For once, and one time only, I'm tempted to agree with you.

Well, a tsunami could undo some of this as well...

The snag though is how do they justify these islands as theirs in the first place? If they somehow made an island in the Atlantic would they think it was theirs despite being on the opposite side of the earth? So why do they think these reefs which are so very remote from China is somehow theirs? The 9 dash line of claim is a ridiculous one and any child looking at a map could tell that this ocean is not a part of China. Instead what we have are some puffed up generals drawing a dotted line of a big phallus and saying "ours is this big!"

This is what's absurd. China's claim if you look at the dashed line is obviously exaggerated and that part of the ocean is obviously not Chinese. It's nowhere close to China and the dotted lines are well within the normal territorial waters of other countries. It's like some general took a crayon and with a shaky hand drew it out and said "this remote and distant ocean is now ours". Columbus style in other words.

Next up, they'll claim that Vietnam and the Phillipines are Chinese territories, and have always been Chinese territories.

Their OS is still effectively a monopoly in the desktop market. And on that OS you have to make a positive action in order to use some browser other than Microsoft's preferred choice, and since most people will never bother or even know there's a difference, that leaves their own browser with an unfair market advantage based upon their OS monopoly.

And besides, Microsoft has NEVER cared about user choice. Each Windows release removes more and more options and customization capabilities. Thus complaining about users not having a choice is like tilting at windmills. Microsoft doesn't care what Mozilla thinks, they didn't make an inadvertent mistake here by changing the user's preferences during installation, they did this change on purpose.

But you do pay more when it's a necessity. Which is why there are different categories of ethernet cables. In an environment and usage where Cat 5 cable is good enough, then it's wasted money to use Cat 6. But if you're doing gigabit of 10gigabit traffic, then you don't want Cat 5 or even Cat 5e.. There are other factors too, you may need a cable that doesn't degrade and become brittle because you're in a high temperature environment, you may need waster resistance, you may have fire safety issues, etc. Getting the most expensive cable there may be a good idea, but you're not going to buy those at the local consumer computer store either.

Even if you don't meet spec you will likely never see any problems with the cheap $1 cables unless you're in an extreme environment that's going to exacerbate the errors. The spec is like the "best by" date on food; it doesn't go from fresh and good to putrid poison on the date listed.

Increase the amount of electromagnetic interference and the cheap cable is going to notice it more, then wrap the cable up into a tight coil, stick it in a high temperature attic, save money by getting programmers to crimp on the connectors after 5 minutes of training, and use a hair dryer during operation, then you're going to see a more hostile environment and you may have to resend some packets. But use that cheap-ass cable that's way out of spec between two audio components in a specialized listening room then you're likely to never see a problem. Chances are any problems come from the cheap cable actually breaking rather than dropping enough packets to make a difference.

The argument is about people wanting to spend extra money without feeling bad about doing so.

Ethernet at the MAC layer has digital data but the wires of course are all analog. If it wasn't analog there wouldn't be a bit error rate. The point was that even with a lot of noise the digital signal was still extracted correctly. The noise on the cheap cable was very bad, falling well outside the specs, and yet it still transmitted the data. The "noise" either causes the packet to be dropped or the packet is successful. The specification is about the limit of what is allowable so that it works even in a worst case scenario for what it is designed for, and they weren't doing anything close to having difficult operating environment for ethernet.

Except that in Skyrim there are extremely few mods that would be of that caliber. A few of course, things that are the size of DLC. There are a few mods with new large regions, some are good, some are extremely buggy, none really I would call "great". Even for DLCs I wait until the price drops to $5 anyway. So for one of these large&good mods, the price point would be $1-2. Yet that's what most people were trying to charge for junk and fluff; $0.99 for a retextured sword is stupidly expensive, and yet some people were actually defending this as an appropriate price.

I have 71 mods I've used for Skyrim (none with nudity). Do you really think I should pay $1 or even $0.50 for every single one of them? Added up as a total they do not equal a single game. If they charged, I'd do without the vast majority of them. Ie, windmills have turning blades in a mod, it's nice to have but I'd be stupid to pay for that. Many of them I tried and then after a few minutes uninstalled again as they were nothing like what I expected. Most were the work of big teams of volunteers. Pay for the unofficial patches? Most players would never do that and it would cause the game to get an even worse reputation for buggyness without them. A large chunk of mods were people just trying things out or making something for their own personal use, and just uploading it to Nexus to see if anyone else wanted it. I could do without all of them except the unofficial patches and the SKUI. Charge for mods and the players using mods and the number of mods they try out would shrink by at least a couple orders of magnitude.

What about open source? Should I be paying money for each Linux patch or feature? How would it survive if everyone who wasn't paid took their toys and went home? Even if they charged a small fee the majority of people would never even try it out.

After the paid option went away, some modders said that they could no longer justify the time and expense for modding and were giving up on it. Yet if Valve/Bethesda had never added this option or hinted about it I know that these people would have still been at it, volunteering and doing it for free. That's because they did not do their early modding work with the promise and hope of being paid later; they did it all even though as far as they knew they would never be paid. But have some paid mods for one weekend and take it away, they just packed up and went home like something was stolen from them.

I've paid for Mozilla when that was an option, and people called me stupid at the time for doing it. I've paid for Linux distributions. So my point is not that I want free stuff and want to be a freeloader.

I misread the xbox one price of $530, it seems that's a bundle with kinect and other things. Anyway, console plus mid range PC is at the cost of high end PC. Could be wrong, but I thought many things also required an additional xbox subscription to get updates or do multiplayer.

Well my monitor is smaller than my TV, but it has higher resolution and sits closer to my eyes so that overall it's better. I can read fine text on my monitor much more easily than on the TV (though for console oriented games they try to avoid anything involving complex tasks like reading).

Ah, I don't play games in the living room. I must have a mouse and keyboard for that, console controllers are ergonomic and usability nightmares. Though I can see the lure of lounging on the couch, but then you've got lower resolution TV, even in HD (lower rez than a monitor at least, for those who want the best).

The irony was that people use to complain that getting a gaming computer was too expensive and you had to upgrade it ever few years. This was never really tru, unless you were one of those high end guys with the dual SLI graphics cards using more wattage than your refrigerator. But the consoles today are essentially the same price as a mid-range PC, often require an additional subscription, people still insist you upgrade them every few years, and they're not forwards/backwards compatible. No cost savings at all. Meanwhile I'm going to play Fallout 4 on the same computer that I just played Fallout 1 on, with access to more mods than consoles will have (yes, they announced mods for consoles but they will certainly be limited in availability and capability).

I don't walk away. I need to turn off my power strip, and I can't do that until the PC itself has powered off. So in Windows 8/8.1 there is a very noticeable wait after the monitor has gone black and lost sync until the PC actually finishes hard drive activity and powers itself down.

No, Windows 8 does a partial hibernation. Applications are shut down, then the kernel hibernates. If there was a crash or you manually do a safe boot or cold boot you will notice the full boot up times.