While AT&T isn't pushing to run fiber to your home, they ARE pushing damned hard to get fiber to the businesses. Very, very hard. In fact, a huge chunk of money is being thrown at this project to have 10,000 plus sites access to Gigabit eth speeds. ( Officially it's known as Project VelocityIP ) Emphasis on BUSINESSES, not consumers.

ALL companies offering bandwidth will always be selective in what markets they deploy into. It isn't profitable to run fiber to neighborhoods where the majority of those living there will never pay for the service being offered. Akin to not seeing very many Ferrari dealerships in blue collar neighborhoods. The customer base just isn't there.

Initially, they will all concentrate on those areas where they can get the biggest bang for their buck.

I'm pretty sure I would decline the service ( even if offered for free ) if it came with the deep packet inspection stipulations intact for targeted advertising.

Exactly.

At this point Russia can demand whatever it wants from Mr. Snowden and he really isn't in any position to say no. If he does, Russia simply puts him on a plane back to the US and that's the end of the story.

He has nothing to fall back upon unless another country offers him asylum as well. Though the same rules will apply there I'm afraid.

Perhaps, but if you try to shift the blame and throw company X under the bus while doing so, watch how much cooperation you get from that company in the future. ( assuming the whole thing isn't a comete sham )

While company X isn't allowed to discuss anything related to the gag orders, I would simply leak the entire thing out to ( insert some torrent site here ) and blame it on bad security, some zero day exploit at the hands of some evil hacker.

Technically, they DIDN'T discuss it, the data was stolen from their servers :)

"Black culture doesn't reward or encourage intelligence.
"

To be honest, AMERICAN culture doesn't either. Is why celebrities, athletes, and entertainers are paid dump truck loads of cash while the really intelligent folks ( scientists, reaearchers, you know folks who actually create the world as we know it today ) are compensated at a much lower level.

Given that, if you're growing up in America are you going to strive to be a math whiz or a pro-athlete ? Which gives you the ideal " American " lifestyle ?

Here in the good ol US of A, we glorify a lot of things: War, wealth, and power to name but a few. Intelligence is way, Way, WAY down the list.

In fact, if you're TOO good at say, Math, in school, you become a target and an outcast because you don't fit in with the cool crowd folks now. Your life will become a living hell.

Sorry you had to endure that, I'm not sure what EA is thinking these days but it sounds like they can't dig the hole they're in fast enough.

  Short sighted/term thinking maybe. They don't realize that a few bad experiences leads to less folks willing to play their product at all. There will always be those who don't know any better and must have it at any cost but there exists no better teacher than experience and in this day and age, word travels very quickly indeed.

Burn your bridges to those who finance your business and the outcome becomes obvious.

Grant you that. Up unil recently, Steam was a trainwreck too. It's finally to the point where it's actually pretty nice to use now and offline mode finally works the way it should have from the beginning. See a game you want ? Buy it, download and play. Done.

Though I still wait for them to have a sale for any games I want to play. Done paying $60 a pop for what will basically be Beta II. By the time I pick it up, it's ~$20 and fully patched and tested by millions of others.

Chuckle. Anyone who has been playing PC games ( and console games for that matter ) knows that within a month of launch, you can expect one or more patches to fix the product they rushed out the door to meet some deadline. Guaranteed.

I'm pretty much done with jumping through all the hoops for this. If you want to make it a pain in the ass just to play it, then I just won't play it. Pretty simple really.

Not that they care as they have legions of folks who are willing to put up with the BS to play at any cost, but in time they too will become jaded with the system and become ex-gamers as well.

Steam seems to have finally got it right in my opinion. I have zero issues with that platform now and the majority of my games come from there.

I have a strong gaming rig and I won't bother with Titanfall for one simple fact: The PC version requires Origin to play it.

I tried it with Battlefield the last Battlefield game and it was such a trainwreck I uninstalled it and tossed the game in the trash before ever getting to play it. It went something like this:

Buy the physical media ( dvd ) install game. Try to play, find out you have to install Origin, cuss, install Origin, register and do all the BS required. Try to play, find out there is a multi GB PATCH to install before I can play, cuss some more, start download ( which takes HOURS coming from their servers ) finally get it all downloaded, try to play, discover my browser opens up instead of the game, Origin now wants to install some plugin to the damn browser. At which point I gave up from sheer anger and uninstalled the entire thing, Origin and all.

I put the Battlefield disc in the microwave then ran it through the shredder resolving to never again touch any game that had an Origin requirement.

So, Titanfall may be the most amazing game ever made but due to the Origin requirement, it is a game I will never play.

XSI users have seen this coming for a long time now. I myself am a longtime XSI user and while the platform is damned powerful, it is silly to spread your development teams across three applications all trying to do the same thing. If they could sim

This possibility is why I don't OWN an X-Box One and why my existing gaming console ( which lacks a video camera and microphone ) is isolated to its own VLAN on my home network. For that matter, all the phones are on their own VLAN, the gaming console on another, the alarm system a third. I don't allow them to talk to anything other than the internet or ( in the case of the phones ) each other.

Don't really want the X-Box camera watching me when I walk through the house, the mic picking up my conversations, or any of the other devices being used as a jump off point of entry to the rest of my network.

Then I'll be damned if I do it with a measly laser pointer.

I'll go buy 500 of the suckers from Wicked Lasers ( or the highest wattage output I can find ), build these suckers into some crazy array, add a focusing lens to this , paint it green, name it Lazilla, tie it into a passive motion tracking system, mount it on the rooftop and have a grand time pointing it at satellites, the neighbors dog, any aircraft within fifty miles and the FBI helicopters when they show up.

I mean, if you're going to go to jail for something, you may as well try and set the bar up as high as you can :D

This will bounce back and forth until it reaches the Supreme Court. I'm sure they are already dreading it.

Were I in possession of the Snowden documents, I would simply wait and see how this plays out. If it simply goes back to "business as usual" for the NSA by being declared completely legal by our bought-and-paid-for judicial system, I would simply pull another juicy document or two out of the pile and add it to the growing pool of public knowledge. Wash, rinse and repeat until the government finally does the right thing ( or you run out of documents I suppose )

Either way, it's a win for privacy. ( We get a little bit of it back, or learn how much of it we've lost )

Though I will be surprised if it survives a challenge all the way through to the Supreme Court.

Even if it does, I would expect some more fun documents to come out of the Snowden files. I certainly would hold on to the more interesting ones to use for this exact purpose. Don't want to clean up your act ? Fine. Let's show the world just how deep the rabbit hole goes shall we ?

We can't possibly hope the judicial system is going to do the right thing here, ( bought and paid for you know ) so you need to have an Ace up your sleeve to even the playing field for an opponent who doesn't play fair to begin with.

the games we played pushed the envelope of PC hardware. More detail, better graphics, physics engines, etc. That, IMO, is what drove the PC hardware market.

However, we've reached a point where the games are pretty damned impressive now ( visually anyway ) and the hardware from a few years ago is sufficient to run them. Couple that with the COSTS to create a game anyone wants to play that will push the hardware to the current limit and you can understand the decline in PC hardware sales. They haven't given up on them, there is just less reason to upgrade as often now.

As bad as it sounds, I would rather play a game on console rather than deal with the DRM bullshit that comes with PC gaming anymore. ( Notable exceptions are Steam and those games that just don't play well on a console )

The market for current generation hardware is just smaller now but we've always known the manority of the market really didn't need their desktop anyway. ( eg, my parents. They can make do with an Ipad for what they need it for. It's great for me as I don't have to make a four hour drive to "fix" it every six months because they don't understand the concept of not clicking the "You Win!" banners and opening up emails that remotely resemble something legitimate.

Last, but not least, I could have typed this whole thing in record time were I not posting this via a tiny ass smartphone keyboard :/

What he's hoping for here is that the folks who act to keep such laws on the books also get to experience the same
end-of-life torture his father has to endure because of their actions. Trust me when I tell you it's one of the most painful
things you'll ever experience and pulling someone you love off of life support is one of the toughest decisions you'll ever make.

It's a difficult decision to make, ending someones life. Even though the outcome is eventually inevitable, I would rather go quickly
than waste away slowly knowing what my fate is to be. I want my estate to pass to those I want to have it, not to the billing department
of some Hospital or facility who is trying to wring every dime they can from me before I go.

When you death vs the suffering they will endure by keeping them alive, you'll ultimately come to the same conclusion I think. Those
who support keeping them alive at all costs have obviously never experienced this for themselves. So I say to them, " Walk a mile in those
shoes, and tell me how you feel afterwards. "