Not 20, not living in a dorm, and not living in 1995.

Most of my friends have laptops, and amongst the reasons we play older titles is so that they don't need $5,000 Alienware laptops to join. Setup time isn't terrible, especially since "connect to the wifi" is all it really takes (though we do prefer hardwired where practical)...that, and newer games don't work over a LAN anyway.

"Coordinating everyone's free time" is something that literally everyone does when they throw a party...so gaming is a less acceptable activity to do at a social gathering than getting completely drunk, or pretending to like people you're stuck talking to?

There are advantages for a LAN party, too: we don't deal with 14-year-olds calling us fags the whole time. We have zero lag, ever. We have zero need for headsets, and it's a whole lot of fun to rag on the person sitting next to you. When we play in cooperative mode, planning attacks is much easier.

Finally, when the PSN gets DDoS'd, we're still gaming =).

Yes, it will likely happen. However, that is, in my opinion, insufficient disincentive, for the following reasons:

1.) If it "accidentally breaks" 50% of the time, it still means that half the time it's working, which is higher than the 0% we have now.
2.) secondary units could be kept in the glove box; most juries would have a very difficult time believing that both cameras failed, or that a known-dangerous situation wouldn't warrant having both cameras on anyway, or that both police officers involved both had faulty cameras, or if only one went in that he/she was not following protocol....basically, the lack of evidence when there damn well should be would lend more credence to the victim than the police officer, leaving it in the officer's best interest to keep it working (or report it malfunctioning sooner than later).
3.) It would help curb selective enforcement; officers would be more likely to more fully follow protocol.
4.) random footage audits, like random drug tests, would assist in internal investigations; officers whose cameras are 'accidentally broken' during an audit would be much easier to penalize, again, keeping it in the officer's best interest to avoid having a malfunctioning camera.
5.) "I have nothing to hide" is a reason frequently given for giving up one's privacy when prompted to do so. If it's true, then "I have nothing to hide" should most certainly hold accurate for people on the public payroll.
6.) A highly trivial reason, compared to the major ones: checking cameras and footage in and out is a good way to add a few dozen jobs to the local precincts.

It will happen, of course...but if it even partially helps the situation at hand of "he said she said" where either no one trusts the cop (in cases where the officer was either genuinely right or ultimately wrong, but in a split-second decision situation), or victims of police brutality are further victimized by the 'ol boys club', then I'd say it's a hell of a much better use of both my tax dollars and Seagate hard drives than the use of either by the NSA.

The GP's point was that Starcraft is possible to play on a server unlikely to get DDoS'd. When my friends and I play Starcraft, it's over a LAN with no internet access at all. If you wish to DDoS my game server, you'll have to trespass to do it.

Targeting any given company's game servers doesn't affect the titles who don't require that players be online to play them.

That's already been done.

The challenge DropBox faces with a self-hosted iteration of its software is that it stops being 'simple'. Existing Dropbox clients would have to be completely rewritten to go from asking "username and password, please" to "username, password, server address, and port, please". Even if we hand-wave away that problem by assuming that users can either correctly type a server name and port number, or that Dropbox will still have 'accounts' but essentially become a DynDNS clone and simply handle network traversal and matching users to their data repositories, we then have to deal with the Dropbox Server software. There may be a market for Dropbox to sell drives like these, but I don't see Western Digital wanting to partner with Dropbox to provide redundant functionality to their existing apps, and I don't see consumers paying more for a Dropbox branded drive if they're already in the "self-contained NAS" market - a handful might, but now Dropbox, for all intents and purposes, finds itself with all the challenges of being an external hard drive vendor...with the added bonus of directly competing with the vendors from whom they're sourcing their parts.

The obvious alternative to this would be for them to sell their software and let it run on a LAMP/WAMP stack, on whatever hardware is on hand, and market it to the enthusiast/enterprise market, like UnRAID or Nexenta. That might be a short term win, especially if they do some fancy stuff with LDAP/Active Directory integration. Conversely, I see it potentially being a support nightmare based on how it deals with storage. Will it install on an Ubuntu desktop containing a hodgepodge of hard disks? Would it be more like FreeNAS where it makes its own software RAID, but requires hardware to be dedicated (or its own VM)? Even at that, how do they bill for the software? One-time use seems like it wouldn't be a good long-term plan, but I don't see too many users being okay with Dropbox charging them an annual fee to use their own hard drives. CALs could be a useful method (arguably the most workable one), but they'd have a hard time managing their consumer-friendly image on one hand with Oracle-style licensing on the other.

Levie is right; 'free' isn't a business model. Dropbox's 2GB number is only sustainable because they're betting that a certain number of those users will go for a paid tier. Either every Dropbox customer will pay, or they start advertising, or they data mine. To my knowledge, those are the three business models that have sustained themselves on the internet. 'Everyone Pays' may be a viable model if Dropbox can do things like sell gift cards for their service (for users unable/unwilling to fork over their Mastercard) and come up with the right formula of how much customers are really willing to pay for storage+ubiquity+simplicity. Although Levie must certainly be feeling the pinch from Microsoft's 1TB of OneDrive for $60/year, the one client we attempted to migrate to that service went back to dropbox VERY quickly because the desktop client was utter crap; I'm left to believe that Dropbox's simplicity still has an edge just yet. Conversely, I don't think that $50/month for 500GB is worthwhile, either - That's only slightly less than it'd cost to buy a 500GB hard disk outright from Newegg every month.

Dropbox is still a well-recognized brand that I'm certain many consumers are still willing to pay a premium for, and Microsoft and Google are competing not only with more storage for less money, but with integration as well - editing a spreadsheet in Sheets or Excel and seamless saving of attachments is not the kind of thing that Dropbox can effectively compete with. Dropbox's best bet right now, in my half-asleep opinion, is to see how much value-add they CAN provide to their existing tiers. I can't quite fathom what that is (a trivial example off the top of my head would be an IM client add-on), but one thing is for sure: they can't easily compete against companies who sell their own gigabytes by selling someone else's gigabytes.

According to one of the comments in TFA, https:/// worked fine, so they were only blocking HTTP. This leaves all the other suspects to their devices - the cornucopia of IM clients, VPN traffic, torrent traffic, usenet, diaspora/retroshare, in-game discussion via Steam or Second Life, IRC, etc. Sure, some of those are summarily blocked, but it seems they're doing such a poor job of acting in malice that I'd deem it sufficient to chalk the issue up to incompetence instead.

Your question begats two other questions:

1.) The site redirects to the T-Mobile USA website. I don't know how this works for other subsidiaries, and/or in other countries.
2.) The site explicitly specifies "Unlimited LTE". If you're torrenting at 20KBytes/sec, then your point certainly stands. If you're saturating an LTE tower during peak usages, then that's a different story...but it requires actual LTE service.

I can't speak for where you live specifically, but here in the northeast, I can tell you this much:

1.) T-Mobile is, in most metro-ish areas, as reliable as any other carrier. Also, it's not beyond the realm of realisticness to presume that users torrenting on their phone aren't torrenting while driving - if you're stationary and have four bars of LTE signal, T-Mo is pretty damn solid.

2.) I've gotten 2.5MBytes/sec down on my phone. Not during peak hours, of course, and somewhat varied based on what tower I'm connected to, but >1MByte/sec is quite common - and triple the speed of my home DSL.

3.) T-Mobile still offers kitchen-sink unlimited data plans if you pay enough. On those, they have a cap on tethering, but on the phone, you can download as much as you want. Since Android has a handful of bittorrent applications, it's entirely possible to be torrenting on an unlimited, uncapped data plan.

I don't blame T-Mo for doing what they're doing. Torrenting, by nature, takes a significant amount of bandwidth, requires lots of network connections, pounds the Carrier NAT with connections that can't be completed, requires a metric ton of extra routes, and doesn't stop seeding unless the user sets it as such.

If there's a protocol that's terrible from a cellular provider's standpoint, it's bittorrent. Blocking it on cell phones is about the least objectionable form of "network non-neutrality" that a carrier could implement. On a similar note, I don't know that T-Mobile's music streaming policy is terribly unfair, since they're whitelisting all the major streaming music providers. If they made Pandora free while Slacker had to pay, that's not 'net neutral'. Since everyone who streams audio is included, it's a blurry area for net neutrality.

I don't particuarly mind the current iteration of Yahoo Mail. It looks loosely like the lovechild of Gmail and Outlook.com, and works about the same.

If the interface is unbearable, a local installation of Roundcube (https://bitnami.com/stack/roundcube) will give a different, quite nice alternative, and of course using your favorite POP/IMAP client is viable as well (though admittedly it costs $20/yr for that access).

Part of this could indeed be network infrastructure - more expensive hotels can afford more robust networking solutions and wireless installers worth a damn that can optimize the way the network works. Other reasons could be upstream - more affluent hotels in more affluent areas will find cable companies caring *just* enough to split nodes where necessary, so the fancier hotels are less limited by their upstream providers.

More likely though, people in ritzy hotels simply aren't using the Wi-Fi. Even if they're not spending the night with a hooker, they're probably using the pool or the spa or the movie theater or the 75" 4K TV in their room to use their own laptop. Some certainly will, but there's a difference between "available for use" and "the only thing to use", which is more the case with the budget hotels.

Here are the answers:

1.) sudo showeverypost. Think it's too much content for me to handle? You're welcome to believe that. Let me decide that, not Mark. If it takes me an hour and a half to sort through everything, then so be it. Either way, I won't see it all.
2.a) eHarmony style. I couldn't possibly send a request to everyone on eHarmony, so they ask me an hour's worth of questions to help filter the kind of person I'm looking for. Facebook could easily do the same thing, and it'd be worth some people's time to help curate it manually. Hell, include a specific section where I can explicitly choose the kinds of ads I want. You don't get much more customized than people explicitly telling you what kind of ads they will respond to.
2b.) sub-categorize re-posts. "Stuff from Buzzfeed", "Stuff from Huffington Post", etc. If they're directly categorized like that, it helps me see what's trending easier, while simultaneously clearing out stuff when I'm looking for stuff from friends.
3.) Auto-Sort. This is what they currently have now.

This is what Facebook needs to implement. Thus, they never will.

This is already a solved problem:

www.crooklynclan.net

The first thing you see on the page is the most recent entries, no matter what they are. Genre pages are available, with each genre getting their own page of recent entries. Completely separate to that are 'charts', which show the top tracks from this month, past six months, and 'all time', with both site-wide and per-genre charts available.

The site's search feature needs work, but that's a different problem altogether. The point is that there is room for both a 'recently added' and a 'most popular' set of rankings, and the way to do it is already in place, and in service. Crooklyn Clan has plenty of the same issues that cause the problems shown in the App Store (lots and lots of contributions, poor SnR, frequent turnover, fickle customers), and they've been doing it right for years. All Apple needs to do is forego their adherence to "not invented here".

So, a major company uses open source software and Slashdot complains about it? There's just no winning.....

It's only a good idea if they can negotiate a peering agreement with Verizon so that they don't end up getting the slow internet anyway...but then Verizon will be mad at them and try to get the internet on their side by writing a public nastygram, which might actually be a good thing because Verizon will find itself on the wrong end of the "Think of the Children!" argument.

That will only take you so far. With so many programs defaulting to the My Documents folder, it'd be annoying at best to have to point to c:\realdocs "because viruses". The user could point the "My Documents" folder to c:\realdocs, but now we're in the same boat again. Even if a user decided it was worth the hassle to deprecate the use of the system variable, c:\realdocs would still be accessible by the same user. From Windows' security standpoint, there's no difference between the user being attacked by ransomware, and the user adding a password to an Excel sheet. Thus, ransomware doesn't need root privileges to mess up a user's files.

Even beyond that, the next generation of ransomware wouldn't exactly need a foundational rewrite to go to %user%\recent and see where those files point to and encrypt all the .docx, .xlsx, and .qif files there. I'm sure that somewhere in userland, there's some indication as to where the Dropbox/OneDrive/Gdrive folders are, and encrypting all that stuff. Even less complicated would be to search all available hard drives for user generated file types. .dll files wouldn't be worth it, but .qbw files very much would be. Ultimately, trying to thwart an attack of this nature would be of limited success, because from the most literal of standpoints, the virus is doing nothing different than what a user would be doing.

Amongst the things that makes this kind of attack so successful is that very problem: if you're trying to prevent outbound traffic at the firewall, you've already lost, basically. How does security software distinguish. technically, between a cryptovirus taking a file hostage, and a user passwording a file with WinRAR and uploading it to SpiderOak? That, good friends, is a question that I pay ESET a nontrivial sum to discuss and determine.

See. what I thought would be a useful stat to show would be "the average amount that those who spend, spend". In other words, if Google showed how much was spent on a given "freemium" app by those who spent >$0. This would give users a meaningful metric with which to decide whether it's worth it to attempt to use the app, because they could, on average, expect to spend that amount. If an app has a spending average of precisely $4.99, and the pro version costs $4.99, then it's fair to assume that users only pay for the 'pro' key within the app, and it won't nickel-and-dime all day. If $25 is the going rate, it's clear that the game is a skinner box and isn't worth it.

Of course, the bleeding obvious issue is that developers wouldn't be too fond of that number getting too high, which people would be less inclined to do once they have the feeling of going 'above average'.