If those game publishers were as big as Microsoft, had been around as long as Microsoft, and had as much experience failing at meeting demand for capacity as Microsoft, then by now they would have added the capacity... as Microsoft has. There's been lots of times in the past when their ability to deliver content has been poor, but that was mostly a long time ago. Now they're just demanding you use javascript on their site, which they only instituted fairly recently. That's piss-annoying.

My machine is by no means blisteringly fast and I built it for chump change but I've got 500GB of SSD, 16GB of RAM and eight cores. I give a shit about bloat. In principle, I care very much. In practice, it is not really affecting me any more.

Windows 7 is so very good I am afraid to leave it. It is not by any means perfect, but I enjoy it more than I ever thought I would enjoy a Microsoft operating system.

It's a nice idea, but running on the metal often exposes bugs which you don't see while running in a VM, usually driver-related. While my hardware is pretty boring now from this standpoint as it's quite new and not exotically expensive or inexpensive, I'm still not going to risk it. I wasn't just born on the turnip truck last thursday night.

You're a bunch of idiots, but I love you. Thanks for taking that early install bug bullet for me. I'll wait a couple of weeks minimum before I do any installs.

What looks idiotic in retrospect is your comment. The name only has to make sense long enough to sell a bunch of units. Then they're on to the next product.

I think that software patents could be a bit more palatable if they also had to provide source code that was proven to compile and work as describe in the patent. As it stands right now, source code is not necessary, and only a vague description of what the functionality is necessary for software patents. That means, even if somebody else finds a better algorithm for doing what is covered in the patent, then the patent might still apply.

This very much stifles innovation. Let's say somebody invents a wood chopping machine and patents it. Now I discover something that is slowing their machine down, or making it unreliable. If I find out a solution to that, I can patent my fix and start selling a better wood chopping machine. With software, if somebody patents the idea of compressing a video, and I come up with an algorithm that compresses it at 10 times the speed while achieving the same end result, then my algorithm would probably already be covered by the existing patent.

Mod this up. (I've already posted in the thread, so I can't.)

Did you confront the responsible party? No? Then don't ask everyone else to fix your problem, which is with that person, not with us or the Internet.

Relatively little of what teens do is going to cause them problems in later life. It's what people do between about 18 and 25 that tends to screw them. Mainly because they're old enough to drink (without having to hide it) but not yet old enough to think (well).

Do you have any evidence to back that claim up?

There are a number of features in Chrome that optionally talk to Google. But you can change them all if you prefer. Do you have any proof that it "phones home" in any hidden way? It should be quite easy to prove; Wireshark is all you need.

FWIW, I know some of the guys who started the Chrome project. Actually, they didn't start Chrome, they started V8. The point was to prove that Javascript engines could be orders of magnitude faster than they were, and to push the rest of the industry to get better, so Google's apps would be able to do more, faster. The rest of Chrome was just to show off V8. Then it became successful, both at pushing Javascript engines to get better, and as a popular browser, and Google started to use it as a test bed for other ideas about how to make the web "platform" better. Security improvements like certificate pinning. Performance (and security) improvements like SPDY and QUIC. UI simplifications like the omnibox (which geeks like to hate, but non-geeks love). Better development tools (though Firebug was and is quite good). And so on.

I don't think "better tracking of users" has ever been a goal, stated or unstated, of the Chrome project. And, seriously, why would it? It's not like the normal web standards don't offer everything that's required for whatever tracking anyone would like to do.

Worth adding is that the answers to someone's "security" questions often are easily obtained with just a small bit of social engineering.

Yep. Even easier if the information ("correct" answers) are available via Google.

But also, since you're already using unique passwords ... and the crackers managed to get your password ... how did they do that and would that have also yielded your "security" answers.

Their thinking seems to be:

1. So, one username / password isn't enough.

2. A second password should be enough, but it will use the same username as in #1.

3. And that second password should be SUGGESTED to be based upon something that can be researched / socially engineered / tricked out of the person.

4. And entered using the same channel as #1.

Okay, if you cannot get two factor authentication then at least use a different email address for each bank AND ONLY FOR THAT BANK. Email addresses are free. And always use completely unique passwords. Not bankname1 and bankname2.

The same for the "security" questions. Always completely unique.

If you have to write them down, do so. Just keep the paper in a secure location. It's far less likely that someone will break into your house to look for passwords than it is that someone will crack your computer.

Robin Miller: One thing that I think my wife and I are doing right: we don't have a bank anymore, we have a credit union, a local credit union and they do use secondary authorization on everything, you have to not just know the account number and the password, but you also need to know the answers to fairly obscure questions about our past, what year teacher was your favorite in what grade, things like that. Does that help?

NO!!! It does NOT!!!

1. It does not because that information can be collected at other sites controlled by crackers. So unless you enter incorrect information (which is, in effect just another password) then it is useless.

2. It is still on your computer. So if your computer is cracked then the crackers get your username / password / favourite-dog-food / whatever.

3. Find a bank / credit union that uses real two factor authentication.

Read carefully and you'll notice the government said he'd even have to accept the consequences of speaking out and engaging in constructive protest: they decree you can dissent against their rule, and that's well and good, as long as they can punish you for your dissent--which is precisely the situation in North Korea, where you may speak out against Kim Jong-Un, and, importantly, accept the consequences of speaking out against him.

Exactly.

If the end result of civil disobedience is the exact same in the USofA as in North Korea ... then what is the difference?

The politicians demanding martyrdom would be just as comfortable working for North Korea's government as they are working for the USofA's government.

And THAT is a very big problem.

Gamergate was ignored because gamergate is not news.

My problem with it is that even if the initial event happened EXACTLY AS CLAIMED then it is still nothing.

The "story" became the reactions to that nothing event.

And then the reactions to those reactions to that nothing event.

And now we have a post mod'ed +5 Insightful for claiming that Gamergate wasn't covered.

They mention plans to sell Slashdot Media and SourceForge... Then the rest of the financial report only talks about Slashdot Media and nothing about SF.

Perhaps they realized they utterly destroyed SF to the point where it's an unrecoverable lost cause.