unfortunately the truth is that amd/ati isn't capable of making decent drivers on both windows and linux, their cards seems to be always better than nvidia in terms of price and performance but in reality they rarely works flawlessy, either the driver crashes or the game glitches and you have to wait for some hotfix, there was also a news here on slashdot just a few weeks ago that the windows amd drivers disable dep/aslr otherwise you get a bsod

obligatory http://xkcd.com/538/

I think that there is one crucial difference though, with zune they didn't bring anything new, it was just another mp3 player, the xbox was successful because they added something that other console didn't have at the time(xbox live), surface seems more like the latter, it's not just another tablet that tries to compete against the ipad, it's a tablet laptop hybrid with an os that seems to be quite good for both

but games aren't just for kid, actually a lot of games are targeted for >= 15 years old, I really can't imagine some 30 years old playing with stick and a cowboy hat, but they can sure play with a videogame

xbox live is mandatory if you want to play games online, you know these games that you already paid 60€ to play, psn is mandatory as well if you want to play online, so not much difference except that xbox live isn't free

does that mean they need to provide the source code after distributing the bombs with the uav?

yeah I never use == True/False but I thought it was some stupid error like if(a = b)

honest question, I don't use php that much but what's wrong with that expression?

opendns is doing that but I think it's limited to websites hosted on cloudflare that enabled this warning so probably not many

according to wikipedia Finland has a very low density and most of the population lives in the south of the country, the mountains in the south are quite small as well and Finland is still very small compared to the US

that's the average speed though, Netherlands is quite small and there are no mountains as far as I know, the US on the other hand is huge, you can't expect fiber optic connections in rural areas, that's also the reason why South Korea and Japan come out on top, they are very small country, of course they are also usually better than the rest of the world when it comes to technology

maybe in the US, in Italy it's not uncommon to find tons of paper ballots in the junk a week after the voting
it doesn't matter if it's electronic or paper both people and machine can screw up either intentionally or not but machine are usually better than humans, that's why we use them for other crucial tasks, the problem is that there is no proper testing because they don't really care if the wrong guy get elected, it's not as bad as a plane crashing or a missile hitting the wrong target

correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't quicksync use the integrated gpu of sandy/ivy bridge cpus?

yeah I really don't understand why vlc is so popular, aside from not having hardware acceleration the video colors are wrong, smplayer/umplayer is better but I still had some issue when seeking x264 videos, right now I'm using potplayer and it's probably the best video player, mediaplayer classic hc is really good as well

well microsoft just bought skype, it's not like they'll change all their servers in a few months just because they don't use their own products, it would have been a totally different story if microsoft used linux for something like bing