"And it says Apple is the reason why it blocked the service."

http://i39.tinypic.com/28b9tnc.jpg

I agree with the above reasons but the two biggest ones for me were:

1) The death of community. They started cross-realming everything and this ruined any community that existed on a server. Now joining battlegrounds or dungeons removes all accountability and respect. People have no reason to be nice or care how they treat anyone else. See here: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/3/19/ There were this kind of people before, but they were known based on their reputation. There was the other end of the spectrum as well, you could generate a good reputation for yourself, and you knew other people on your realm besides your own guild. There was a much bigger sense of community.

2) The death of world pvp. BG/Dungeon queues mean no one leaves a city unless they're doing a small subset of daily quests or leveling. They seem to be doing all they can to cut this out of the game. Battlegrounds are an OK substitute but they've forced them to be even more of a point grind. Half the people in there when I was still playing weren't there to win or even for pvp. They were just there for the easy purples. Probably on one of their alts. This also goes back to my previous point about community. There is none in BGs anymore and you get the same sort of trolls, but people try even less because they can get their gear without winning if they lose long enough.

There are plenty of other reasons but these were the root of my lost interest in the game. I enjoyed raiding and battlegrounds, but I enjoyed them with friends or in a community of people I knew had a common goal.

I'd love to try it out but unfortunately it is unavailable for apps accounts...

I guess it depends on what shows you actually watch, but we went the rout of an HTPC with tuner cards. It turned out that most of the shows my wife and I watch are either on local channels or available on Netflix, Hulu, or other streaming sources. We were paying $80 a month ($960 a year) for cable, I turned around and spend around $400 on an HTPC. It streams in HD on netflix which looks about the same as our cable did, local HD broadcast recordings look better than cable. Our monthly cost is our Netflix account or maybe a trip or two to Redbox, though we were also already using both when we had cable.

I agree that the cable TV industry as it stands is doomed. Our ISP (AT&T Uverse) is instituting caps next month. They give the usual bandwidth hogs line but it's very obviously to protect their cable TV business. We've already set up our cancellation date and scheduled the install of TWC. It's sad really because when we got AT&T they were (SHOCK!) excellent. They still were until the cap announcement, and we're sad to leave. I'd much rather be giving them my money than TWC, but caps are unacceptable to me personally, especially when being used for anti-competative measures. It's possible we'll be back... if TWC caps we'll be moving to Uverse Business class next. It's expensive but not as expensive as Cable.

I've had a bluray player quite a while (PS3) but don't really own many discs. The biggest hinderance for uptake in my case is the cost of media. I'm not going to pay $25-30 for a movie. If I REALLY liked the movie I might pay $19. I pick up all my discs via sales at Amazon/Target/Frys. Otherwise I get bluray discs from Netflix or stream.

The other thing I personally see slowing adoption is computer playback. No OS plays bluray video by default. I looked into setting up our HTPC to playback bluray discs and it would have been more expensive to buy an OEM drive and playback software than a dedicated player. Both my wife and mother have looked at movies and said something along the lines of "oh... well I cant play it in my laptop so I'll just get the DVD". Sure, they both are rarely going to play the movies on a laptop but they like having that convenience (road trips, traveling, on vacation etc).

That and my wife doesn't notice or care much about the quality difference. A majority of the time she puts out 5.1 system into mono mode when she's watching things.

They really should do a modern reprint of those shirts. Wore mine constantly in high school (I either just admitted to being really old or really young...) and consequently wore it out.

and I guess eSATA(n) is out too... wonder what the safe way to attach external storage devices is.

I remember when the same sort of crazies were going around proclaiming UNIX was evil because it was full of daemons and used the secret code "chmod 666" on your files...

I suppose. You could apply the same logic that defines "high speed" internet in the US and come to that conclusion also.

Yes, but they don't exactly qualify as "High Speed".

Oh believe me I do know, I've taken them many times. A descriptor I would not use for them is "high speed" though... I think half of a lot of the trips were spent cruising slowly through residential areas or stopped waiting for freight traffic.

That said I still prefer it to flying... it just takes too long given the speeds, track sharing and the whole having to use Chicago as a central hub thing.

You obviously don't travel in the states...

I'd be curious to see information stating the Pro panels are IPS screens. I had a pre-unibody pro and it definitely had a TN display. Given it was good for a TN. My iMac has one also and it's much nicer than the cheap TNs you can buy otherwise, but next to my Dell IPS panel there is no comparison.

This is exactly when I delete the app and give it a one star review. Quite convenient they give you that option while deleting an app.

If they're going to give me a free or "lite" app, don't jack me around later and try to turn me into a revenue model. Make a game good enough Im willing to pay a few bucks for the full version

Previous Starcraft games already implemented what you are talking about. You had to have a legitimate serial number to connect to battle.net and play online. It prevented pirates from playing online in any of their servers which would involve any competitions and the like. Sure (just like with SC2) they could create a reverse engineered server and play online, or they could do LAN or local play... I don't see this method decreasing piracy significantly, especially not as significantly as it'll decrease actual paying customers. Without LAN play I have no interest in the game when I was previously looking quite forward to it. Especially if I have to be online to take part in solo offline campaigns.

Because he wasn't flaming an Apple product of course! This is slashdot! You're either a fanboy or an anti-fanboy! ;)