I shouldn't have to.

Wow, did they really need to have an auto-playing video ad with obnoxious music at the bottom of the page? I'm pissed that I gave them even that one pageview. I won't be reading the article.

You still pay for some (or sometimes, all) of the class, of course.

Not always the case. I went to Purdue for Aviation Management (to become an air traffic controller) and for some odd reason they let students take computer classes in place of some of the other Gen-Ed stuff. I was able to test out of several classes, without having to pay a dime. It depends on the school.

FTFS:

"The technology is apparently mature enough to be deployed as part of ships' short-range missile defenses"

Thanks for clearing that up. Sounds like a speedbump, not an actual blockade.

"But any studio execs who thought 3D video would somehow end piracy would have to be complete idiots."

Who says they aren't complete idiots?

"What exactly is there to "figure out" about copying a 3D blu-ray over a normal blu-ray?"

I don't know. I'm not an expert in the field. That's why I made no assumptions about it being as easy as ripping a Blu-Ray movie.

"When I was a student I downloaded a few movies, now I just buy everything."

Same here, but I still like to buy my movies, and then rip them to a digital format for use with XBMC and the Boxee Box when it finally hits the shelves. I guess one of my big worries about the 3D BS is that movies, that would otherwise be quite good, could be poorly done just for the sake of a good 3D experience.

I think at the very least part of it has to do with piracy. I remember years ago when hddvd and bluray were first hitting the shelves they were heralded as the end of piracy. The logic was no one would be able to pirate a movie that clocks in at 40-50 gigs. Of course, thanks to h.264 and other codecs, downloading 1080p copies of movies is pretty trivial.

I suspect that studio execs are sitting around assuming no one will be able to figure out how to pirate 3-d movies. Of course, there are probably people much much smarter than they are trying to figure out how.

This just in, rain still likely to be wet.

You're right, but it still struck me as odd that people would just say "Hey stranger, take my card for the next 8 hours." It was pretty rare that I would still be there in the morning when they checked out, so that means I'd have to pass their card off to another low-wage employee to trust it with.

It was kind of crazy how often my GM would have to fight these dispute charges. People would get enraged that their breakfast wasn't gluten free or that the tv in the room wasn't big enough and then have their CC companies claim they never stayed at our hotel. 99% of the cases were decided in our favor, but it was still a massive hassle from people deciding to throw a fit.

Seems to me that people who submit false claims for disputing charges should be held liable for fraud themselves.

I used to be one of these night shift people. I was definitely underpaid, but I used my spare time on the job with a laptop and a book learning to program.

Here's the scary thing, plenty of people made it extra, extra easy for an employee to steal. We had this ridiculous backup process that had to be run nightly which would make our computers inoperable for about 90 minutes. If someone with a reservation came to check in I could do so, but any walk-ins would have to wait. Around 2-3 times a month people would come in so exhausted from driving all day that they'd just hand me their credit card and say "I'll pick it up in the morning, just give me a room key". I think that since it was an upscale Marriott people just assumed everything was safe.

That was probably intentional, to make it seem like it was really written on a PDA with a crappy keyboard.

The only thing worse was the actual Doom 3 gameplay

I actually really enjoyed the gameplay. The moment I discovered the idiotic system of codes for the weapons lockers, I went online and printed out a list so I could ignore the various PDAs and audio messages.

The biggest disappointment of all? I got my hands on that leaked E3 Alpha, which was about 10x more interesting and scary than the actual retail game.

The worst offender of all time was a game I had very high hopes for. Constantly jotting down locker codes was bad enough, but having to leave the game to grab a code from that Martian Buddy nonsense website made me stop playing.

I suspect people who actually think like this are the reason GA gets a bad reputation.

Isn't this sort of mitigated when people put Google Analytics at the bottom of the page? I've never noticed any slowdowns waiting on GA on any of my sites, and I have GA scripts at the bottom of every page. The absolute bottom.