I haven't commented on shashdot in years but for your comments I just wanted to say your comment fits the idiocy of what this site has become. Russia agitprop Whatgarbl devoid of any substance. Please actually die.

The problem with that line of thinking, while true, is it's fatalistic. If we accept we're already fucked there is no reason to try to avert disaster.

I'm guessing Bucharest? It's not necessarily indicative of the whole continent. In France where I live we were too far from a dslam to get anything above 7mbit until the fibre rolled in this January. Much of europe's infrastructure is good, but a lot is old and needs to be upgraded, just as it has to be in the states: a much bigger country anyway.

Any chance of getting a location on that apartment building? Might be moving to the area in a year or so. I have 500down 200up FTTH where I live and I cannot live without it anymore (think streaming your media library from your server to a Chrome-Cast in another country).

Unless you want to play a windows game or do something else like 3d modeling in which case it's actually quite handy.

I used to have a G5 tower. Didn't know they came with a liquid cooling option. Mine had a giant heatsink the size of a watermelon and two fans that sounded like a jet taking off when the system really got going.

You probably know this, given the site, but if you stick a paperclip in the little hole, you can get your CD out. I sympathize with the optical drive problem. Has happened to me as well more than with any other component.

I've had the worst of luck with optical drives, especially in laptops. My previous two laptops went through a grand combination of two *each*. My previous desktop's dvd burner failed, as did the desktop before that. Granted I did use the drives a lot, but still. Thankfully they're not that necessary anymore. Also power supplies, but not nearly as bad as the optical drives. I've had pretty good luck with HDDs.

No kidding. I've been considering returning to 10.9 considering the stability of Yosemite at 10.1 is what i'd expect from a preview image.

I'm getting Free's gigabit FTTH in Febuary. Just wait. Fibre is being deployed. If you're too far from a dslam, it sucks, I know (7mbit now), but it's not going to be better outside of paris.

In Paris, after using the local taxis several times, and after experiencing the horrifically rude drivers. I swore them off in favor of Uber. Now, France is trying to do the same thing as Germany (at the behest of the existing monopoly of asshole taxis). What you're witnessing here is the preservation of a state granted monopoly on sub-par service, not any real protection of the consumer. Personally, I prefer Uber's system when higher rated drivers get priority and users rate their rides to one where I have no choice, one where the state had made the decision for me (with predictably bad results). After all, what is the incentive to be a nice guy to your customers if they have no choice in choosing you.

Small scale piracy, yes, but not large scale. The scene dudes at that time just compressed the audio assets using lossy compression and/or removed the videos entirely. They then wrote their own installers to decompress the assets. Maybe 5 games or more on a CD-R using this technique. I used to buy them in Romania for about 5-10 USD a piece from street vendors.

You're incredibly naive if you think that there is a society or a species that is inherently altruistic. Our survival required being selfish and this is the basis of our evolution as a species. Even other species, such as wolves, will fight over resources. The strong survive. The weak die. Countless generations of this have resulted in who we are and it is completely futile to fight it. Greed is in our nature and it is to our collective benefit that we acknowledge this "unfortunate" fact and take advantage of it. Capitalism is the only system that does. The rest only pretend to deliver equality while in reality setting the stage for inevitable tyranny. There is a reason a strong central state doesn't work. It's comprised of people who are greedy. No matter how altruistic they pretend to be, it is in their nature to maintain that power and dominate others. Power doesn't corrupt, it just allows us to express the inner person we all are but wish we weren't. It's better this power be restricted, which is why a constitutional republic, governed by law rather than humanity, will always be superior to those moral busybodies who claim themselves to have our best interest in heart.

Even requesting that of incorrect data is unreasonable. Who is to determine truth? Only the courts can do that.

As far as I understand, Valve says you can install from other sources. Also, not all Steam games have DRM. Quite a few actually don't have any protection at all. Steam is primarily a distribution service. It's the game developers who demand the DRM.