Whoops - forgot to mention. The other benefit WORM media has is its usefulness for storing software that needs to be trusted, such as your OS. I realise it's much faster to install an OS from a USB flash drive, but I can much more easily trust the Ubuntu disc I burned on a trusted system after verifying its integrity using the supplied sha1sum - or the offical logo'd Windows disc supplied by Microsoft with the pretty hologram embedded in the disc surface.

I will miss them. I still like optical discs, as they make an excellent WORM media (Write Once, Read Many). This makes them good for archival storage of files that aren't huge movies, like documents. A double layer BD disc holds 50GB, which is plenty for documents, config files, code, save games, even photos or moderate amounts of music. Just because you can't fit your entire torrented movie collection doesn't make them useless. You see, I can write a BD disc, and close it. I then know that nothing can write to it again (well, practically - how many people have BD burners, and mine won't anyway), which means it's safe to use in an untrusted (or potentially infected) system. Name a cheaper storage medium which has this capability.

I also find many people dismissing optical media for movie and game distribution, and claim that these days it should all be distributed online. It must be nice to have a fibre Internet connection to your house, but back in the real world where everyone else lives the average Internet connection speed is still a couple of megabits, and that isn't improving very quickly at all. People like myself are stuck with a measly three megabits... you expect me to download a 20GB video game or a 40GB movie on that? I'd be waiting a week!

Hmm, let me think about that for a minute:

1. Mods. What mods you say? Bah! Who plays mods? Lots of people do. It's pretty easy too. I've even made a couple simple ones, such as one for Oblivion that lets you use any spell effect in the game to make spells and enchantments. Don't forget entire games have been born from the ability to mod, such as DOTA. Mods also include unofficial patches for games that fix bugs that the developers won't, which are very handy.
2. I can back up my save games. Tried backing up your Fable save on the 360? Game won't let you. That's just one example.
3. I can use my gaming rig to do anything else with my machine, unlike a console. I have dual monitors and I can have a full screen game on my main monitor and throw chat windows, web browsers and the like on the second one. My PC, being an Intel hex core, is also great for working with media. Did you know that I can transcode an entire FLAC album to MP3 in just 80 seconds? My PC is my general purpose computing device. Why do I need another one just for games, when this one actually does a better job?
4. It's faster. Not just in processing, but storage - games load metric shittons quicker too. What's not to love about that? Of course, the PS3 is far worse in this regard than the 360.
5. If I want to buy an old game, I'm not forced to pay the same price it was when it was released. Steam reduces their prices over time, so most old games are very cheap (well, except for Call of Duty, but only teenagers play that these days). Those that aren't, will be cheap in the next sale.
And this is the most important, by far:
6. I can use my mouse and keyboard. Sorry, but your shitty little joypad doesn't cut it. I need a mouse. Yes, PS3 supports mouse and keyboard... except, you can't use them in 90% of games.

You can keep your console thanks.

My biggest gripe with Windows 8 isn't the Metro interface. No, my problem is Microsoft saw fit to reduce a large Start button to a tiny 4x4 pixel area. How in the absolute fuck am I supposed to click that easily/quickly/reliably when using multiple monitors or Remote Desktop? And the Charms bar is even worse as it's only a single pixel (so it seems, but it can't be bigger than a 2x2 area) in which I can activate it. Again, how do they expect us to use multiple monitors or windowed remote desktop with this crap? It's like trying to run XP on a tablet and use your finger to operate it - ridiculous!

I agree with most of what you say, but this:

is retarded. Perhaps you don't like pinning apps to your taskbar, but the rest of us find it exceptionally useful. You don't like putting apps in your taskbar because you can't tell what's running? That's what the border is for. It couldn't be any more obvious. If that isn't good enough for you, try adjusting your resolution because you must be blind.

The MacBook Air doesn't have Gigabit Ethernet. When I want to move more than 10GB of stuff to my laptop, wireless doesn't cut it and neither does USB, even USB3 as firstly I actually need a spare drive to use and second I have to wait for the data to be transferred twice rather than once.

Of course, the other thing you get with Apple's rubbish is that you have to use their bullshit overpriced adapters and converters to connect a display, whereas with a PC ultrabook you just plug your stuff straight in cos it uses standard HDMI connectors and you get an included adapter for VGA if it has that. And of course you don't get all the other standard PC features like card readers and swappable memory/HDD.

Macbook Airs are really just overpowered thin clients rather than small laptops.

MSE is not free: it is free for home users. Business may use only up to ten free licenses before they are required to upgrade to Forefront. If you're a business and using more than ten copies of MSE, you're breaching the license agreement.

Source: the MSE download page

Dammit, I had mod points just two days ago... The best I can do is a thumbs up:

b^.^d

That is not correct, and is a non-argument. Sometimes you get some warning with a hard drive rather than sudden death, sometimes you do not. The frequency of drive death occurring suddenly rather than over time will vary with personal experience, but regardless: if you value your data, then you should never just assume that a drive will give you warning before your data suddenly disappears into the void!

Compared to what other brand - Samsung? WD? Toshiba? I know of no data which suggests that one popular brand's modern drives are any more or less reliable than that of any other. These days, they are all about the same. Any preference or suggestions that I've seen for one brand or another are based purely on anecdote. Case in point: just over a month ago, I had my second drive failure in two months, and they were both WDs - Caviar Blacks, no less. One of them had been going strong for almost two years before it failed. The only sensible thing to do is distrust all storage, no matter the brand, and keep backups (and plenty of them).

FTFY

Uh, sorry mate, but that's not correct.

Your problem is that you see things in black and white, when in reality there are many shades of grey. This is a fallacy related to the false dilemma.

Really? Are you sure? Why don't you go and think over what you've just said there a bit more and get back to us.

I don't, and I'll help you out a bit here: American populace != American Government. In addition, the mere fact that they democratically elect their governement does not in any way suggest that any individual American nor the populace as a whole, agree with every single act and decision of their governing body. When they criticise other nations for human rights abuses, they frequently direct the same criticism toward their own government. And you've still stereotyped them regardless.
Regardless of their hypocrisy, a valid criticism is still a valid criticism.

Maybe (s)he is, but then again, you're drunk on your own bullshit too.

Cheers buddy. You just ruined the game for me. Some people have lives and aren't able to play it 24/7 until they're finished it. The post you replied to went straight over my head until you had to point out what it meant.

I use them like bookmarks. Bad habit, I know. Whenever I'm doing something that gets shoved to the side in favour of something else, I leave the tabs open so I can resume where I left off, and to remind me to come back to them. Sometimes I go back to them and finish with them, sometimes I never get around to it. Over time they just stack up.

Every now and again I go on a tab-closing rampage and close 80% of them. It's probably getting around about that time now...

Well, right now, Firefox 9 on my work system is using 568,948K of RAM and I have 73 tabs open. It has been open all day, with heavy usage for most of it. I sometimes put my work box to sleep instead of turning it off.

I personally find that Chrome is better at managing small numbers of tabs and Firefox is better at managing many tabs. If I have saved around 10 tabs on each, Chrome always starts up within two seconds and loads all saved tabs quickly, and uses around half the RAM Firefox does. Firefox takes around 10-15 seconds or so before it's fully ready and uses twice as much RAM as Chrome does. In this way Chrome is a lighter and faster browser. However, if I have more like 50 saved tabs in both, then I find Firefox is ready to go sooner and uses far less RAM (30-40%) than Chrome does.

Some people find Firefox is fine, others find it is a huge hog. I get this behaviour on all my systems on which I have both installed (ranging from Atom based to Sandy Bridge machines), but I have had friends say they have the opposite experience I do. So it depends on the user and the sites they visit, the number of tabs people keep open, the extensions they have installed and their browsing habits.