Digital Video Express was a DVD-based format that stopped working after a while, unless you paid a fee. It required your DIVX (yeah, they overloaded the namespace of Divx here) player to be connected to a phone line so it could call home and take care of the billing/drm.

Google works in the UK... First link for "Digital Video Express" will explain it quite well.

If he does get arrested for this, he'll probably get his laptop back, because for the thief to make a police report he has to go to a police station with enough information to connect the stolen laptop to this evil guy who's stealing all the thief's privacy. A new lead!

Paintballs are so embarrassing to the poor marked animal, please think of the children who will grow up thinking zebras are black and white and green all over.

You threw the can in the trash. Or you simply daydreamed that you got the soda out of the fridge and drank some of it. Since you didn't completely remember what you had done, it's quite possible you didn't do any of it. No supernatural intervention required.

I'm sorry, but your joke is too subtle to be modded "Funny". Please try again next week!

Advertisers know that some people block cookies, and the obvious way around that is to put tracking info in the image request. So the tracking images also need to be blocked to prevent tracking. Most of these tracking images have random-looking junk in the image link. That junk might, or might not, be some sort of tracking information, but it sure seems suspicious.

Blocking only tracking cookies will not stop tracking.

Best description so far of how I feel about most web ads these days. Too many creative types assume that the website visitors have the same multi-core fast graphics systems, and forget to put a CPU usage limiter on the flash ads. Oh, look cool ad, too bad I can't do anything else now until it stops playing, and sometimes not even then..

Er... ok, I bought an Android phone at Walmart recently. No problem. You're mistaking "mass market" for "monopoly". If you're looking for something that only a few people in an area will want to buy (operating system software they don't have experience with), big box stores are not the place to get them.

There are a few companies that tried pre-loading GNU/linux, but almost nobody bought those. In most cases it was cheaper to buy an MS computer, and then put whatever you wanted on it, than to pay more for a similarly speced linux machine.

By the way, trying to buy a free desktop operating system at a retail software store like Newegg will always be difficult. There's this problem with not making a profit when no money is paid.

If you're painting over "precessing errors" in an X-ray lab, you're doing something wrong. Your analogy is pretty much unrelated to the average xray developer, which runs significantly less than 5000 prints/day.

So, the whole problem with US healthcare is the malpractice insurance cost, but not the fact that bills are often padded with another few 0s if you're uninsured, and then reduced by 80% if you prove that you have no money left to pay for them? The cost of healthcare in this country is pseudo-randomly generated, and requires a pretty large accounting department in each hospital just to keep track of what money they may, or may not, receive in payment for a fairly simple medical procedure.

Malpractice insurance expense is easy to track in comparison to the randomness of medical bill payments.

I've worked on software that processes medicare forms. There's a ton of bureaucratic paperwork involved in even the simplest of procedures for medicare patients. Not sure on this point, but at one time, you had to print out the forms, and couldn't just send them electronically.

A lot of eBooks are based on either "First Edition" or "Advanced Reader Copy" texts, and never updated. I bet many of the DRM creating programs for big publishers require royalty payments every time it's used, so updating the copy to the latest edition costs money.

If you often find yourself in situations requiring you to read data off a HD that has scratched or demagnetized plates, you're doing something wrong.

I don't quite see what you did there.