Well we're getting into the what-if game, but that's when you use a boosted car and one of those realistic latex masks to change your race, etc. -- but yeah, I'm surprised this hasn't come up yet with someone trying to paint a false picture of activities via online records.

So by your rationale I can, as a resident of a given city,

1. Drive to a bar in a city 3-4 hours away. Take a variety of photos of myself there/at local attractions. Modify the time stamps/embedded data.
2. Leave my cell phone at home while I do this.
3. Load doctored images to cell phone.
4. Hand phone to accomplice: send them back there to upload them and tweet/facebook up a storm connecting via the local cell towers.
5. Paint an alibi.
6. Go on a criminal spree.
7. If arrested or tagged later, use my alibi: I was 4 hours away at the time. See?

It can't be that simple.

Posting unencrypted data on 3rd party corporate services exposes them to legal requirements! We never saw that coming!

Seriously, I've ALWAYS wondered this. I can play say Grand Theft Whatever or Assassin's This or Star Wars That or Red Dead Data Packets... and the stupid thing is constantly churning autosaves or save sessions or save points. A staple of gaming.

But if I go fire up FIFA 11 or Madden or MLB 2k10, I *HAVE* to play a given game through to the conclusion or leave it paused until I'm done. Why?

Examples: I love a nice leisurely 60-90 minute Madden session, really thinking about the plays, or a leisurely baseball game sometimes, really working the counts, etc. -- but rarely have 60-90 minutes to just burn through for either. That's why I love the FIFA game--10-20 minutes, in and out, done. I can't remember sports games EVER letting us do this--I finish a game, my seasons/campaigns/whatever autosave out the wazoo, but the in-game process itself? Weird. Am I the only person that cares for such a feature?

Is the real offense here by Netflix, as evidenced by comments there on the site, is that they've exposed the dirty little secret of many ISPs--that they oversell capacity?

I don't know why people bag on Tivo. Of the canned products like this, it's by far the best. Once you have the Tivo desktop program as well, and integrate Netflix and Amazon into it, it's stupidly powerful as a cheap media server for any idiot to use. The thing to remember about their GUIs is they're not designed for us--the crowd reading this comment. It's designed for my grandmother. And what else do I need, as a nerd? I don't need 24th century LCARs. I need to turn on the TV, hit transfer for the soccer game I downloaded from overseas off of my PC, push play on my recording of Hawaii 5-0, and then later watch a streaming movie with the minimum of brain power. All of that is like 5-10 remote clicks in cute interfaces, and like I said, even my grandmother could figure it out.

The point is that you can't buffer ahead of time. I've let Netflix buffer for 30-60 minutes on pause and it still chokes out at times. It's all a tightly held Netflix licensing secret but there general consensus all over from researching it to fix it, that I've seen, is that Netflix can only serve so much at once for licensing reasons. Unlike Amazon Video on Demand, who can send the whole media file at once.

My internet is fine. It's a blazing fast Comcast line, and it's simply the HD buffering that fails at times. Everything else for non-HD is fine. All I'm asking for is a toggle to simply downgrade at will.

Here's what happens:

You start to stream a HD selection. We happen to run it through Tivo.
It buffers and has the little HD icon.
It buffers some more.
Then it buffers some more.
Then it runs. Hurray HD!
Then it buffers after 4-5 minutes.
Then it buffers some more.
Then it runs again. Hurray HD!
Then it buffers after x minutes.

Give us the option to:

1. Select what mode we want. I'd happily not see everything in amazing HD 1080p glory in exchange for everything just going. Yeah, Lost Seasons 1-6 looks astonishing in HD, but I'll happily take it just blasting through without CONSTANT buffering.

or

2. Allow us to build up a much larger buffer locally. If licensing prohibits this, see option #1 -- give us some exposed controls over this.

Before anyone says, "Well, upgrade your connection!" -- for some of us, that may not be a feasible suggestion.

The beauty of Wikipedia is that Jimmy's game of playing founder is dead and buried because of the nature of what he created with Larry Sanger. It died a permanent death when Jon Stewart on the Daily Show introduced him to America as the "co-founder" of Wikipedia.

Damn fun! Curse them for making me suffer through multiple hundreds of hours of social interactions and fun with friends growing up on the NES, Genesis, and later other gaming platforms! Down with fun and childhood, up with FREEDOM!!!!

>>According to Wales — who was quick to stress he was speaking in a purely personal capacity — set-ups such as the iTunes App Store can act as a “chokepoint that is very dangerous.” He said such it was time to ask if the model was “a threat to a diverse and open ecosystem” and made the argument that “we own [a] device, and we should control it."

In other words, he has a problem with the iTunes stores and Apple lockdown, versus the idea of monetizing and controlling content like this in general as his business is making money on the for-profit Wikia content sites. As someone said above, what exactly is an app store but a GUI front end for a site like like Sourceforge or a Linux repository, where people can install programs without having to jump through technological hoops?

My wife has an Ubuntu netbook that she uses for writing and browsing and mail only, but if I suggested that she apt-get or sudo or any other nonsense she'd whack me upside the head, point at the screen, and ask me to do whatever it is I thought needed doing. That's probably 95% of everyone in the world, right there. There is no chokepoint unless the hardware vendors do dumb things like the news that Microsoft locked out app installs yesterday on Windows Mobile 7 unless you subscribe to their tools.

App stores are no more evil than the business decisions of the vendors controlling the hardware that connect to them. Sort of like computers, cars, guns, and so on.

In what sane universe does it take six months to return a cell phone?

Obviously, this is the opposite of Warcraft, which is monthly subscriptions, but that also lets you buy a variety of microtransactions. The other game I play routinely is Valve's Team Fortress 2 via Steam, which has no monthly fee, but has a ridiculous array of little extras and add-ons and play-changing toys you can buy for extra cash when you feel like it--but you don't need even one.

How does LotR compare versus those?

People assume that relationships are a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... love-y wimey... stuff.