yeah, but it is only half-killed. You still have to install it to install the game, but it doesn't do anything besides cause crashes if it is not installed.

the reality of the real world is that you don't get to pick what your customers and your vendors do, you just have to code around their bullshit.

well yeah, duh. That was the point of my post.

This advice is what I give people who ask me "how can I learn to program computers like you?"

Build something. Find a problem and solve it. It doesn't matter what the problem is or how you solve it.
Write a tic tac toe engine, or a photo slideshow generator, or a fart joke generator, or whatever you want to do. But you just have to do it.

You would be shocked. I envy your isolation if you have never had to work with or near people like this. Whole SOAP integrations are done from within Visual Studio. You push the "publish" button and now it runs "somewhere" (hint: Probably on an MSSQL Server somewhere, which is just god-awful).

It is a longstanding joke in my office "We are the only ones in the world who know how to write software." Because every integration we do, is with companies who have 0 people who understand SOAP, SSL, Rest, or whatever flavor of the month bullshit that they demand we provide.

It is not like we can't tell what is going on, when we get a 4 meg Microsoft WSDL.

Are you joking, or just straw-manning? Space exploration has forced humanity to come up with new and useful technologies. Try something hard, and you will inevitably make other things better. Nasa spin-off technologies have built the world.

They include:
Enriched Infant formula and other foods - which has probably done more for the collective intelligence of mankind than almost any other single effort in the history of humanity.
Water purification advances
Solar power
Firefighting advances
Safety grooving on highways
Aircraft Anti-Icing
Those ones are obvious, and easy to trace in their benefits, long term and short. See Wikipedia for a more complete list

But more important than any one single benefit, eventually we will run out of room. This is not some abstract theory. Sure, we can populate the desert and the ocean, sure we can die from disease and war, but eventually, Earth will not be enough. Betting on exploration is betting on humanity, in the long, long haul.

Our ancestors built dugout canoes 40,000 years ago. If dugouts had been a waste of a good axe-stone, when there were rival tribes to murder, Columbus would have never found the new world. I am betting that humans are a viable species. I am betting that mankind has nowhere to go but up. Look to the future, embrace exploration, it is the only way that mankind can last another 40,000 years.

When did you last bend a processor pin. I swear, I am glad processors are cheap now, because it takes 2 for me to do a build nowadays.

I like how you cut off the quote of my post where I talk about the banks who work with visa and then the clearing fees... then "disagree" with me, in a way that completely agrees with me. Weird.

I play lots of casual games in addition to less casual ones. I would love to have a tablet that can run my steam games while I sit on the couch "watching" tv dramas with my wife. I already have a gaming rig... I should not have to buy a $1200 MS Surface to accomplish this.

I just want a tablet that will run modern versions of Civilization (preferably in tablet mode, which is civilization's windows 8 killer feature).
I don't care if it is streamed or run locally or whatever.

This is the only thing keeping me from buying a shield tablet, the other games I can easily see how they will work, and they are a "bonus" for me, I can and will run emulators on anything, so the seamless controller will be nice, but it keeps coming back to Civ.
I know Civ V (and eventually Civ Beyond Earth) can be played on the Surfac, and that is literally the biggest draw for me, every other feature the surface has, I can work around. I will probably spend 500 hours playing Beyond Earth, and I would love for it to not require buying a 2 piece laptop from Microsoft.

The truth is that credit card interest is the highest profit gig in the whole world. Because of this, Visa/Mastercard and all the myriad banks that work with them have a vested interest in making credit/debit card purchases VERY EASY.
Visa wakes up, takes a dump, then wipes its ass with $300,000 dollars. It is nothing compared to the billions they make in clearing fees alone.
Vendors are not even allowed to do things like require an ID, (I know they do, but it is against the vendor agreement), even though it would make purchases a lot more secure, because EASY trumps everything, EASY makes billions. Secure override codes... Who cares?

yup.

I don't do blu-ray, but for DVD I just use fair-use wizard. and I run through a completely ridiculous set of trans-coding and file copying... most of it I have automated with shell scripts, but it is one of those things where I got it "good enough" by just hobbling along.

"Sports" consists of:

4 hours of "This team is totally gonna sports all over this team, because of the sportsing. These 12 players will totally sports all over the sports because of sports."
followed by a 1 hour game that takes 4 hours
followed by a 4 hours of "That team totally sportsed all over the other team because of sportsing, but these 3 players were particularly sportsy because of sportsing.

eSports consists of deterministic matches, usually between 2 players. There is just not enough bullshit to fill the air and not enough stars to sell shoes.

Sports fandom feeds off of the non-deterministic nature of the games that are played, sure there are winners and losers, but there is very little room in eSports to blame Referees, because in the game world it would be called "Exploits" and would be considered verifiable cheating .
The format has a total lack of potential for a "Support your Team" mentality " Sure team A scored more points, but Team B Player 12 did the greatest thing ever, therefore my fan activities are more valuable even though my team lost" some of that can happen in eSports, but for the most part, the games don't even support/lend to that kind of team play.

Awesome. Made me laugh.