Agreed, there will always be differences in access to hardware and ressources, this is no problem but a fact, what you can try is to lower the impact it makes on perception and you can also try to diminish impact on some of the rankings and competitions. The way to do so is difficult, I agree, and the limit between employee and excess support is floating and hard to define. Nontheless there have to be made decisions now and in the future about this and I wish a lot of luck and wisdom to the staff to do this. But the question I had was not answered, why are employees of vendors out and employees of distributors with better retail access accepted at comps. It is a bit weird for me if I see this and only judge it by hardware access, of course I am aware of the advantages you can have if you get special bios or prebinned vga by vendor. Well, we will see...