Failed product? I'm sure they're selling tons of copies.

But both me and the VPN endpoint are in the US.

But the effect of doing so might make reviews less valuable. Some games might take far more than 2 hours to really get in to, while others might get worse after 2 hours by virtue of being too repetitive. Or, in the case of this game, you might not run into bugs in 2 hours.

Not that impulse buying a game before good, in-depth reviews have been published is a good idea to start with.

Ironically, I use a VPS as a VPN in the US, but for some reason google thinks I'm in Hong Kong. Every other geolocation service seems to get the location fairly close, so I have no idea where google is getting HK from.

Comcast provides a smarthost for customers to use. This is nothing new, I had to deal with this years ago. Hell, nowadays they even block outgoing port 25. Just look up what the comcast smarthost is and point your server there. If you're coming from a comcast IP, you don't even have to authenticate or anything.

Now if only we could end the even more idiotic practice of regional price gouging for digital goods/services too.

You want low latency for web traffic, and most video streaming can handle some latency. It's not latency that gets in the way, it's variations in latency/jitter. You could have a constant 500ms latency and a video stream would work fine. There's almost no traffic that actually requires high bandwidth and low latency.

And the only response to that should be "why did that stop you"?

I couldn't care less that systemd exists. If you don't like something, don't use it. I use it on a laptop for the fast boot time, and it works fairly well there, but there's enough legitimate complaints about systemd that we need alternatives.

The problem is that other things are starting to depend on systemd. GNOME being the worst offender. Not that I use it, but who knows what DE could depend on systemd next. It's like being told that if you use bash, you must use emacs.

But no amount of technical knowledge or intelligence will matter if the people in question are biased to begin with.

Besides, at this point, the discussion isn't even "should we use systemd?", it's "should we force all of our users to use systemd?" Whether or not you use systemd (disclaimer: I use it on my laptop and a desktop, but use sysvinit on servers), it's pretty hard to deny that there are plenty of perfectly legitimate complaints against systemd, to the point where forcing systemd instead of allowing people to choose their own init system is clearly not a great idea.

No, they'll probably just find a way to ruin blackberries too.

I mean, all they had to do to get guaranteed business was just keep thinkpads the same. Instead, we get chiclet keyboards and trackpoint buttons integrated in the touchpad for whatever reason. I like the build quality (my current one has been spilled on and burnt), but I'll probably just have to buy some dell or whatever with a trackpoint.

I can live with the post-IBM drop in quality, but nowadays they've removed almost everything that makes a thinkpad a thinkpad.

Also when they post crappy Dice articles and have to figure out how to get people to click.

What I've noticed is that the presence of payment opportunities very rarely actually improves the quality of things being made, but rather people just start charging for things that they wouldn't have before. Case in point: iPhone apps. Back in the 1.x days, before there was an app store, people made their free homebrew apps. App store comes out, and I see that several publishers pulled their free apps and put them in the app store for a price. You can still see it even from an absolute standpoint. Look at browsers. Tons of free browsers for desktops, which are actual complete browsers. On the iPhone? People want you to pay for literal Safari reskins. They didn't even write a rendering engine or much of anything, they basically just made baby's first iPhone app. And they want you to pay money for it.

Just imagine if you had to pay 99c for every package you install on a linux distribution.

As for movies/music, it becomes more of an ideals issue. I don't want to support RIAA/MPAA scumbags or anyone associated with them. I know that if I buy music from a big label, the people who actually made that music will only see somewhere between 0 and 10% of that money. Hell, for a typical album, it would be more efficient to mail the artist a dollar and pirate it than buy their album legitimately.

I've seen way too many bus and taxi drivers being rude drivers (blocking intersections mainly). They can't even feign ignorance when they drive for a living.

"Windows X"
Try pronouncing that out loud and you can probably figure out why they didn't spring for that name.