Steam is not nearly as annoying as iTunes, because there's no magic dance I need to do to transfer purchases from one device to another... but that's another story.

Steam makes me buy more PC games than I could ever play, because it's all right there at my fingertips with enticing sales and instant gratification. Personally, I've bought every Assassin's Creed game on Steam as well, despite having played one or two on Xbox. Voting with my dollars... I support the series, I support Steam, and I support Ubisoft's support of the PC platform. Yes, you can all thank me for throwing dollars at Ubisoft to make PC somewhat profitable for them.

Honestly, I'm probably one of the few that doesn't care about "crappy console ports". That's what my HTPC is - an Xbox 360 that can run games at 1080p/60fps.

OH MY GOD WILL YOU PEOPLE STOP PERPETUATING THE FACT "MOVIES ARE 24 FPS SO THAT'S ALL YOU NEED"

No but seriously, movies and tv are only at 24 fps because of motion blur. If you play a game on a computer where you can control the frame rate (via video options), get an application like Fraps that will show you the frame rate and try to get the game to run at 24 fps, then at 60 fps. You will see a massive difference because the game is showing individual frames with no motion blur.

This link is very informative on the topic:
http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm

Solid state drives have driven up the price of hard disk space again, and driven down the capacity. Additionally, a lot of people have the extra processing power/ram to spare and may even come out ahead on performance with compression on.

How much have we gained!? Notice how much he talks about "working" when he has time aka "furiously posting on forums and writing emails".

I can't believe I read that overly verbose nonsense. He writes about people wasting his time with formalities, but his rider is a waste of time with all that verbiage.

This. This is why we can't have nice things.

Those purposes are already legal? Well, then my health insurance is already breaking the law.

I take issue with your seemingly contradictory points. At first you say "some 'accents' are simply lazy nonsense" and then you answer yourself by saying "different people hear things in different ways," which mostly boils down to your first language. I'll concede one argument to you and say that, as someone who at least tries to mimic the "accent" of the original language when speaking in tongues, I don't understand the math teacher I had one year in college. He insisted on saying the word "path" as "pass" every single time. As this was a class in graph theory, the word path came up a lot. :(

This whole thing reminds me of a class in linguistics I took. The teacher showed a video of a bunch of Americans in a submarine that was sinking. At the end of the video, the German dude on the other end of the emergency communication channel said, "So... what are you sinking about?" German lacks the "th" sound that English has and to the German speaker, the "th" phoneme translates to the nearest sound, "s," turning the word into "thinking" in his head, but it comes out as "sinking."

Your original language controls very heavily how your perception works. There was another example of a tribe of people somewhere that count up to "many." They had 1, 2, 3 4, 5 or something and many. You show them 10 or 100 and they simply call it "many." Their notion of counting ends at "many."

As someone who had a hard time in college with some accents, I really don't see this is as wrong when communication is a vital part of the job description, such as teaching or being a call agency of some sort. If you settle on a language, you need to have an accent that at least somewhat resembled the typical speaker. There are horror stories across the US, I'm sure, of colleges with student teachers with accents so thick you might as well not go to class. (And don't get me fucking started on students that ask said teachers in their native language and then receive an answer in that same language, without them ever explaining what the fucking question or answer was.) If you're saying "pass" and you mean "path," maybe it's time to get some accent training.

English has a wide variety of sounds but if someone came up to you and started talking in a language that uses clicks (they do exist), you would have an incredibly difficult time distinguishing one click from another, even though to the native speaker, they are the difference between "path" and "pass."

Ignoring the oxygen deprivation, I'm not sure anyone riding that coaster would be the same again, anyway.

Tech companies are just giving consumers what we want - less complexity. Perhaps our government is, as well. Scary.

Your post is very informative. I think I see an obvious solution from what you've posted.

Let's use the ground as a battery and then geothermal to recapture it!

Let's make our own "ring of fire"!!!! It worked for Johnny Cash.

I believe WebOS had sufficient Android compatibility, at least on the tablet. I think this is a smart move for HTC - they can finally differentiate themselves and control their own destiny. For a while during the Windows Mobile/early iPhone era, they were kind of screwed.

And their forums are an awesome resource.

I recently made a 'quiet-ish' gaming HTPC. It has all top-of-the-line hardware in a smaller form-factor case (antec nsk24800). I had to mod the case, the VGA card, and the heatsink to get everything fitting and decently cooled. Was it worth it? Probably not... but it makes the geek in me happy. My final build photos are here: http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=62147

Indeed. He said that drinking helps. So working causes him to drink...

Still not caring all that much. Google+ is keeping Facebook in line.

They can have them. Who cares? Particularly, who on Slashdot cares?