Please provide the "objective proof" that we are in this "Golden Age" of gaming, rather than rattling off a list of games that you think are good.

Anyone who parrots that "golden age" industry wank (I wish I could remember which sock-puppet kicked it off a few years back) unironically clearly didn't live through the Age of Legends (Gen 3-4 with Atari/Intellivision/Odyssey/et al as Gen 1).

You keep repeating this, while ignoring the fact that, until the early 2000s, it DID fall under it already. The whole "information service" Title I reclassification came about because the ISPs said "the regulations are holding us back, we promise we'll play nice if you cut us some slack." Instead, they delivered conflicts of interest and asterisks all the way down.

That's the thing about standards: there are so many and you don't have to reveal which one you are using!

Irregular verbs exist because English is a hack job of a language mashed together from several sources.

Silent letters don't exist to disambiguate homonyms, EG: lead. They exist because the words came from different sources. Compare the derivations of right and rite.

I'd wager that a properly constructed language (if adopted) would probably mutate fairly slowly, about as fast as normal language does.

There are exemptions in FTC regulations for Common Carriers.

FTC is suing AT&T.

AT&T says "Step off, FTC. We're under the FCC until we win our lawsuit fighting it"

Judge says "Fuck you, you weren't Common Carriers when you pulled your scam."

It depends where you are. I recently finally got tired of Sprint's bullshit (like charging me a $10 "4G" fee because my phone was WiMax - i.e. has never, ever worked as a 4G phone) and switched to T-Mobile. It works pretty well around home and the office, but it has a lot of spotty coverage in the "in between" areas, and none at all at the SO's apartment. Wifi calling didn't work right there, either, probably because of having 20+ SSIDs pumping through her living room. So coverage can still be a very real concern for them.

OTOH, they seem to have the self-awareness to realize this: When I called them about the problem, they hooked me up with a "free loan" (i.e. I have to send it back if I change carriers) of a 5gHz WAP. Hopefully that nails down the problem, but it's sure a nice surprise either way.

This is Comcast trying to squelch Google. You are most likely to see them "roll out" Gb+ Internet in areas that Google Fiber is being rolled out, and the reason is *only* to make sure that Google can't make money at it and quit altogether.

This is called "cutting off their air supply"; the assumption is that Google can't fund a literal roll out nationwide. Welcome to the the end-game for your most "free markets" - a monopoly.

Take as evidence iOS jailbreakers who do it so they can download $0.99 apps for free. There are plenty of people who are never going to pay anything if they can get away with it.

Well sure. On the other hand, look at iTunes. Before iTunes Napster et all were wildly popular. Then Apple starts offering downloads at $0.99 a track and suddenly they're making a ton of money and the music filesharing sites seemed to lose all traction. Lowering the price may not have solved the problem, but it greatly reduced it while creating a revenue stream that wasn't there previously.

There will always be those who won't pay, granted. With that in mind, the question becomes one of how much do you want to penalise the honest Internet users in the vain pursuit of an unobtainable absolute?

If you think for example that a computer game is too expensive and you pirate it, surely you should put the amount that you think is correct in an envelope and send it to the producer of the game? How many people are doing that? Everyone else is just lying.

Well, if someone was to illegally download a game, they'd be foolish to provide paper evidence of the crime, so to that extent I suppose it's understandable. On the other hand, if the game creators established a channel for this to happen safely, they might be surprised. I mean that's the basis on which Humble Bundles operate and I gather they've frequently been quite successful.

Granted, it's the publisher's decision whether or not to offer work on those terms, but you can't really claim it never happens or that it never works.

You and siblings missed the gag: capital "F" on fuck was to troll the AC complaining about capitalization, the "American spelling" would be "capitalise," with an "s" in the UK.

Actually, I know exactly what Free Software is (at least as defined by the FSF): I think you're just using the letter of the definition to ignore the spirit of it. You're conflating not distributing modified versions of released software with not distributing your own software - nothing wrong with that, we all have one-off scripts the universe at large isn't interested in - but there's nothing about that software that's "free" other than your statement that it is - If you decided that you weren't going to release it under the Oracle "We reserve the right to eat your Firstborn " license, the end result would be identical - no one else can run, copy, distribute,study, change, or improve it.

It contributes nothing to the software ecosystem or to society as a whole, which is the entire point of Free Software.

I'm just puzzled that I actually ate a downmod for that post. It's amazing what people take personally on the internet these days.

If only a domain could publish information about the CA authorized to sign its certificates... perhaps with a record via DNS called "info", and secured with something called DNSSEC so you can be relatively sure it's correct.

Naw. Stuff like that couldn't happen, could it?

I'm a *nix neckbeard, I respect my skills, and I use nano daily. It's a simple, fast, straightforward editor with controls similar to Word Star. Ctl-K to delete line, etc. As I've been busy building my neckbeard for 15 years or so now, and originally learned word processing with WordStar, it's a simple, natural fit.

I code in NetBeans with an IDE but for sysadmin work on any of the 50 or so servers I admin? Nano + mercurial all the way.

These days, the word "female" in TFS seems to be showing good success.