Apple has crapped on their TV-connected product line, though, by cheaping it out so hard that it's now pathetic.

I would have hoped that they would have LCD-aware scalers on these chips by now, but I'm not a registered developer so I can't download docs to find out.

I'm not suggesting that you can live high on the hog. Although what I would suggest is not having three kids if you don't have some kind of financial security lined up. After just one unplanned child I'd be off to the snip snip.

Because you haven't downloaded the 'Samba Filesharing for Android' app yet. Did you even look?

Privacy is a valid concern. However...

I've had HDDs give me warning, and I've had HDDs fail without any warning. People have gone to their backups and found them unreadable. People have lost their tape drives, bought another one, and found out that their old tape drive was fracked and creating tapes that no other drive could read. It takes a tiered backup solution to be more reliable than Google, who will almost certainly give you months of notice before they take down a service.

I agree with calm down, but I also agree that it's stupid. When you put your text in monospace, what you are saying is "I am a special snowflake, so you should read this text even though it is more difficult than if I didn't set a special style that I only use because I am a hipster." So if that's how you want to come across, by all means, keep setting your comments in monospace. If you've set a flag that makes all your comments enter in monospace, then you're an extra-hipster.

When has Google ever dropped one of their services without providing months of notice to the unpaying users first?

You really don't think that's going to be solved by the community?

You mean XBMC can't just slow everything down by a fraction of a percent?

Name one.

I don't buy display devices with networking built into them. That's stupid.

If it's halfway competent and doesn't try to lock you into using their shitty store and launcher, then all it will need is a real recovery to be everything the Ouya wasn't.

I bought Ouya, it was unremitting shit and didn't even work right, so I took it back. I won't preorder Android hardware again (I didn't kickstart, just preordered Ouya from a store, so I could return that POS) but I will give this machine a go if it reviews well.

You should be able to afford to raise a family on half of that, even in the Bay Area... unless you keep buying new cars, bought a house you couldn't afford... and generally just represent the kind of person who the people who grew up in the area you moved into despise.

It also made them a lot more sensitive to the manufacturer, however. Underfunding a project almost certainly led it to being a disaster (the N1 rocket being a classic example). They generally were willing to sacrifice performance for ease of production and quantity - it was very much a widespread phenomenon.

A friend of mine once served as a translator for the military during one of the late mutual nuclear disarmament treaties (don't remember which one). She described them as pretty much a scam, in that both sides wanted to get rid of their old weapons anyway and it gave them an excuse to put funds toward development of new, treaty-compliant weapons. But anyway, they were allowed to inspect any area small enough to contain a "treaty limited item". To figure out whether they could inspect it, the teams were equipped with sophisticated laser measuring devices - if it determined that the space was large enough, they could inspect it. The Russians were really impressed with it. They sent their teams over with... a stick. If the stick fit, they could inspect it. ;)

Another example she mentioned was driving licenses. You know, if you get stopped in the US, they take your license, run your number through their computer, it connects to remote databases, they look up past offenses, they register a new one, etc, and give you your license back. In the USSR it was much simpler: the officer took your license and punched a hole in it. If you had too many holes, they kept it. ;)

I know it's such a stereotype that the Russians preferred low tech solutions vs. the US, but she said that the stereotype was totally well deserved. ;) She also found that they weren't as inclined to get a joke. She and some the guys on her team found it rather sad that these incredible weapons delivery systems were just being destroyed, literally crushed - devices that could deliver a payload anywhere on Earth with precision. So for fun they did some calculations for what they would have to do to reengineer one such that you could load up frozen pizzas onto racks and have them cook on reentry then parachute to the surface - they figured that given the reengineering and operations costs, a person ordering a very large order of pizza could get them for about $20 per pizza, delivered by decommissioned ICBM. They wrote up a formal "proposal" with all the calculations and budgetting and had her talk with what she described as the Soviet equivalent of a colonel about their "Intercontinental Pizza Delivery System". She said he stared at her like she was mad. ;) Totally didn't get the concept that it was a joke and thought that the US team was honestly proposing a private pizza-delivery-by-ICBM venture.

13% of Proton launches (46 of 355) have ended in failure - it's not a very impressive record.

Because if there's one thing Russia is famous for, it's QA ;)

Absolutely true. Soyuz too has had tons of third stage failures. It's something that just keeps biting them.

Considering the joke that the legal system of the US has evolved into, I have a hard time making an informed decision whether this is the right or the wrong thing to do.