An immunocompromized individual belongs nowhere near a school. This is for their own safety. There's a strong likelihood they are quarantined from contact with the public already due to their condition. They may even have a special directive from their doctor telling them to STAY AWAY FROM SCHOOL.

The LAST thing that a person fitting your favorite loophole needs is to expose themselves to the germ exchange which is any large group of children.

> 1) Could not afford shots
> 2) No access to health care

If this isn't a problem in Mississipi, then it's probably not a problem anywhere.

> 3) Child could not get shots for medical reasons

If this is serious enough to be worse than the risk of dying from the Mumps then this person should be quarantined anyways.

So the "gun grabber" squads in California are a reflection of the US in general? Seriously? You're on crack. California is at the fringe of one end of the political spectrum.

It is not Peoria.

Even back in 1993, AOL was considered a haven for idiots and suckers. Anyone with half a clue went somewhere else. This even includes the "can't be bothered" crowd.

Not that PPP was that difficult to deal with. It came pre-packaged in the same kinds of automated software installers that AOL came with.

AOL really didn't solve any problem.

It was just pervasive. They went that extra mile to SPAM eveyrone.

> The difference is that there is a rather large demand for many of Elton John's songs

This whole thread appears to flatly contradict that idea.

That is why the music industry is whining.

They're whining that they can't milk the cash cow after 40 years.

I suspect that everyone that has any interest in buying a copy of something representing Elton's work has already done so and did rather a long time ago. That particular well is tapped out and they they can't "frack" it with another change in formats.

Many people aren't particularly attached to some random performer. Those that are likely already have an aging collection of CDs or MP3s. The rest are content to listen to things "for free" just like they always have since the dawn of radio nearly 100 years go.

Beyond that, what the music industry really needs to worry about entirely new forms of distraction that have arisen in the last 40 years.

The entire subgenre of music I used to listen back to in the great heydey of paying for physical media were all bands that had to do their own marketing before the labels would even look at them. Even that only came because a lot of 3rd party marketing that occured outside of the label system with underground clubs and tape trading done by mail.

Record labels abuse the talent and then corrupt the law.

As soon as you acknowledge DOS an a proper OS then you've opened the door to pretty much anything.

...except the problem with all of that is this is being driven by idiot savant musicians that don't understand that there's a money grubbing middle man in between them and Spotify. What the artist gets and what Spotify actually pays are two different things.

And that's not even getting into the problem of assigning a reasonable value to a single impression.

On the other hand, MCE was always total pants when it came to outside media handling. This is an area where XBMC is especially good at. XBMC is pretty much the gold standard here. Whereas MCE is a bad joke. Even the (multiple) plugins to address this problem don't do well enough.

Then add in the modern streaming services and it's even worse. They are numerous enough that supporting them is difficult, plus PC options for accessing streaming services are all pretty much terrible (Flash & Silverlight).

Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, Hulu and friends all make your cable provider moot. They provide the same interface as what you can cobble together with a Tivo and a really large hard drive.

Tivo and everything else like it was really just a stopgap measure between conventional TV and a full on-demand experience.

It's just the nature of the beast. ANY app that provides that sort of "re-startable" viewing experience is going to have to spy on you just a little. There's no getting around it.

The entire system to support MythTV including full desktop GUI support, the command line, and the IR remote interface system as well as things like database support and a full build environnment clocks in at a whopping 4G. It doesn't have to be a bloated pig.

Your one liner insult is not nearly as impressive as you think it is.

The OP has a point. Microsoft has the resources to push into all areas equally. They can "waste" resources maintaining consistent UIs for a number of different form factors. Certainly for their own products, they can make everything usable with any interface you can mention or even allow for translation layers.

They're just disinterested. MCE is the perfect example of that. It was always very promising but they never really ever committed to the idea.

No. There are any number of use cases on the PC that use or require more horsepower. Gaming is an obvious one. So is the use of bleeding edge media formats. The whole point of a PERSONAL computer is that these use cases can come from anywhere and end up a killer app (like the spreadsheet).

Gut the system and turn the ecosystem into a prison and you sabotage that.