. Well, you said you don't actively like Steam DRM, but continuing to use Steam only ensures that it'll never change.

He likes stuff like disc based securom drm even less.

If he refuses to use everything he doesn't like, he won't play very many games at all.

but continuing to use Steam only ensures that it'll never change

Steam has added family accounts, and now family library sharing features. These don't solve the problem yet, but they are baby steps forwards towards solving some the biggest complaints most people have about steam's drm.

I'm frankly surprised not many other people here seem to be all over the lack of an SD slot.

For $50 bucks more you get the 64GB model, and forget about it.
What do you need an SD slot for exactly? Do you routinely SWAP cards? Maybe you do.. but I NEVER have. If it had an SD slot, I'd buy a 32GB or 64GB card and then forget about it.

So buying a 64GB phone... amounts to the same difference for me.

I like having my entire music collection, my entire photo library and 1 or 2 movies with me just in case

This seems contrived to be an amount of data designed to fit precisely more than the 64GB built in yet be less than the 128GB you can add to, for example, and S5.

I mean, why only 1 or 2 movies? Why not all of them? And just your photos, not your hundreds of hours hi def home movies?

Is it because if you wanted your 500 DVD rips, then even a 128GB sd card won't meet your needs?

Or is it just that you need precisely 128GB of storage; and if a phone came with 128GB of storage but no SD slot, what then? Would it meet your needs or not?

The $695 bikes at the bike shop are the low end of what they offer.

That's a mystery; particular to your shop -- good bikes start cheaper than that.

I've lost four bikes or more in ten years. [...] break it due to my own overweight, or see my investment go down the toilet because it's stolen

Buy used. Seriously. A used bike is 1/2 what a new one costs, and even despite reasonable wear and tear is an infinitely better bike. And even a 10 year old quality bike is still a quality bike. And if its got some deficiency, odds are it can be fixed.

For I've got a 2003 brodie brute.

http://www.brodiebikes.com/201...

  I paid $450 for it 4 or 5 years ago. That bike would be maybe $250 bucks today (?), but its still an infinitely better bike than anything you'll get at walmart. (8" front & rear hydraulic disk brakes, 130mm front suspension, hard tail) I've taken it down Whistler).

I've since added a Norco Team DH (also used) for stuff like Whistler.

http://www.norco.com/archives/...

Had that one 2 years now. Paid $600 for it (SRP is $5900 -- no idea if anybody ever actually paid that much for one, but it gives you an idea where it fits into the 'hierarchy' of bikes.) Its a downhill monster.

But that's beside the point; I've got no plans to get rid of the brute for riding around with the family. Its a fantastic bike. And even the brute is huge overkill for anyone looking for just a basic mountain bike for riding around town / bike paths / trails.

A good starter bike from a real bike shop, 4-10 years old on craigslist in good condition is well within your price range and an infinitely better bike.

So if I come into your bike shop for an adjustment, please do spare me the "you're gonna spend $600 on that piece of crap before you're done with it."

Its not that you are going to spend $600 on that piece of crap, its that it will continue to be a poorly adjusted piece of crap no matter how much you spend on it.

Stuff like this has existed for a while for various flagship phones.

http://ca.mobilefun.com/38058-...

I would think some rubber buffer around the glass could be used to add a lot of break resistance.

rubber doesn't really go with apple's metal and glass stylistic sensibilities.

Are scratches or breaks more common?

I've seen tons of broken screens even as recently as last week. I can't honestly say I've seen any scratched ones in the last few yers.

The point remains that if Citizens United is to be reversed, the job of making that happen, for all practical purposes, still falls to congress.

Well, perhaps finding things to fix should be the job of static code analyser.

Because static code analysers can catch all bugs?

The Senate is part of the US Congress

You are right of course. I misspoke.

And they can pass veto-proof legislation with supermajorities in both branches of Congress.

Yes they can, but that's not the usual way. The president doesn't veto that much in the first place, and of the vetoes congress only overrides a tiny fraction.

So legislation is not at all the same as a constitutional amendment.

I never said it was the same thing; I know well they are very different.

But you are splitting hairs saying its not congress' job to amend the constitution. It can't do it by itself, and it doesn't even have to originate them, but its certainly the origin of most amendments in historical practice, and by most, I mean ALL 27 of them. So its disingenuous to represent that its not their job to amend the constitution.

Yes, this is true. But they are also making it a lot more possible to actually find the things that need fixing.

US Congress can start a constitutional amendment process, but they can't make it happen by themselves.

Splitting hairs.

They can't do anything by themselves. Even a regular bill needs to go through the senate, and end with a presidential signature... etc.

All of this was drama to cover up his desire to release the files to Russia. Now he's on TV, obviously repeating a Putin script.

That is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. If he desired to release them to Russia, he could have simply done so without any drama at all.

but I've never seen a hundred commits that didn't introduce their fair share of bugs - let alone a hundred commits in a single week.

Take a look at the commits.

Majority of them are things like

sometype
*name

to

sometype *
name

and fixing indentation, formatting comments, etc

The ones that actually -change- anything significant are FAR fewer, and most of those are simple straight elimination of special platform specific paths, for platforms they don't wish to support in this fork.

Very few actual bugs are being eliminated. No new features. The number of "real code" commits is very nominal.

Those laws reversing it are properly called "Constitutional Amendments".

It's human nature to occasionally (or always) speed and break minor traffic laws.

Indeed. I just had an argument with a local neighborhood group. They've gone and posted the speed limit at 10kph, but they don't want people to actually drive 10kph and even came out and admitted that... but they got the idea that you set it 10-15kph below what you want people to do, so they set it at 10kph to get people to drive 15 to 25 instead of.

The problem though is that set at 10kph, with the expectation that we drive 15-25 is that legally we're doing 50% to 100% and beyond over the posted speed limit, which as you can imagine is not merely 'speeding' but 'excessive speeding' and 'reckless driving' per the letter of the law. Sure the cops are probably never going to bother with a speed trap to nail me going a measly 22kph, but an automated GPS insurance monitoring system... will probably record that I do double the speed limit habitually... and assess my premiums accordingly.

They didn't, apparently, as they were eager to get their hands on him.

What revisionist history are you imagining?

The *only* reason he's in Russia is *we* trapped him there.