The tech communities are really good. You can stay in touch with some tech leaders, discuss about some nich stuff (like your favorite Linux distro, Astronomy), etc. To me, Facebook = family and friend network. G+ = tech network.

Wii had an easy controller, easy appealing games, like Wii Sports and Wii Fit. With WiiU, they said they gone hardcore. But the hardcores don't want Nintendo products. So, I'm a casual gamer. I loved Wii. My wife loved. My tiny kids loved, because it was easy. Now, with WiiU, they offer a bad tablet experience, that requires recharge all the time. No easy controller, no wide appealing games. Wii Sports, Wii Fit, all the best selling games for all the times. Nintendo is the only company over the world, that produced a big hit in the market (and their best selling product), and denied it totally later.

It's not racism to point out the fact that most H1B scab labor in IT is Indian. It's also not racist to point out that "lowering the bar" is bogus.

If Jesse wants to wage the next race war, he should start by getting more black kids interested in STEM and education in general. He can fight against the pervasive drug and gang culture that keeps black kids away from any means to better themselves.

Perhaps he could even get a bunch of athletes and rappers to just read to kids.

> Who uses a flash drive anymore...it's all about the cloud...get with the times grandpa.

It's an automobile.

It goes where the cloud doesn't.

You don't even have to try that hard really.

> You bought a license to play that music

No. That is total corporate-felating bullshit.

There's 100 year old case law that contradicts this nonsense. Corporations already tried to pull this shit and got slapped down by the courts.

There is no "implicit license" on a copy of a creative work, just standard copyright law.

The ability of a DVD to be compressed using a different format seems largely to be a function of the quality of the "original". A decent original can compress quite nicely. A crap original will be crap transcoded.

It won't be as impressive as a BluRay but the original isn't either.

Again. MPEG2 is a really outdated format. It doesn't take much to do better (or much better).

One whole seat?

Do you think Blacks would be dancing in the street if they were entitled to one whole "reserved" seat in Congress? Latinos? Asians?

Talk about tokenism.

> Not that I approve of Israel's bombing of their own citizens

Israel is not bombing it's own citizens. Although Hamas is.

Israel is bombing an enemy belligerent. Collateral damage and casualties within your own forces are just a part of that.

Ireland didn't do anything remotely like what Hamas is doing to Israel. If it did, you would have seen the relevant bits of Ireland flattened like what England helped do to Nazi Germany.

We have ISIS running amok engaging in mass murder, mass mutiliations, and the destruction of religious sites. The problems in the middle east have sqaut to do with oil. This kind of ethnic strife would be going on regardless.

It's like the Balkans or any other place on the planet where people can't get along with each other to the point of engaging in genuine ethnic cleansing.

> And I have ones that have failed.

My last Archos 5 with spinny rust inside of it refuses to die. It's fortunate too since no other device I've seen can match it for local storage and disconnected (from the cloud) operation.

I've yet to have an SD card fail. If anything they will become obsoletely-tiny before actually breaking.

It's funny that someone thinks that multiple redundant server farms and the entire network infastructure of the internet and all the phone providers is less of a resource hog than a few tiny bits of electronics.

That is true perhaps.

However, this is all entirely Verizon's fault. They are the entity in this arrangement that has actively encouraged assymetric use of the net by offering assymeteric service. It's really rich to see ISPs complain that they are getting too much traffic all in one direction then that's how they f*cking design their service.

Verizon is selling massive downloads. So is every other consumer ISP.

> Why bother compressing?

Uses much less space and yields you something small enough to fit on a phone while still being useful for a 60 inch TV or 120 inch projector. Besides, most playback devices don't handle MPEG2 very well. They're all expecting h264.

DVD is a really outdated format and benefits greatly from transcoding.

I'm not convinced people in mud huts were numerous enough or destructive enough to manage the megafauna extinctions. A lot of this hysterical screaming about how we're destroying the planet seems a lot like hubris.

On certain level, the idea that we have that much power pleases the egos of some people.

...except consumer tablets aren't proper digitizers. This is especially true for platforms where a stylus is a banned option because it doesn't seem fashionable enough.

Proper tablet inputs typically are PC peripherals, not the limited functionality that comes with consumer tablets.

Even a mundane mouse is better at the "direct manipulation" stuff than what's provided on your average consumer tablet. The "direct manipulation" on a consumer tablet is crude and clumsy.