Ah, but they know why they want their privacy, and are concerned that you might want yours for the same sorts of purposes.

It wasn't enough to wake us up, here in the middle of the San Joaquin Valley (about halfway between Modesto and Fresno on 99, where I am).

I don't think that's what Mashiki meant. 64-bit versions of Windows run 32-bit applications just fine, and the mere virtue of being 64-bit does not require 4GB of RAM or more. It just doesn't make much sense anymore, to continue making a specific version of the OS to support a hardware standard that's been obsolete for a decade, give or take a year.

That's technically true, but cbiltcliffe also makes the point that it's not his responsibility. cbiltcliffe doesn't care about the US postal service's fee. The Canadian postal service has given him a price for delivery of his letter, and he pays said price. His end of the transaction is done, and whatever agreement the Canadian postal service has with the US postal service is, that is the Canadian postal service's problem, not his. Whether or not the Canadian postal service's fee includes the US postal service's fee is not guaranteed, and any additional fee for international shipping may indeed be considerably greater than the US postal service's fee to complete the delivery.

What I came up with was almost identical; the year started and ended with the Winter Solstice, and consists of 13 months of 28 days. Where mine differs, though, is that instead of a "minimonth", I choose to exclude the extra day or two from any week, month or year; a period of time I call "Offset". These days being excluded from a week means that any given day on the calendar will always be the same day of the week from one year to the next. That is to say, under this calendar, if the first day of the first month this year is Monday, then next year and every year, it will or has been Monday (as is the first day of every month, in point of fact). In fact, the 1st, 8th, 15th and 21st would always be Monday, and Friday would always be the 5th, 12th, 19th and 26th.

I've only ever used this system in unpublished works of fiction, though I find it interesting that this same idea has been explored by others.

Seasons and duration of day are logical and meaningful things to base your units of time on. Nuclear decay and EM wavelengths are a rather illogical basis, as these things don't have a practical use or observation in the common life of humans in general. Days and seasons, on the other hand, have an apparent and obvious cycle, which can be observed without need of special equipment. Furthermore, they have an immediate and profound affect on our environment. This is the difference between light and dark, between heat and cold, between growth and recess. These cycles dictate when we can grow food, and how long we have to complete tasks. It therefore makes a great deal of sense that we would want to keep track of these things. The only failing, is that the larger units aren't always comprised of a whole number of the smaller units, as they are based on difference cycles, which are not actually related to eachother.

Now, on the other hand, if we lived on a starship or perhaps a space station unassociated with any particular planet, your timekeeping method could reasonably be arbitrary. You might choose to base it on the crew's mode average circadian rhythm, perhaps. In those circumstances, you would have eliminated the conditions that have inspired our current timekeeping system.

You know, what I find funny about this, is that the only console games I ever see commercials for these days are FPS, with the occasional Third Person affair.

Am I missing something important, or does this idea where you're expected to type the thing you want to do kind of abandon the whole point of using a GUI instead of a command line?

I'm not exactly opposed to having the feature there, but if you automatically have to resort to it, then your GUI needs to be reconsidered.

I dunno, $200k seems about right to me. 30k seems quite a bit low for a police officer, though. The tricky thing about deciding how much a cop's salary should be, is that you've gotta pay him enough to keep him honest. If he's having trouble making the rent each month, then taking a bribe here and there might start to sound pretty good to him.

It's not clear to me that the existence of reincarnation precludes the possibility of the universe existing with simulation-like properties.

That's Larceny, in fact. Though the law generally treats it identically to theft.

If your life and the events thereof had been run through the simulation more than once, without that knowledge being a designed part of the simulation, how would you know? You are, after all, a part of said simulation.

I've given this idea some thought as well, but the conclusion I've come to is that I don't think that we're part of a computer simulation. I do, however, think that whatever it is that makes the universe possible is liable to operate on principles similar to a computer, and may even be somehow artificial.

I can't imagine that a deliberate boycott can be necessary. Game companies have a hard enough time keeping their servers up at launch, for vastly underestimating demand, and that's often for just authentication purposes, alone. The demands this kind of service has on its servers is ludicrous (just how many players can any individual machine in the cloud support, anyway?), let alone the problems that arise when you account for latency. I just don't know how they can reasonably accomplish their goals.

As something of a .NET programmer myself, I can testify to the veracity of this. .NET does a great deal for you, and I really think the handicap has prevented me from learning what's really going on.

Anyone savvy enough to create an artificial Xbox One in software isn't going to be stopped by any DRM measure.