If he had gotten it from Best Buy he'd have basic consumer rights to refund, a working product, etc. enforced by policy and executed by a human (be it a sales associate, manager, whoever).
If he had gotten it from best Buy he would have received actual human interaction when first complaining about it. Best Buy may be a joke and the Geek Squad may be a ripoff, but the mere presence of a human being who has some idea of how to troubleshoot shit, or at least whose job it is to keep customers happy, is about 87 miles ahead of Steam's "support".

Steam support simply doesn't exist unless you threaten to issue a chargeback or sue. No human at Valve even SEES your support ticket until 2 automated "solutions" are generated and spit out - 1 blaming your ISP and 1 telling you to delete clientregistry.blob or reinstall Steam. After that they blame the developer and close your ticket.

No, writing things in Java guarantees your shit will be jacked.

Fuel. You've been bitching about the use of the word "power" when you're the one who's using it wrong. The word you want is fuel.

Thermoelectrics generate power in the presence of heat.
Internal combustion engines deliver power when shit explodes inside them.

Gasoline is a fuel, not a power source.

Yeah, I saw the low UID, which is why I wondered how you could be online and yet so unaware of what so many people were doing on the Web in 2000. Sure, it was mostly dial-up or bad DSL, but it was hardly just "hardcore geeks". They were e-mailing and chatting and looking at (still-image) porn and shopping and selling garbage on eBay, and talking about what a bust Y2K had been. There was that whole "dot-com bubble" that everyone was talking about (but not calling it a "bubble" yet because it was still the latest Big Thing). The following September, I distinctly recall everyone at my office flocking to news web sites trying to learn what was happening in New York on a Tuesday morning. So I have to figure that you were too preoccupied doing stuff with the geekier parts of the internet to notice that yes: the Web was already kind of a a big thing in 2000.

And EPOC worked in devices with great battery life. Mine would go much longer on a set of AAs than I do with my iPhone.

True, by every measure.

Look at rates of life-long diseases - from obesity to asthma to peanut allergies - and general fitness in children . After vaccinations for polio, mmr, etc. we should be raising the most fit generations of kids ever, yet here we are with kids who can't do a single pull up to pass the presidential fitness test because they spent their early childhood eating shit and staying inside.

Look at the rates of kids who have behavioral disorders - autism, add/adhd, anxiety, etc. An ever-increasing number of kids are simply unable to cope with the outside world, or are only able to do so while on mind-numbing drugs (which create all sorts of other problems).

Look at the pathetic math and language test scores and real-world abilities. Look at the pathetic life skills high school and college graduates end up with - the current generation of kids can't change a light bulb let alone a tire, can't manage a budget, can't file their taxes, and have mommy go to their fucking job interviews with them.

Was the web on its own interesting enough in 2000 to make this a killer device?

Yes, it was. Were you still wading on CompuServ and Usenet or something at the time? :)

Also, what OS does it run, can it do anything but surf the web?

EPOC could do lots more than surf the web; it had apps for all the obvious personal-assistant functions (calendar, notes, to-do, contacts) and had a decent ecosystem of third-party apps. It powered the Psion PDAs (clamshells with decent thumb keyboards and stylus input), and was head-and-shoulders bettter than PalmOS or WinCE (its contemporaries) in terms of stability and ability to run on low-power hardware. I nursed one of the later Psions along for years after they were discontinued, until the iPhone came along and there was finally another pocket computer worth switching too. The devices' main weakness (other than nonexistent marketing) was the state of mobile connectivity in their day: slow-n-crappy cellular data, hard-to-find local wireless, and dial-up.

But who's the top and who's the bottom?

Intel Inside
Microsoft.

Oh.

Children today are retarded - physically, mentally, and emotionally, and they come from retarded parents.
The situation is going to get worse, not better, despite how many PSAs or "First Five" programs you trot out.

It takes a village to raise a child, but parents don't trust the village so they try to do it all themselves.
Then they realize it's too much fucking work for 2 people, 2 people who both need to keep their jobs, 1 person (since single parents are more common than not), or 1 person who's working a full-time job (or two). So the kids get plopped in front of the TV, a tablet, etc. and vegetate. Outside is dangerous, so kids don't play, they Google Play and get fat. When they enter school, the state becomes the sitter. Education and social interaction are to be avoided - the goals here are to not get sued and to try and make money off of attendance records and performance on standardized tests.

There are only 3 simple steps to solving this:

1: Stop having kids you when you can't handle kids (financially, mentally, temporally).
2: Stop having kids with people when you aren't both committed.
3: Stop wasting time coddling the broken kids in school - leave them behind in the bad schools and dumb classes and let decent kids get an education based on learning, not on administration.

Of course, none of this will happen because it involves people taking responsibility for themselves and their kids.

Yup. You did. Think for once.

That's still miles better than going after non-criminals in other countries for non-crimes, or just drone striking them.

Dogecoin is best coin.

They're about strategy as much as rock paper scissor is about strategy.
Actually, that's not fair. Rock paper scissors is balanced - SC2 is meta-balanced by blizzard to achieve a desired win ratio.

AKA nerf Terran every patch until no one wants to play them.
It would be like making scissors break rock because more people choose rock.

If they have admin privileges on a box that all your workstations look to and trust for updates and can forge MS's cert, then it is in fact game fucking over regardless of SSL because they don't need to look at the traffic.

If they can MITM your network and inject traffic and can forge MS's cert, then it is in fact game fucking over regardless of SSL because with WSUS SSL only protects the update metadata.

You can scream "defense in depth" all you want, but you're talking about building a moat around your battleship.

They guarantee support for X years for shit when a SP is released.
Since these updates aren't cumulative updates they aren't SPs, despite the significance of the changes they involve.
Since they're not SPs, MS has no obligation to support shit for X years after releasing them.

Windows 9 will be Windows 8.1 Update 2. It will be out next year. The press will love it, and will stroke their own cocks furiously for successfully perpetuating the odd-numbered Windows release pattern.