You misread the TFA. Google offers a 5Mbps plan with a $300 one time connection/construction fee, that can be paid for with $25 a month over one year. Afterwards, the connection is free for at least another six years. You can get the same deal in any area Google Fiber is offering service.

5Mbps for $25/month for one year, and then $0/month for six years, not a crappy deal at all.

The news here is that the deal Google Fiber struck with the City of Austin, which was to waive the $300 connection fee and provide 5Mbps for $0/month for 10 years to public housing residents, will now be offered in all the markets they are in or will enter.

5Mbps for free for 10 years is definately not a crappy deal by an reasonable standard.

And will calls across carriers count against your data cap?

But you'll need a phase inducer to prevent the neutron flow from disrupting the tachyon beam.

There are plenty of family friendly sports "bars & grills" where you and the kids can watch the game, and you don't have to be over 21 to enter.

Cost is not the important factor, margin is. With today's business always focused on the short time, the margins would need to be higher than 3x on the alternatives in order for the suits to be bothered with greasing the palms to get a ban on the older bulbs.

Do you have any data on the difference in margins between the incandescent and newer bulbs? Because I'd really like to know what they are.

Want to know how scared AT&T is of Google Fiber in Austin? AT&T is now advertizing Uverse with "Gigapower!" Sounds like AT&T has a product to compete with Google's gigabit/s services, doesn't it? Well, no, it's only 300 megabit/s. Fastest residential service available in Austin at the moment, but still under 2/3rds the speed of coming Google. Only reason to call it "gigapower" is to confuse people into thinking it's equivalent to Google's gigabit/s service.

You must have been playing a very different version than I've been playing. Your entire post is so off the mark!

The entire stable of mechs are purchasable with real money, yes. However all but a few are only purchasable with real money, and those are only variants of mechs that are available with in game currencies. And the vast majority of those are considered to be sub-par. You can purchase every single chassis with in game currency you earn by playing the game.

If an Atlas is one of the trial mechs, then hell yes. If not, then hell yes - after you earn the in game currency to buy one; and with the cadet bonus, that's 25 games.

I've been playing the game sense closed beta, and I have no idea what the hell you are talking about there.

The entire point of the mechwarrior series?

Do you mean Community warfare? Because that isn't even out yet, so it can't be behind a credit card.

Stompy giant robots blasting each other? That's there and free to play.

No, wrong, wrong, wrong! It wasn't paying players that were stomping free players, it was organized group players stomping PUG drops. Payment had nothing to do with it at all. You didn't need to pay to drop with other players, and paying didn't make you instantly have a group to drop with.

I get, and agree with, what you are saying about differences between European countries being much greater than difference between states within the US. However, the history, language, culture, and economy between, say, Texas and New York is not as shared as you think. In a large part, the differences between states are due to the different European groups that settled in the various areas of the US had very different languages and cultures. And that's even discounting the contributions from non-Europeans to the culture of the different states. And let's not forget the native Americans, who's history goes back quite a bit further than 200 - 300 years, and did influence the language and culture of America as well.

And then you hit your data cap on you home ISP as well.

Or until you use repair tools to remove the rootkit. Once they figure out people can do that, then they'll ask to make it illegal to remove their rootkits.

Although it is against the TOS, unless the server is using a large amount of bandwidth, it is unlikely to be noticed. Even if it is noticed, again, as long as it isn't using a large amount of bandwidth, the ISP is unlikely to do anything. ISPs are smart enough to know that it's better to keep Bob as a paying residential customer, than to have him switch to their only other competitor in the market over whether or not Bob's low bandwidth using game server requires a business account.

Other than using a disproportionate amount bandwidth, the only time an ISP is likely to go after you for violating the TOS with a server is if they think you are actually making money with the server. And I'm not talking about an extra $20 or $100 bucks a month kind of money, but enough extra money where they think upselling you the business account makes sense.

Why do I make this claim? Because I use to work for an ISP back in the day, and part of my job was to look for people using the service to set up Internet shops. We only cared if it looked like the shop was actually making money.

My mother had to get a new machine this past weekend, all they had in stock came with Win8. I was dreading it the entire way back from the store, and while I was removing her old box and connecting up the new box, due to my experiences with the Win8 preview. Looked and acted pretty much like the preview did to me, but surprisingly, my mother liked it. I heard a lot more "oh wow"s than I did "oh no"s.

If Mechwarrior Online is anything to go by (it uses the Crysis 3 engine), the min-specs aren't going to play the game very well. Dual-core machines end up having both cores hammered, and FPS drops into the singles when up close and personal with more than one other Mech. My machine is about midway between the min-specs and the recommended for MWO, which looks like they took the min-specs straight from Crysis 3, and it plays alright, but not great. It could be due to some of the code the MWO team has bolted on, but I'd say it's a pretty good indicator that the min-specs are more wishful thinking.

I used to work at a competitor to Snapfish, writing the software to manage and send jobs to the production floor and machines, so I'm familiar with the business. Using any of the web-based or brick-n-mortar stores with an actual photo-development machine is going to be a much better option than printing them out yourself. It takes longer to get your prints, but it will be cheaper and the quality is much better than anything you can do yourself. Unless you happen to have a Fuji Frontier, or other industrial photo-developer, in your basement. A true photo-development machine, like a Frontier, is going to produce better colors (if it's calibrated correctly) and longer lasting prints than either dye sublimation or ink jet printers.

Dye sublimation or ink jet printers are nice if you want a quick print, but for bulk prints or prints that you want to last, order online or drive to the drug store.

Also, a quick note, we used to compare our quality of prints to other competitors. Snapfish was alright and their quality was usually consistent. But that was over seven years ago, and everyone's quality would drift a bit over time. I'd order some test prints from a few places before placing a large bulk order.

"Don't fight it son. Confess quickly! If you hold out too long you could jeopardize your credit rating."
- Guard, from the movie Brazil