Slashdot posters used to be technically savvy people.

Seriously, I've never had a problem with a fake torrent (find an uploader you like, and follow the RSS of their uploads) or a file not being in a playable format (everything today is H.264 in an MKV container, and there are dozens of players that support that format). And, if the only hardware media player you own is a DVD player, then you likely have a really hard time playing back movies from Amazon Prime on your TV, too. Pretty much any other hardware player can stay hooked up to your TV and play either network streams or read your local file shares where you stored whatever you downloaded.

You don't get to "keep" downloads from Amazon. You can keep the file around, but you still need a player that supports their DRM and can authorize you to play the content. This is not an issue with torrents, nor is it an issue with a purchased plastic disc, as you do get to keep the disc forever, and the DRM is easily defeated if you care about that (although it's not necessary, as every Blu-Ray player can play it back without having to phone home to authorize the playback).

All that said, I pay for what I want to own, and only use torrents to download TV shows that I could record anyway (the convenience of having somebody else remove the commercials is worth it...I used to do it myself) and movies that aren't available for purchase or that I already own but don't feel like ripping myself.

I'd love to be able to download movies instead of getting the plastic disc, but there are two big things stopping me:

DRM: any download will only be playable on whatever the studio deems to be "acceptable" hardware and software.

Quality: no download comes close to the quality of audio and video on a Blu-Ray, and downloads almost never have extras like commentary tracks.

For other people, another reason not to download is that Blu-Ray generally has all the subtitles they need to enjoy the movie, but most downloads are very limited in that respect.

By "bank card", do you mean "debit card"? If so, wouldn't it be easier just to get the kid his own bank account with a debit card?

It depends on the transaction. ISTR that PayPal had some concept of "personal" transactions that had either very small or no fees. The idea was to allow people to move money to their friends and relatives without taking a big hit. There are also places like GOG that have a lot of sub-$10 transactions who likely have a special "volume" agreement with PayPal.

For regular one-off transactions, though, there is per-transaction fee that would kill you if you are moving just $5.

I suspect that "any major insurer" would consider the act of flying the drone "negligent".

MS is generally OK in the "programs run" bit, but they really need to force hardware manufacturers to keep supporting the older OS with drivers. When Windows 7 came out, a lot of smaller companies stopped providing XP drivers for their hardware.

If the clone isn't on the same VLAN, accessing the same data-gathering hardware, there is no way the infrastructure can have a test match production. The data-gathering hardware I'm talking about costs $20-70K in supplies to complete a run, and the hardware itself is in the $250K range, so there is no way to duplicate it.

I'm not saying that we don't try (use data from an old run, etc.), but there is no way to truly duplicate everything, and sometimes you just have to live with that.

No approach is terrible compared to the consequences of leaking the types of data mentioned in TFA.

Because they are generally flying over property that they don't own.

I'm willing to bet that an insurance company would laugh at me when I ask for insurance to protect my own home against what might happen if I crash a model airplane into it.

You're missing that point that anybody can make both USB sockets and USB leads with a very minimal royalty payment.

What if only one company made USB sockets (Microsoft) and they charged $100 for it (Windows). Then, once you did pay and had your USB device working, they stopped supporting the current USB standard, which encouraged your device manufacturer to stop supporting it. Then, all new USB devices would only work on the new USB sockets, so if you buy a new camera/scanner/mouse/keyboard/whatever, you can't plug it in to your current USB socket, and need to pay another $100 to get the new socket. If Microsoft didn't see Windows as a profit center, but instead used it as a platform to get you to pay for everything else they do, 90% of the complaints about them would stop.

I didn't mind paying for the first versions of Windows, because they gave me something I didn't have: a windowed UI. Then, Windows NT gave us real multi-tasking and 32-bit code. Windows 2000 and XP were just more polished versions, although XP gave us 64-bit that wasn't supported much. Windows 7 finally gave us 64-bit with real support. Windows 8 is just a different UI. So, the reality is that over that span of nearly 20 years, I feel like I should have paid "full price" for about 3 versions (truly major upgrades), and some token amount (about 20% of the full version price seems right) for the "maintenance" releases.

Instead, if you wanted to play the latest games, you had to upgrade to XP (2000 was just fine for running productivity apps) and 7, and even before the end of support of XP, you had to upgrade to 7 if you didn't use an alternate browser (unless you like getting burned by the most common security exploits). Then, add in that the more recent OS often don't have drivers for older hardware and have a lot more system requirements, and you end up with Linux getting traction because of this endless cycle.

Although Linux is really hurting the inroads that MS made into the server market, it will never touch the desktop until it's just as easy to use. It will never be just as easy to use as long as there are 14 different Linux distributions with 43 different GUI implementations (numbers pulled out of my ass, but you get the picture). Until there is one GUI, no large percentage of companies will heavily invest in converting to a Linux desktop because they won't want to train every new hire in how the system works. And yes, I know that the vast majority of people don't do anything complicated, but things like connecting to a network share, changing the screen resolution, changing the GUI colors, playing a video, scheduling a meeting with co-workers, etc., are all things that real people do and which have to be easy and consistent. In addition, until all the standard software is available (no, Linux doesn't have to have Microsoft Office, but it has to have a package that does everything that Office does, and Open/Libre Office ain't it), there won't be a large shift, either.

I maintain Linux servers for a living, but I still use a Windows desktop (even though my employer does support Windows, Linux, and OSX for personal desktops) because it still is easier to get everything done using that. I have lots of options to get to a Linux system and run programs (both text and GUI), and not everyone in my office uses the same toolset as I do. But, the other direction is painful. Without Windows, you can't easily find out when everybody is available for a meeting, and can't stay logged in to your e-mail (OWA times out, while Outlook does not). I can connect to a Windows share from a Linux system, but I can't adjust the ACLs. With a Windows desktop, I can connect to both Windows and NFS shares and adjust the ACLs.

You're saying this mostly because of Portal. Without that game, you'd be left with the taste of Half-Life 2, which showed they were losing their touch because they had to have enemy spawn points that never run out of bad guys.

It also was a very linear game, where even the more open sections were just an A->B->C->D path for the player...there was no side exploring of any consequence. In particular, you very rarely left a building by the same way you entered. You would often see areas where you would soon be or used to be through windows/fences/etc., with the path between the two a very long maze.

I never played the game until I picked it up from GOG last year. I didn't find the first section very hard at all until the giant dragon. Even that was easy after I realized there's no shame in hiding and sniping. I even killed the sentry guns by destroying them instead of destroying their power link until I got to the door that could only be opened by destroying the power link, at which point I felt like an idiot.

The first weapon you get has essentially unlimited ammo (carry 100 shots with 50-shot packs sitting around every corner) and does a respectable amount of damage per shot. It can also fire around corners via bouncing off walls.

The only real problem I have with the game is that although there is a story, there isn't any game-play info in the story, so I wasn't sure if the cowering technicians were OK to kill or not (being used to games like Deus Ex where you don't kill something unless it's trying to kill you). I haven't finished the game yet (only gotten to the point where I have both sidekicks with me), as I had to rebuild my gaming machine and don't have a lot of time for games in general, so it could get a lot more sucky.

I don't think that the "2am" listed in TFS is "getting up early". Instead, it's more like "staying up late".

For me, it's not really a problem, but I have had to do that kind of maintenance as a team, and some people are just useless if they stay up that long, or even got a short nap. My current job gives us all day one Saturday a month for maintenance, so you can sleep like normal and get up when appropriate (one hour worth of work, start at 2 in the afternoon if you want...7 hours of work, better start before noon). A lot fewer mistakes seem to be made with this sort of schedule.

How, exactly, do you snapshot and test the production VM before the maintenance window and guarantee you won't affect (and by "affect", I mean anything that changes behavior in any way that is not expected by the users) any services running on that VM?

If you meant "clone" instead of "snapshot", that doesn't help either, as the clone will have to have a different IP address, can't connect to the production database, etc.

We've had VMs that have become corrupt in very strange ways so that they would not reboot. The corruption didn't affect any running services, but existed for at least six weeks (we had to go back that far to get a backup that didn't have the issue). Testing a kernel patch that requires a reboot wouldn't have revealed this corruption, as the dev and staging servers didn't have the problem. Testing it on the production server would have revealed it, but we would have to do that during scheduled maintenance anyway....

Writing zeros to every byte of a 32GB flash drive takes less than an hour, even with very slow flash (10 MB/sec write speed).