And this is different from a cop pulling the same person over how? Oh, right, the speed camera actually leaves a record of the person violating the law in the first place, whereas the cop just makes it disappear by not recording it. Not sure how race plays into this, unless all rich, powerful politicians and cops in your country are strictly made up of a single racial group.

Why would they? The UK still operates at a deficit, so there's nothing to compensate. They're just less negative for fining those who endanger others on the road.

Most Linux users that you know have little in common with their computing habits than most Windows and Mac users that I know, I'd wager.

So your argument is that Flash would still be preferable to developers so they would keep developing with it, and Flash would work well enough to users that they would still be good with using it, but it needs to be forced out because it is older than HTML5 which contains the potential to replicate most of the functionality of Flash eventually. Gotcha.

Simple, just disable HT... ohhhh.

Unfortunately the browser makers are now finding ways to kill common APIs through legislating access to their customers instead of via technical means. Fortunately it is just Apple that is controlling what their customers can choose for now, but they are a significant enough market segment for many content providers to suck it up and accept the additional development overhead of developing for multiple environments. Pretty much the same thing that the console manufacturers do to the gaming industry.

Excellent point, and a similar reason as to why I got one as well. Unfortunately, I also have to agree with the assessment of getting Guitar Hero (or in my case, Rock Band) on other platforms instead, as everything software related in the Wii is absolute garbage, leading to playing these games on a Wii to be a far inferior experience even for those of us who don't give two shits about analyzing graphics. The online service sucks, the lack of patch support suck, the lack of external storage support sucks, and having to go through their ponderously slow to load interface just to start a game sucks.

That's why I have no interest whatsoever in a Wii sequel. They can't even fix all of the fuckups that can be easily remedied in software in the current version, so why in the hell would I expect newer hardware to be any better?

Regarding polish, mirror-polished crap has a far better chance to sell like hotcakes than a clever idea that is kludgy. Perhaps you're just a superior gamer to the millions who derive enjoyment from a well-polished game, but that doesn't mean much to the developers who have to spend ungodly amounts of money making a game unless you're planning on paying $1 million+ per copy to make up the difference. People can argue about difficulty, story, music, plot, characters, graphics, or any other factor in a game all day long, but polish in game development is just like salt in cooking; it may not make the dish, but if you fuck it up, your dish is going to be regarded as crap to most people.

Google Voice speech-to-text is fucking awful, which I'm guessing is due to recognition of speech rendered though a phone. Using the voice functionality on the handset, such as for searching for filling in text fields, on the other hand, is absolutely fantastic. I nearly always get 100% recognition when I speak clearly, even with words that I would never expect it to recognize. It doesn't provide any punctuation or capitalization, but otherwise is ridiculously good, like good enough to make me wonder why in the hell Dragon Dictate can't do nearly as well on my far more powerful computer with a much better microphone.

I just wish that I could find a desktop version of the Android speech-to-text engine so that I can set one of my keyboard's macro keys to work the same way as holding down the search button on my Droid.

Not if you want it buttered just right. You can't just melt butter and throw it on after the popcorn is done, because that will just give you several soggy kernels and a whole lot of plain kernels. Your best bet is to add the butter just prior to the kernels popping, but it either has to be done at the right moment as a bunch of small bits of butter or as hot previously melted butter or else you'll cool the oil and cause the kernels to be afloat in a sea of butter and oil, refusing to pop. Then you have to heat the hell out of the mix while shaking the pan like a lunatic just to get the kernels popping, at which point the butter might get cooked brown and cause all of the popcorn to taste slightly burnt. Sure, you can avoid all of that by getting butter-flavored microwave popcorn, but you could get the same effect while saving quite a few calories just by licking the bottom of your shoe.

So that's patents for you.

And yet you read Slashdot, which simply aggregates news from other sites and allows people to converse about them. Sites like Facebook serve the exact same purpose, except for interpersonal affairs. You apparently want to present the same information, but you want everyone to be focusing exclusively on you while they consume it. Sounds more like an issue with ego than with format.

You can try to do what I did and keep pushing forward past support and into engineering. Now I get to do all of that fun, experimental shit that I used to do on my own time at work, and with a lot more toys at my disposal than I ever had at home. Not easy, considering that at my company there are less than ten of us and over 150 support people, but possible.

Of course, there's always management. ;)

Why are you letting the terrorists into your computer?!? FOR THE CHILDREN!!!

Precisely. Google just keeps providing better alternatives to existing products. Products that still exist just fine. Hell, I've got accounts with a few free email providers but I use Gmail for the majority of my day-to-day email because it is just better. There's nothing preventing Yahoo or any of the other webmail providers from stepping up and outdoing Google except for their continued failure to stop sucking.

Yeah, I like ARM precisely because they focus on providing new tech to anyone who wants to use it. I hate the thought of them being controlled by any company with a vested interest in specific products, particularly a company that so proudly declares how much it wants to limit the end-user experience.