That's the point. You either know your Blender or you don't. There is nothing in between.

You must be joking. The old interface had no future. There's only so many buttons you can stuff into a fixed size panel. In 2.49 buttons were being added not where they were logically supposed to be but where there was space. There's no way you could backport the new ui to that because it just plain wouldn't fit. My only gripe with 2.5 is that they STILL haven't ported the bevel tool. They're waiting for bmesh (a new polygon-based modelling system), but that seems to have stalled.

Actually, I have over a hundred games on Steam and I'm reasonably happy with it. It's just that you said the problem is minor, but it has affected me at least a couple of times now. And I don't believe it's at all unreasonable to ask that my backups work without an internet connection. Steam could encrypt the backup with a key tied to my account upon creation and, yes, if it later decrypts, just believe it's mine and let me run it. Such backups would be useless to anybody else, and the verification you speak of would still take place - just not on first run, but on installation of the Steam client.

What if internet is unavailable and you want to reinstall that game you've made a nifty Steam backup of explicitly for this purpose? No gaming for you!

When you're annotating a paper, you don't want a keyboard. You want to scribble, cross out, underline, circle, and write IMPORTANT in huge red capitals all over the page. You want to draw charts and add formulae. The virtual keyboards on smartphones and tablets are good enough for typing a short url or a quick email, but not much more. Despite the immense technological progress of the last half century, the only difference between how I work and how my grandfather used to is that my pencil is mechanical. I'm eagerly awaiting a B5 paper-sized tablet with a stylus (the revolving-screen-laptop style is just too heavy and the battery far too short lived). You'd think Google or Microsoft would have the clout to address the iPad's biggest failing.

There are very few things we actually need. Air. Water. Food. Clothing. Shelter. Medicine. Transport. Security. Communications. There was never a real need for portable music players, or television sets for that matter, and yet most everybody in developed countries has one or more unless they choose not to. If making a good tablet isn't enough to sell a good tablet it just means there is no demand for good tablets; there's a demand for iPads.

Actually, considering that there's too many of us on our little ball of sand and iron already, the Greater Good &trade might be better served if we keep driving like we're used to. Reconcile that with "Do no evil", Google!

I can't imagine how they managed to squeeze (and lose) a season's worth of data into 300GB. Sintel, which is just 15 minutes long, has 650GB of raw frames, excluding any work files.

Perhaps they have specialized printers for handling things like ID cards, where falsifiability is an issue. Perhaps he meant retina scanners. Who knows! A "scanner" and a "printer" can mean a lot of different things.

Oh I believe he cares about the freedom part a great deal. Freedom from the CIA's backdoors that is. If you remove that non-monetary cost, Windows essentially costs pennies for an entity such as the Russian Federation.

Actually, if you had bothered to properly migrate your data as you stepped away from media formats throughout the years, all of those would still be perfectly readable. In fact, keeping a closet with old media is a ridiculous waste of space considering all of the data inside would probably fit nicely on a small home NAS. Leaving media formats behind is like moving to a new home. If you don't take your stuff with you, don't expect it to magically show up when you want it. I've already archived all of the data I ever originally had on CDs. Have you?

Yeah, most don't. But if Uematsu wanted to, I bet he could make FF4 into a pretty nice one!

While that is true, the data transmitted over HDMI is indeed not compressed. You'd need a drive solution that could store data at almost 5 Gbit/s for 1080p, including sound.

Supposed to? Says who? Linguistics is not a prescriptive science. I've been using the term to describe all kinds of small, specialized utilities since something like 1993.

I used to regularly buy stuff from PSN. Then they removed linux. I thought I wouldn't miss it much, so I updated anyway. But I do. So now that there's a hack and a hope for getting linux back, I'm not updating. Sadly, that means I can no longer buy anything from PSN. Too bad. I was hoping to get the new Lara Croft and the guardian of light game and maybe the deathspank expansion. Hey Sony! I have money right here! You can have it if you let me back into your store and/or put linux back in!