is entirely too limiting.
The 9200 series was the last series by ATi to have their drivers opened. All subsequent chipsets have been closed, and hardware acceleration via open source drivers does not work.
The problem with the non-proprietary, open drivers is that they wholly suck. Try using "Radeon" for a while on anything greater than a Radeon 9200 series. Yeah. It hurts. Not as though the official "fglrx" driver is actually a good driver, but at least it does hardware 3D acceleration, which, to me, at least, is paramount, since, y'know, it's a 3D accelerator card, not a "display this" card. I could very easily get by on an old PCI Trident for that, which would be, of course, supported out of the box with open source drivers. Now, if more companies opened up the specs to their hardware rather than hiding them as though they were trade secrets (the actual reason is the inherent instability present in the official drivers is laughable), we'd see some good open source drivers. Until then, binary is the only real way to go. I won't settle for "a display" when it could be "a hardware accelerated display", which adds a big boost in UI performance and a big load off the CPU.
Not to mention that when proprietary codecs are the only codecs available for streaming on Teh_Intarweb, you're usually looking at either proprietary or nothing.
Mostly true, except in that Vista doesn't support older hardware very well at all, breaks compatibility with many older (read: brand new) software packages (most notably iTunes/iPod drivers). XP is the only MS OS that really can make that claim at this point, though I'm sure as the driver framework becomes more expansive, we'll see more compatibility in Vista's hardware support.
You'd be surprised how much hardware auto-detects well on Linux, though, both new and old. Only real hitch comes in the binary video drivers for nVidia/ATi cards...
Select was optional; It simply enabled two-player in Konomi games like Contra. Start isn't necessary, though unless you just want to sit at the title screen, you need to hit it to start the game. The actual code itself simply ends with "A".
It's been added to certain newer Konami games (such as the lackluster AirForce Delta Strike, where IIRC, if you input a variant of the code (no A or B on the PS2) with the game paused as the unlockable Vic Viper, you self-destruct. Amazing cheat.)
Honestly, I would have thought that anything would be better than the corruption and lies coming from the Liberal camp, though were I able to vote by that time, I'd have voted NDP, rather than Conservative. Never would I have voted for the Liberals, however; Their stay in power corrupted the party beyond reproach.
OK, first, how many people would be killed if that was an IED? Several hundred? Cry me a god damned river. This is scaremongering; It's like charging someone for putting up a picture of a bomb somewhere and having some idiot call the police about a bomb threat.
Oh, but that's right, it's not the number of people whose lives come to an end, it's the principle in which they're taken, which, were this a terror attack, in this case would be malice. And heaven forbid someone kill someone else. People die in street crime every day in the United States, and I don't ever see a weekly death toll on that one. Why the fuck would I care if some dipshit set off a bomb on a bridge somewhere, when all over the nation, people are killing each other anyway? Why worry about violent crime when illness and disease are the major killers, anyway?
It's just the state saying "Oh, look, we're looking after you so that you don't have to worry about getting killed in a nonexistent terrorist attack". The more people react like this, the more they cater to the people behind the REAL attacks. Stupid.
I had forgotten about the criminal organization known as the IRS; Sorry, Americans.
Police haven't done squat to stop crime
When is it possible for a policeman to stop a mugging in a dark alley? When is it possible for a policeman to keep a bullet from entering your skull?
Granted, there is a lot of corruption in both the Canadian and US police/judicial systems, but I would be more wary of a system wherein police forces are actual companies (think Microsoft/RIAA having a legal police force) that are trying to compete with one another. Think about that - If these private police forces rely on crime to exist, isn't it then obvious that they would create crime to keep themselves afloat? If they "stopped crime", as current police forces are supposedly incapable of doing, wouldn't that, then, mean that they, themselves, would cease to exist?
What's to stop them from simply taking your money and brushing you aside? The law? They ARE the law. And in the case that the judicial system is replaced with a private one, as well, that would then mean that the law is in the hands of whoever has the money to buy the courts, which in turn means that whoever has the cash can change the law as he or she sees fit.
Huh? No profit margin on the moms and pops? When a retail copy of XP Pro costs $389 CAD, and an OEM copy costs $189? How much are the megacorps buying it for?
Slashdot Mirror
This is precisely why I felt, long before it entered service, that the Raptor's "millions of lines of code per second" computer systems would be its downfall. Surprise, surprise, it almost cost 12 aviators their lives.
What would happen if that same central computer was damaged in combat? Would the pilot have to eject because his otherwise-OK aircraft had no communications nor navigation?
Actually, the version of XP in these screenshots lacks a service pack line, so therefore, it means the XP from 2001. That means the fair comparison is XP from 2001 vs Linux from 2001.
I'd rather have a company that I'm "paying for" start producing decent products, rather than simply attempting to protect the legions of drivel that's been flowing from them recently with overly-expensive and overly-complicated encryption algorithms that have nothing to do with the industry at all.
The point is to get these companies to change the way they think and do business so as to be more suitable to today's increasingly electronic world, rather than simply changing the locks on the door and tossing out scribblings on driftwood instead of a decent product.
My argument is that there are cheaper devices for the job that are much more capable, and that the iPhone's pros (touch screen, interface) do not outweigh the cons (networking issues notwithstanding) nor the hefty price tag (almost precisely that of a PS3). Though I'm sure someone raking in $100,000/year could easily afford one as what might as well be equivalent to pocket change. At that point, and especially if you're drooling over something like the iPhone, you're probably dropping a phone every month for the shiniest new one you can get your grubby paws on. Other than the "want" factor, there is absolutely NO reason at all to purchase an iPhone. If you can give me just one logical reason that anyone with half a brain should buy this turd of a phone over something far more powerful for an equal or lesser price tag, then I'll back off. Until then, bite me, and back off yourself, fanboy.
Unfortunately for the world, though, it's people with more currency than brain matter that make things like this a hit, at least initially or until a price drop. Unfortunately for me, it's these people who have mod points. But hell, I have karma to burn, so have at me, Apple geeks.
The answer to all this on the PS3 is Linux, though I don't recommend it.
Make phone calls
Skype.
Send & receive text messages
MSNIM, YIM, AIM, etc., plus e-mail
Function as a portable music player
Winamp.
Function as a PDA, too
Outlook.
Browse the web
Firefox.
Multi-touch screen interface
Tablet PC. (though that would be expensive, and that's probably the most expensive part of the iPhone. Is this really necessary?)
A UI that is actually good
Debatable on the iPhone's side of things, but most PC interfaces are fairly decent.
Fit in my pocket (or a belt holster)
The iPhone's freaking huge for a phone.
By the way, you may be a cheapass, but for some people, spending a little money isn't a big barrier to getting the form & function they desire. I wouldn't buy a PS3 for $100, and there's no laptop in the world that can work adequately as a mobile phone.
By the way, you may be rolling in cash, but for some people, $499 USD minimum is a massive amount of money to spend on something as fucking trivial as a phone, and if you find that you absolutely have to have one, then you're a complete and total moron. Case in point:
My $200 USD LG-8100 (an already expensive piece of hardware) does the following:
-Contact list
-Web browsing
-E-Mail/Text messaging
-IM
-Image, MP3, multimedia
-Calendar functions
-Alarm functions
-Fits in my pocket
-Has a decent interface
-Is more than 50% less in terms of cost than the iPhone, the only major difference being no OS-X/fancy effects, no high gloss finish, and no touch screen. Big fucking deal. The iPhone offers nothing special that would prompt me, a student, to go out and blow more than a quarter of my student loans on a piece of Apple hardware that has no functionality that I don't already have, especially when I could get something far more useful for that kind of money.
My point? It's going to sell to people like you because it's shiny, and it's Apple. There's nothing inherently special about the iPhone, and unless you can give me a compelling reason to believe otherwise, I doubt my position will change anytime soon.
The phone's still as expensive as a PS3, and half as functional. Since the damned thing is practically one big touch screen, you'd constantly be wiping off the smudges every time you make a call. And, as I've said before, no GSM accessibility around these parts, so it's entirely worthless to me, anyway, though even without that factor, I wouldn't buy one. Hell, you can get a decent laptop for that kind of money, and a laptop is so much more useful than this is.
Pass.
They're storage media. Neither is inherently going to give you more or less quality on playback; It's all in the compression used. Geez. I hate articles like this.
You have to admit though, that a snowmobile is nowhere nearly as safe nor durable as a car, and therefore doing those kinds of speeds, even if the roads are legal to be travelled on with them, is absolutely insane, unless you have a big, flat stretch of open nothingness.
What? Snowmobiles have right of way in the USA? ... Snowmobiles doing 92-97MPH?! o_O What the fuck was that guy thinking?
Up here, if you're caught snowmobiling on public roads at all, you get a nice, shiny fine. Then again, there's never enforcement, but...
What are you talking about? You obviously don't know what ColdFusion is.
This is Slashdot. We're all scientists here, and every post is a major scientific breakthrough that is ridiculed by the mainstream.
For example, I just discovered that peanut butter cures cancer. But nobody will ever believe me.
What the fuck does anti-capitalism have to do with global warming?
Holy hell, get a clue.
If you'll read TA - Page 1, paragraph 5 (last sentence) - it states: ...
Drama and Cannon have in recent years been paid by the same companies that paid Kilgo to help arrest them. ...
So no, according to the NY Times, it is most certainly not bull, or at least, not Slashdot hype. The RIAA('s member companies) actually did do this.
Not that this was an overly serious post to begin with, I guess I'll start off by saying that's "masturbatory". But anyway.
The United States of America, as a country, is wholly dependent upon other countries for its own prosperity. Look around you; Virtually everything that you can afford to buy is manufactured in China, (SOMETIMES) Japan, Mexico, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and so on and so forth. Most of those electronics are also designed in Japan (Sony, Hitachi, Pioneer, Panasonic, Nintendo), Europe (Philips), Korea (Samsung, LG) and Taiwan (ASUS, MSI, Biostar, DFI). Why? Cheap labour. Do you realize how much it would cost to purchase a television whose manufacture was solely performed in the United States, with well-paid workers and stricter quality standards? Let's just say there's no such thing as a $20 DVD player in that sort of world.
Like it or not, there is a massive amount of interdependency between the United States and the rest of the world, and there isn't a whole lot that the average American could do with their lives were the United States to end the rest of the world as we know it, or even just cut off contact. Not only that, but the aforementioned brands that people in the 'States use every day would cease to exist in American society. Considering that these electronics companies are pretty much the staple of our electronic consumption for both appliances and entertainment, that means that entertainment as we know it would also take a nosedive.
As I type this, I'm using an Acer computer, with an ASUS motherboard, an LG optical drive, a Microsoft optical mouse (made in China), a Philips 17" CRT, and a Siemens (Germany) DSL modem. Were I living in the United States, and the USA simply decided that it were to isolate itself from the world, all of those things would simply cease to be. Well, that's not entirely true. Existing products would obviously still be around, but when it comes time to buy something else, or if one of those components should fail, I'd be SOL, especially since I don't know of any motherboard manufacturers based in the United States who make AMD motherboards.
My point is, American industry is mostly on the ropes as it is - General Motors, for instance, is scrambling to keep up with cheap, efficient imports of increasingly higher quality. Chrysler is now merged with Daimler-Benz, a German company, meaning that if ties with the EU were cut, the fate of Chrysler in the USA would be in question.
Like it or not, imported goods are a vital part of any economy, and arguably especially the USA's. Economic sanctions would devastate the American economy, and as far as that goes, I wouldn't underestimate the strength of the EU, China and Russia militarily. While not strictly a superpower even combined, they have more than enough nuclear weaponry to glaze over the entire US mainland, and China has more than enough manpower to launch a sustained conventional assault on the United States, as well.
While I highly doubt nuclear weapons will EVER be used by any sane government, it's still in the USA's best interests to avoid pissing off the neighbors.
... And have the UN come crashing down hard on charges of crimes against humanity, use of WMD's, etc. While the UN may not have the military might to slap the USA around, its member countries, collectively, do, unless the US decided to launch nukes at everyone and bring their own world to an end as well. And I'm sure that a nuclear winter in the vicinity of China would piss off a lot of people - Most notably the Russians, since they're cold enough as it is. Besides, they'll just hack the missiles and reprogram them to make a happy face pattern in the Pacific.
128kbps is actually plenty in Ogg Vorbis or AACPlus. MP3 not so much so at that bitrate (transparent my ass), though LAME is really good on the highest "quality" settings.
Also, for high bitrate lossy, I don't think it's possible to beat MPC. I personally use Monkey's Audio for lossless, though, even if there's not much difference between the lossless formats. That said, CD audio might be lossless, but it's usually downsampled from 24-bit to 16-bit, requiring dithering and noise shaping to keep artifacts to a minimum. DVD-audio is better, but still not portable enough. We're in the age of eraser-sized MP3 players; As small as CD's are, they aren't small enough, and uncompressed PCM (Redbook audio/CDDA) is entirely too limiting.
The 9200 series was the last series by ATi to have their drivers opened. All subsequent chipsets have been closed, and hardware acceleration via open source drivers does not work.
The problem with the non-proprietary, open drivers is that they wholly suck. Try using "Radeon" for a while on anything greater than a Radeon 9200 series. Yeah. It hurts. Not as though the official "fglrx" driver is actually a good driver, but at least it does hardware 3D acceleration, which, to me, at least, is paramount, since, y'know, it's a 3D accelerator card, not a "display this" card. I could very easily get by on an old PCI Trident for that, which would be, of course, supported out of the box with open source drivers. Now, if more companies opened up the specs to their hardware rather than hiding them as though they were trade secrets (the actual reason is the inherent instability present in the official drivers is laughable), we'd see some good open source drivers. Until then, binary is the only real way to go. I won't settle for "a display" when it could be "a hardware accelerated display", which adds a big boost in UI performance and a big load off the CPU.
Not to mention that when proprietary codecs are the only codecs available for streaming on Teh_Intarweb, you're usually looking at either proprietary or nothing.
Mostly true, except in that Vista doesn't support older hardware very well at all, breaks compatibility with many older (read: brand new) software packages (most notably iTunes/iPod drivers). XP is the only MS OS that really can make that claim at this point, though I'm sure as the driver framework becomes more expansive, we'll see more compatibility in Vista's hardware support.
You'd be surprised how much hardware auto-detects well on Linux, though, both new and old. Only real hitch comes in the binary video drivers for nVidia/ATi cards...
UP-UP-DOWN-DOWN-LEFT-LEFT-RIGHT-RIGHT-B-A-SELECT
) -START
The actual Konami Kode is:
UP-UP-DOWN-DOWN-LEFT-RIGHT-LEFT-RIGHT-B-A-(SELECT
Select was optional; It simply enabled two-player in Konomi games like Contra. Start isn't necessary, though unless you just want to sit at the title screen, you need to hit it to start the game. The actual code itself simply ends with "A".
It's been added to certain newer Konami games (such as the lackluster AirForce Delta Strike, where IIRC, if you input a variant of the code (no A or B on the PS2) with the game paused as the unlockable Vic Viper, you self-destruct. Amazing cheat.)
Honestly, I would have thought that anything would be better than the corruption and lies coming from the Liberal camp, though were I able to vote by that time, I'd have voted NDP, rather than Conservative. Never would I have voted for the Liberals, however; Their stay in power corrupted the party beyond reproach.
Let me guess; Onboard video and 512MB of RAM. Right?
OK, first, how many people would be killed if that was an IED? Several hundred? Cry me a god damned river. This is scaremongering; It's like charging someone for putting up a picture of a bomb somewhere and having some idiot call the police about a bomb threat. Oh, but that's right, it's not the number of people whose lives come to an end, it's the principle in which they're taken, which, were this a terror attack, in this case would be malice. And heaven forbid someone kill someone else. People die in street crime every day in the United States, and I don't ever see a weekly death toll on that one. Why the fuck would I care if some dipshit set off a bomb on a bridge somewhere, when all over the nation, people are killing each other anyway? Why worry about violent crime when illness and disease are the major killers, anyway? It's just the state saying "Oh, look, we're looking after you so that you don't have to worry about getting killed in a nonexistent terrorist attack". The more people react like this, the more they cater to the people behind the REAL attacks. Stupid.
I had forgotten about the criminal organization known as the IRS; Sorry, Americans.
Police haven't done squat to stop crime
When is it possible for a policeman to stop a mugging in a dark alley? When is it possible for a policeman to keep a bullet from entering your skull?
Granted, there is a lot of corruption in both the Canadian and US police/judicial systems, but I would be more wary of a system wherein police forces are actual companies (think Microsoft/RIAA having a legal police force) that are trying to compete with one another. Think about that - If these private police forces rely on crime to exist, isn't it then obvious that they would create crime to keep themselves afloat? If they "stopped crime", as current police forces are supposedly incapable of doing, wouldn't that, then, mean that they, themselves, would cease to exist?
What's to stop them from simply taking your money and brushing you aside? The law? They ARE the law. And in the case that the judicial system is replaced with a private one, as well, that would then mean that the law is in the hands of whoever has the money to buy the courts, which in turn means that whoever has the cash can change the law as he or she sees fit.
Huh? No profit margin on the moms and pops? When a retail copy of XP Pro costs $389 CAD, and an OEM copy costs $189? How much are the megacorps buying it for?