it's 2010 and we have netflix with it's so so instant streaming. along with a few other buy/rent online stores that offer content at decent prices. we even have blu ray's coming out with a digital copy so you can watch it on your phone, ipad, laptop without an optical drive, etc.

How's that work out for when I need my media away from a broadband connection and I'm not buying into Blu-Ray yet (or what am I buying doesn't have the DRM-restricted digital copy)?

This is it. Why promote from within when you can hire someone to be an asshole manager from outside the company?

It uses Keychain on OS X AFAIK, and there's a 1Password plugin for it so you can use that as well.

Maybe you just need to buy better than the $450 laptop at walmart, or a new battery, and the Windows machine will also last a few days in sleep (which it should).

It's a Thinkpad T61 and I haven't trusted it to sleep 16 hours from the time I got it.

Hibernate & sleep are 2 different things.

Hibernate works for me 95% of the time. The 5% of the time it doesn't, it crashes & burns in spectacular fashion.

He may or may not have understood the concept of in-memory caches and unsaved user work, but it didn't much matter to him.

I know it's easy & popular to rag on BillG, but toward the end of his tenure at MS, he did occasionally come out as an advocate for users & pushed for simplicity & fixing broken things in their ecosystem. Take this example from when he attempted to install Windows Movie Maker in January 2003.

But back to the shutdown thing.

As a naive user, why should I have to ask my computer for permission to shut down? When I tell my TV to power off, it just does it. When I turn the ignition in my car off, the whole thing stops. Same with my VCR, my cell phone, you get the idea.

As a non-naive user, why is it that when I tell my XP laptop to Hibernate, 5% of the time it just flips out, every application crashes, and I can't do anything, including just shutting the damn thing down until I've cleared all the "this program has crashed, how would you like to debug?" messages and then wait for the UI to become responsive finally to the point where I can tell it to shut down. And then takes 5+ minutes to actually shut down. When I close the lid on my MacBook, OS X puts it to sleep. When I open the lid, it wakes up. Every time. Why can't Windows do this? I can't just go to Standby because it drains the battery too much, so I have to Hibernate.

If designing a shutdown process is this complicated maybe it does deserve a patent.

This is hardly their worst offense, but how did the Bush Justice Department ever let AMD buy ATI to begin with? Are we really OK when there are only two major manufacturers of processors and graphics hardware?

They were too busy dragging their heels on the Sirius/XM merger at the behest of the NAB to notice.

But the latest "quit smoking" PSAs they're airing in New York are absolutely disgusting. I don't have YouTube available to link to the actual video, but here's the gist of it:

It shows a man lighting a cigarette using the flame from his stove. The picture then cuts to a surgeon, opening up an aorta, and squeezing out fat and plaque that has accumulated inside the vessel. It's the aorta of a 32-year-old smoker.

The description doesn't really capture how vile the video is. It's enough to completely ruin your appetite for a while. This can pop up anytime you're watching TV, but it's most common between 5 & 8 PM.

It's apparently acceptable under the guise of "public health" but I doubt you'd get a pro-breastfeeding commercial approved that actually showed a woman nursing.

Pointing a customer to already existing documentation on how to get their GLX setup properly would cost far more than any revenue you could bring in? You are crazy. I can prove it..

Telling a paying customer "here, go figure it out yourself from these links which we claim no ownership of & can't tell you for certain will work" is shitty customer service.

The RTFM response may work on a "community" forum or a user mailing list, but not when you're calling up to get support for something you've paid for.

Under the GPL at least, you only have to make source available if you distribute the program. If it's exclusively for internal use and never leaves the company, you aren't obligated to release the source.

worse if you're open sourcing it.

You're assuming that the company hasn't agreed to open source the code. Some companies actually do release stuff they've done, or contribute back to OSS projects they use.

While the offender may be responsible for the cost of the device, each county has to set up & pay for the monitoring, including staffing for it. The state mandates it, but is not paying for it.

To address the questions about drinking after you start the car, the system will beep loudly indicating you must blow into it again while you're driving or your vehicle will shut off. This happens once every 20-40 minutes.

This sounds incredibly dangerous, please tell me it's not just an instant cutoff with a timer. Shutting the car off in traffic would be very, very dangerous - does it at least wait till you're at a complete stop?

I know there's a lot of people out there that have been negatively affected by drunk drivers but in most states the punishment really can be life destroying.

So you're saying that endangering unknown numbers of people and potentially destroying their lives is less significant than "destroying" the life of the person who chose to drive drunk?

But your first offense with a DUI ... where do we draw the line?

Ask the families of any of the thousands of people who've been hit & killed by a drunk on their "first offense."

Yer mom?