Why did you decide to have a family before you got a good job?

Get the job first, then get to making babies. We have enough people on the planet as it is.

1,000 times this. I wish my mod points hadn't expired yesterday.

I think it's totally cool that Apple "steals," and does so in a way that genuinely makes good products with some level of innovation, at least in design.

What I don't think is cool is that Apple steals but then expects other people not to. Either Apple can steal ideas from other people, and other people can steal ideas from Apple, or neither can steal ideas from each other. Apple can't just have the benefit on both sides, being allowed to steal while being impervious from people stealing from them.

Exactly this. HD makes a huge difference, regardless of graphics.

Playing Mario Kart 64 on my HDTV from an emulator actually looks much better than Mario Kart Wii.

Exactly. Youtube is not there to enforce the law. That's what the courts are for. As you said, they are not there to determine if a video is legal or not, and therefore they are not there to remove videos that may be copyrighted.

They are free to decide what they think is acceptable. If Youtube does not want to remove videos that may be copyrighted -- they are free to not do so.

Because everyone knows posting on an online forum carries the equivalent importance of a job application.

Google could now potentially make an entire line of Nexus phones through Motorola. Say goodbye to MotoBlur crap?

I just gave a rather long explanation about how I can say that in the post you replied to.

The media ignores third party candidates because it is the logical thing to do in our current political system. Voters who think logically will also ignore these candidates.

They "founding fathers" did a great job constructing a democracy without much to go off of, but there are some negative consequences to the system they devised that they could not have foreseen. These design flaws have since been fixed by other countries, who had the benefit of looking at American and seeing what worked and what didn't. Using a first past the post system with a district magnitude of 1 has the negative consequence of the country only having two parties. This is fixed by systems such as proportional representation, which allow for multiple parties.

It's not the media's fault that our country doesn't have a proportional representation electoral system.

If you're not sure why this happens, it's really not that complicated. Only one person can win. Lets say there are 4 parties on a spectrum of 1-10, with 1 being conservative and 10 being liberal. They may be something like 2, 4, 6, and 8. If you are a liberal voter, you have to choose whether or not to vote for 6 or 8. If you are a strong liberal, you would like to vote for 8. The same applies on the conservative side. Now, what happens if the liberals all vote for who they actually want to win: half vote for 6 and half vote for 8, but 6 also picks up swing voters by being in the middle, knocking 8 out of the race. Now, lets say the same thing happens on the conservative side, 4 is the victor. So the election comes down to who happened to get more votes, 4 or 6.

Lets pretend that 6 won that election. In the next election, conservatives get smart and decide to all vote for 4, ignoring 2. If the liberal do not do the same thing, 4 will win by a landslide, as the liberal vote is split between 6 and 8. In the next election, you can be certain both groups will vote for 4 and 6, 2 and 8 are ignored. Do this for 100 years, and you end up with two parties.

The media doesn't really have much (if anything) to do with it.

Political science has very few concepts that can be considered anything close to a "law," but the law of Duverger is one of those few. While not 100% accurate, as any "law" in a social science won't be, it is still very accurate at determining the number of parties a political system will end up with. The law, put simply, states that the number of parties in a political system will be the district magnitude +1. So, in a winner-takes-all system such as the United States (District Magnitude of 1) we end up with 2 parties. In a Proportional Representation system where more than one person is elected for each district, you end up with more than 2 parties. If you look at actual data on various countries, you can see that this is almost always true.

Or pay to watch the show AND have half of it taken up by ads, ie cable TV.

Just wait for the software developers to hear about that one.

"A human being would've known that. Robots... nothing here, just lights and clockwork. Go ahead, you trust 'em if you want to."

I personally have my desktop connected to my living room TV, but even still I don't tend to play games on the television much. Most PC games are designed to be played from a close distance, and so even though my monitor is smaller and of worse resolution, they still tend to be better than on the TV.

In addition to this controllers still seem better than mouse/keyboard for TV gaming. Yes, controllers can be used with the PC but that's an additional cost, and not all games allow their use.

PCs would have to be vastly simplified to work for the average console consumer in my opinion, which kind of eliminates the entire point of playing on a PC.

This is my biggest grate with PC gaming. I'm a PC gamer myself who built my own desktop specifically for gaming, so I do love PC gaming. However, if I want to play a game with my wife it's much cheaper to buy it on ps3 (if available), than to buy two copies for the PC.

Also, while consoles are sadly getting away from local multiplayer and becoming more like PCs, there is still a larger amount of games with local multiplayer than on the PC. There's just something to be said for playing a game together on a single screen, rather than two separate screens.

And for groups of friends, there's no argument that a Wii with brawl or mario kart is by far the best way to go.

But what if every game is controllable using the gamepad? It's not like you don't have to buy controllers for consoles, and you already own a cell phone so it at least cuts out the price of the console itself.

Completely agree with this. I imagine a world (maybe in 10 years or so?) where when we come we simply place our cell phones on a little pad that connects them to all our other crap. They interact with our tv and wireless controllers for games, and our monitors, wireless keyboards, and wireless mice for computers.

The only problem is I don't see stuff like this really getting any attention outside the "geek/nerd" communities. Even the Apple patent cases, which are the most widely publicized from what I can tell, aren't really well known to people who don't care about their cell phone brand.