As An Owner Of A Sony Google TV it worked out surprisingly well. Especially after the last major update which added the interface to Android Marketplace.

I had initially got the thing because I needed a "medium" sized HDTV and the current specials made it a reasonable buy. I've seen "Internet on TV" so my expectations where really low. I have several things that play Netflix. I have several things that do DLNA. I have plenty of devices that have web browsers in them (although very few entertainment/living room devices do that). This TV has all of them it. What ended up happening is that it combined some of the disaparate components into the TV itself. Its about as close to a HTPC as anything consumer electronic thing I have without actually being a HTPC. But it still has gaps. I would claim that my Sony Google TV would be a little weird as a family room HDTV but its a great bedroom or office TV mostly because you don't need a bunch of little boxes to go with it.

After being happy with my Google TV, I see the next step as a full blown "Smart TV" like "Smart Phones" that revolutionized cell phones. The software components are all there but it needs better and tighter integration. Especially with a home internet connection, your TV should be leveraging the search and information it has to some intelegent things out of the box.

Things to improve with Google TV:
- Boxee style "Show Me Later". There is a way with Boxee to put a link on your browser to "tag" things you find on the Internet to watch on your box later. What I do with Google TV is remember where it is and browse to it.
- Subtitle support. If a video stream has subtitle text encoded it should display it. Mutliple devices do it multiple ways where this seems to be something that could be better supported in the display instead of the player.
- Agressively scrape information but depricate non-display friendly information. I don't think reading email on TV is a good idea but a Smart TV should recognize emails from your mother and father from their European vacation with pictures and a Youtube video where those videos and pictures are great to view on a TV.
- Google has a nice calendar feature, lets start using it. I'm not suggesting that one should be mixing their professional meetings and appointment data with when "Survivor" is on but a Smart TV should to track both events. The goal here is to get the TV and PVR and other devices to recognize the same calendar and do some smart things with the information. Recognizing you have favorite programs or a video streams but have a conflicting appointment should make the devices save or promote features.

Sounds pretty much what is in "WoW" 4.x or Cataclysm. This is why I keep scratching my head when people say "TOR is completely different than WoW". Finding out who blew up the horde ship in "WoW" really doesn't appear to have big or critical impact than finding out who stole the ship in "TOR". Its great lore but actually clumsy play mechanics limited in a MMO engine.

The thing I think "TOR" gets wrong and "WoW" gets right about quests is that although you can refine the presentation its still a quest limited in the MMO structure. Lore is important but doing voice over to a "FedEx" quest (NPC wants you deliver X to NpcA) is nice but it turns out that beyond the first play through, many really don't care. So many players over value lore in quests when they instead want to play through the quest as fast as possible. No matter how many choices or cinematics or voice overs inserted, its still a "FedEx" quest. "WoW" goes to great lengths to make quest objectives clear and easy for anyone to understand independent of context (new player first character, old player 10th character) instead of trying to dress it up. Is that what "TOR" does instead? I am not sure that is entirely re-playable though when you are forced to watch the same scene unfold for the nth time because everyone voted for the popular option.

It doesn't matter if the software or code was written by a team across the world or across the street but if your team is given the edict "Use this software because it is too expensive to use something else" then that puts your team in a bind when flaws and bugs pop up. But this is not different than other project lead decisions made at other times about which software to use or support. The trap I think many fall into is that because they treat the other team as "trusted partner" that means they are automatically more responsive or higher quality or even care about your complaints/feedback than strictly separated third party which I haven't found much evidence to support.

A problem is that Firefox is adopting a lot of what Chrome is doing including look and feel and release schedule. It would seem to me the more Chrome gains the more the Firefox team wants to make it behave like Chrome but you are fundamentally correct that doing this isn't listening to users.

Why is the government in the student loan business? **Because it turns out having a general population that does more school and studying tends to pay better taxes than a lesser one.** There are stats out there that just going by the raw numbers if an undergrad makes it out of college and secures steady employment for 30 years they will end up paying in taxes 10 times the amount they put the government "at risk" with their initial loans. The weakness, if not problem, with the scheme is that it maybe hard and getting harder to sustain 30 years of employment.

Is the problem that student loans are too freely available (supply)? Or is the problem the "labor market" has pushed to require higher level super expensive degrees for even simplistic jobs (demand)? Seems like it is a dual sided issue where both the supply and demand are driving up cost. And it is my experience that when Ron Paul talks like this it is because he is correct about some aspect, specifically that cutting student loans will force reduce colleges to reduce their fees and drive up salary and wages in the general labor market, but he also fails to realize or ignores that there are some serious and undesirable consequences. Paul likes to just hand wave away which I find wholly unsatisfying and makes it hard for me to take him seriously.

A lot of the world must bore you since "Diablo 3" is going to have grinding. "Dark Souls" has grinding. "Battlefield 3" and "Modern Warfare 3" are going to have grinding. So on and so on.

I am not defending "grinding" where I do find it an undesirable side effect of multiple game systems but I suspect "grinding" isn't the real reason The Parent Post don't like "World of Warcraft" any more. "WoW" has the most streamlined leveling system of any modern MMO and has the most dynamic raid content where no two fights are the same and they keep introducing new setups. If there is a game that has done a lot to mitigate "grinding" it has been this one so it makes me scratch my head when The Parent Post goes "Still a grind..."

I believe Ron Paul is earnest and really believes what he espouses really will work but that doesn't mean anyone should believe it is practical let alone try to implement what he suggests. Just listening to his talks about how he thinks money works should give you enough indication of the impossibility of what he talks about.

People keep mistaking "passion" and "determination" for "throughly thought out planning" which as many even in this have pointed out is completely bonkers. Ron Paul is passionate but often what he says has not been thought out. For instance the side effects of dismantling the Department of Energy has far reaching effects where Paul just hand waves and says "Look at the savings" which doesn't answer "Who is going to be responsible to handling/licensing/processing X?"

What these guys are touting is IE9's "SmartScreen" protection which claims to "block 99% of phishing" so I am pondering what that even means. I wonder how many of those "phishing" exploits actually work if a user activates them on Firefox, Chrome, etc. It also doesn't appear to take into account platforms where activating the page on something like a non-Windows platform Android device with Chrome breaks because it can't handle or support what the attack wants.

I am for a more intelligent IE9 so I'm happy for SmartScreen but I also wouldn't oversell it. There is value in blocking a questionable web page. There is value in simply not allowing what the questionable web page wants to activate as well.

Releasing a 64-bit install is about compatibility in the environment. But an implication by the parent is that Mozilla can't work on increasing compatibility and fix bugs at the same time. These two things aren't related at all where we should welcome things like this.

Or another way to think about it: We should applaud Mozilla for releasing the 64-bit installer and continue to complain about the bugs.

A common metaphor for Cloud resources is treating them like a public utility. Its there and there when you need it. But in reality there isn't an infinite amount of power, water, or cloud resources either. Caps exist in these as either regulatory or systemic controls where one can never demand any amount they desire and certainly not "for free" either.

Will caps kill cloud computing? No more than power and water restrictions "kill" projects in the real world. People live and work with caps all the time often without realizing it.

Even then that isn't the whole story.

To win Seven Year War (aka French-Indian War), the British Government had to drop a lot of cash on a huge war machine to win. So the British Parliament did the sensible thing: Ask the Americans which where ostensibly benefiting from this to help pay for it. The break down happened when the nature of the tax and what to do with the funds where in sharp divided between the American Colonies and the British Parliament.

So yes, it was lack of representation that was the problem instead of a tax collected at all which is sort of ironic since the British themselves have wrestled with this very thing in their very past. When the monarch went wild forcing taxes, Parliament pushed back changing the fortunes of both. The same thing happened here with Parliament getting push back from the colonies again with history altering effects.

As a side note, taxation ended British "rule" in this part of the US but taxation setup British "empire" in India. America and India turned out they way they did kind of pivoted on taxation and how it was handled.

This seems to be more evidence that water exists all over this part of the Solar System instead of Moon and Earth formed differently. In fact it would be kind of weird and probably be more supported of "separate formation" if we couldn't find water on the Moon.

I first started using Linux in 1994 in college. Like most college students with a ComSci class that involves coding homework, you are nominally provided university resources to create and compile code but like so many universities, those resources were very overloaded especially during peak and crunch times. I had a 368 which I used for playing games and writing papers but someone mentioned that they knew this thing called Linux that behaved a lot like the system we used except it wasn't so slow.

So thanks to those authors and contributors back then for making my homework go smoother and who knows how Linux will help years and decades into the future.

Some pieces of software should cost $0.99 and some should cost $59.99. Suggesting either is killing gaming is silly. If anything price structures on many platforms are too rigid where the platform vendors can't handle a game because its the best price is neither $0.99 or $59.99.

Instead of blaming Steam, a more likely explanation on why the next set of games is taking longer is that Valve is embracing cross platform development including the trickier console platforms. I am not suggesting "Consoles are bad!" but that cross platform systems are inherently more complex and take more time and money to do.