I guess my answer would have to be whether I was traveling "for business or pleasure". In other words, do I time travel to go and see things I personally want to see? Or to alter/observer time in order to make a profit? If I wanted to make a profit 100 years back or forward would be the best bet. Anything more than that and chaos/fate would have its way with it all. The neat thing is that this question reminded me of a book I read years ago called "Pilgrim" by Saberhagen. A rogue time traveler decides to go back in time to gather ancient relics and works of art to make a fortune for himself. It all goes fairly well until he starts trying to sell his goods in the late 20th century when carbon dating blows his scam out of the water. "What?!? What do you mean this 2,000 yr old vase is only 5 yrs old?" So he then tries to grab goods and store them in "safe houses" where they can sit undisturbed for years (naturally aging to avoid carbon dating issues), and then swoop in years later to gather them once they have been "time cooked". That then causes things to get even more crazy as you start having early Asian dynasty vases appearing in found Aztec tombs and the like. Wacky little story. Not groundbreaking or epic, but fairly fun. Think of it as a "Dr. Who crossed with a Ferengi" type of story.

It has been many a month since a comment made me laugh out loud and scare my coworkers across the hall. I damn near snorted out Coke after reading that one. Congrats to you sir or madam!

This post hits close to home... A year or so ago (pre-Unity), I decided to try an experiment around the office. We had some desktop users who were claiming to need a notebook for things (travel, presentations, etc...). We have tons of old notebooks that we cannot donate or trash yet due to the specifics of the funding they were purchased with. I took a couple of the old notebooks and prepped them with Ubuntu then themed it to resemble Windows (was not going for a 100% duplication). "My Computer", "My Documents", etc... Put appropriate shortcuts on the desktop and handed it over to a couple of users to try out. Now keep in mind the office had not yet switched to Windows 7. With the exception of the IT group the rest of the office was XP. Fast forward a couple of weeks and I had scheduled a "check up" to see how things were going. I was getting worried because I had not heard anything out of most of them. My guess was they freaked out and just did not use the notebooks. Instead I found out that they really like their "new, fast computers". They especially liked the non-Ribbon interface of Open Office over what they had seen from Office 2010. Now a few things to point out... These were typical “worker drone” users here. No special software like AutoCad, Photoshop, etc is needed in their daily work. Give them a web browser and “Office” and they have what they need. I did have a problem getting the notebooks to print to a networked Ricoh copier/scanner/kitchensink device, but the Ricoh was brand new at the time so that might not be an issue if it was a little older. All in all the experiment worked out much better than I expected. All except one of the users wanted to keep their notebooks around, so since they were working ok we let them until it came time for us to change out the dept’s computers to Win 7. When we changed over, they received notebooks with docking stations instead of desktops so there was no need for the linux notebooks. This might be an anomaly instead of the rule, but considering the target users, it all worked out better than I expected. I have not tried a similar experiment since Unity came around. I think that would cause a much more "alien" feel to it than the older version of Ubuntu did. Not that users can't get used to it, but if one of the goals is to minimize distraction and alienation, then I don't think Unity will help matters much.

I would honestly have to check the do not play box, but that does not mean I do not want to do so. After moving into a family life there is only so much time to go around.

I can see this being aimed at tech-dumb parents/grandparents. Might be huge for my "business-smart but tech-dumb" bro-in-law who doesn't mind paying a fortune for a mobile data plan. I don't see how this gives any halfway tech-literate person anything better than what they can do on their own with a good ripper and a NAS. If they also provided a local DRM-Free file for home/traveling non-streamed viewing when you take your disc in, I could see it being more popular, but as is, I am not interested in the slightest.

I only include this because Lumley takes more of a scientific explanation of the Wamphyr and not a supernatural one. Alien race of vampires infecting our world through a "wormhole" under a old soviet science base being fought off by a hitech squad of vamp hunters led by a guy capable of mathmatic teleportation. Sounds sci-fi enough to me! The first 8 or so books of the Necroscope line are one of my all time favorite series, but they don't seem to get much publicity in this day of "sparkly vamps". http://www.brianlumley.com/necroscope/ http://www.amazon.com/Necroscope-Brian-Lumley/dp/0812521374/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1331128761&sr=8-1 I also thought that new comers to the series would think the first book was a 6th sense ripoff and be turned off, but it was actually around long before that movie.

Agent K said it best: "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." Sometimes you need the dumb panicky ones to get the herd moving. Of course those sames ones can cause the herd to run right into a pack of meat-eaters. So, flip the coin and take your chances.

No matter how good LibreOffice gets, if no one knows it exists, it will not catch on. They really need to invest in some proper marketing some people other than geeks will know they even exist.

The lack of Amazon Prime Video has bugged me too. WD passes the buck to Amazon, who promptly passes the buck to WD. It makes me think Amazon has intentionally put a monkey wrench into the works while they engineer their own "Amazon Media Box".

Yeah, I don't have too much faith in a media box lineup that doesn't include a newer WDTV. WDTV was one of the first "prime time" media boxes. Very odd to see it left off the list.

Here is an odd question that may come up more in the future with cases similar to this... With surveillance drone tech becoming cheaper and more prevalent, at what height from the ground does something become "on the property" and therefore guilty of trespassing? 30ft? 300ft? At some vertical point in space above the ground, you will need to establish when a floating/flying object is considered "on your property".

Long ago Adobe's applications went from having an actual "splash screen" to a "loading screen" that we have to sit and watch. To hear this guy talk about it, this sounds like more of Adobe wanting to lock users into their Adobe subscription model than actually worrying about start times. Anything that would connect to "instance in the cloud" would have even more ties into logging how the user access their programs and give Adobe even more control.