It's probably worth noting that in the Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 "leaks", technical previews, and consumer previews - ALL had the ability to enable a start menu by changing a registry key from 0 to 1, and ALL had that option removed in the final builds.

I have no reason to believe 9 will be different until after the grand master image is released to OEMs.

The same can be said for you - stop stealing from the public for the copyright you never intended to pay for, and only then do you get to claim it is your movie and not mine.

Seeing as me not watching your movie means you get $0, and you have already accused me of stealing it despite the fact i haven't stolen or even pirated it, and the fact you have lied to the government to get them to steal money directly from me to be given to you for my act of not watching your movie...
By my count that movie is mine three times over already (once when you copyrighted it, once when you claimed i stole it, and once when you had the government steal the cost of it from me to give to you)

Seeing as I have 3x as much ownership as you do over your movie, I say you have zero right to say what I the true owner can and can't do with it.

If I decide to download a copy of my property, you can shut right up and deal with it.

I don't see how having hundreds of thousands of planets in our solar system is a useful construct of the term "planet"
Nor do I see having $random number of planets being useful either, nor being even a "definition" of a word at that.

Since those are the only two logical conclusions that can result from such a statement as "pluto is a planet" - would you mind explaining your reasoning?

Even better: "The NSA - The only part of your government that actually listens!"

As for the logo, once more 4chan has us covered
http://i59.tinypic.com/2rngfq1...

Just out of curiosity, how did you manage to keep that one alive so long?

I too kept re-adding that slashbox and dice kept removing it for the past couple months.
I finally decided last week to stop fighting it and just use my bookmark instead of first visiting slashdot and then hitting the freecode slashbox title once I reached the end of the /. stories.

I really hope Dice wasn't counting freecode visitors based on how many people fought with them over removing that box, and I was the deciding counter :P

For over 10 years I've always dedicated at Least 15 minutes of each day for going down the new updates on freecode / freshmeat.
In fact there was 3 pages worth of updates posted between this morning when I last checked and Monday evening the time I checked before last.

That almost seems like more projects listed than slashdot lists articles in the same time frame :P

Thinking back, I've actually checked freecode nearly daily (at least during the week, though I did this weekend too) all the way back to a short hospital stay I had about 4 weeks back when I was offline completely for a few days.
There was literally not a single day that went by without at least a full page of freecode updates posted.

And while I can't really be sure, it sure feels to me like the number of updates posted each day hasn't declined in the last year, even if the posting frequency went from 3-4 times a day down to the 1 time a day it's dropped to in the past couple months. But that one time a day update posted just as many new and updated projects as one would get before as far as I can recall.

I just simply can't believe this is really due to "low traffic" when traffic is defined as most of us use the term.
I'm pretty sure what they meant to say was "low ad income" instead...

Most printer vendors these days offer a feature to print from the internet, and they figure (correctly I suspect) it's easier to have the printer connect out and poll than to explain how to port forward something through a home router to the average customer.

HP for example assigns the printer an email address on one of their domains, and the printer just polls the mailbox.

I suppose under the asumption one wants such a feature, this is the better way to go about it...

I'll make you a deal then.

If I ever happen to violate your copyright in the future, can you promise that you will sue me (and ONLY sue me) for "stealing"? I'll even allow you to use the proper legal name of "theft"

If you can promise that and never ever bring up "copyright violation" while in court, then I'll promise to never again mention how those two laws are not the same.

Deal?

In reality there are two sides to their exchange configuration: how it technically works, and how it legally works.
Being the US government however that means there is only "How it works" which is an alias for how it legally works (How it technically works might as well be magic)

http://www.archives.gov/record...

Installing exchange server and not raising the default retention period is a criminal act.
Actually, I'm pretty sure not installing a backup package to work around exchange store limitations would also count as a criminal act, but it may just be negligence or something instead of willful destruction of records.

Of course as you mentioned, if they would have gone a step further above zero-point on the server side setup, XP/outlook/PSTs wouldn't even need to be involved in the matter.
The very fact the even mention the client PC crashing implies that isn't the case.

Personally coming from a long line of competent IT work, it's a tiny bit shocking it was even a thought to go look at the client PC... That's the kind of thing one should only resort to if/when the exchange shit hits the bit-bucket fan. At my organization that would be called "unexpected disaster recovery plan C"

Sadly I very much doubt the person responsible for information and technology will be held responsible for their crimes.
If the PC didn't get the blame, then some poor outsourced Indian fella would have been one more addition for the no fly list instead :/

It's worth noting that life has been on Earth many thousands of times longer than Humans have been.
Looking just at our own planets history and turning the question around - why haven't any one of the 99.999% of species that have already existed on Earth and died off before humanity showed up risen to our level of technology and space travel?

There should be a few billion species in space already by that logic, as all of them but a very very small percentage have been around Earth much longer than we have.

Yet that doesn't appear to be the case, as most of those billions of species are now extinct, and there is "only" a few millions currently living, and so far only one utilizing technology.

There's also the question of why any civilization at such a high level would care to communicate with humanity.

After all, do you actively seek out all the ant hives around your property and make them aware of your presence let alone try to communicate with them?

No, you would deal with the rare one that becomes known to you, and continue to ignore the hundreds of others you don't know about.
"Dealing with" might be to ignore the hive if way off say at the edge of your property line where you don't care, or perhaps simply destroying it if say it was very near your home.
In the latter case, destruction would be so swift and near total that both the hive in question wouldn't have more than a few seconds to even be aware of whats happening before being killed, and generally so total that communication of that fact to other hives should be impossible.

Even our one sample set (aka humans) don't look too very far outside of our own scale.
It has been what, a hundred or so years since we even learned about things the size of bacteria and virii, let alone smaller at the atomic scale.
It's been roughly the same amount of time (less I believe) we have had the technology needed to discover the largest structures in space exceeding "solar system" size.

And while I admit we have come quite far in those hundred or so years, most human minds still seem to out-right reject the concept of a system operating as a whole on galactic scales as even a possibility, let alone a requirement for such a civilization.

It can be argued how much more difference there would be between humans and ants, and humans and a civilization capable of interstellar colonization - but no matter if that is 1:1 or 1:[some-large-factor] - it is a bit hard to imagine that improving the nature of the situation in our favor.

Finding a world capable of supporting life alone isn't (or shouldn't be) the only factor.
We need to find a world capable of supporting life, and already having a few billion species that have arisen and potentially fallen before there are any odds of a technological civilization being above zero percent.

As others have said, we are barely just now at the point of detecting planets where this is even a possibility, but we have no ability to tell if life has arisen and falling the few billions of times that would be required to raise the possibility above zero.

Likewise, if such a galactic system was operating with individual components the size of galaxies or solar systems was functioning right in front of our eyes, would we recognize it? Would it even be operating on a time scale we could have perceived any changes occurring yet?

Think a fruit fly, which only lives a week or so, trying to contemplate the life time of a human at 80ish years, or a human civilization at thousands of years... That scale is likely closer than the difference between us and something operating on a time scale of millions to billions of years.

Such a civilization could be right in front of our nose right now, and we have only observed such a tiny percentage of the whole of any one action that no obvious patterns are even there yet let alone detectable.

Sometimes it's hard to wrap our minds around the scales involved, both physical and temporal, and this all assumes we mostly know the general idea of what is going on with physics of the universe, which while likely (at least on a gross level) is still far from certain.

They can't go with Linux because their Steam contract forbids it.
They can't go with OS X because Apple forbids it.
They can't go with Windows because some Anonymous Coward forbids it.

Those three OSes are the only three that run Steam.

So what is this any other OS that runs Steam that isn't one of the only three that runs Steam?

For the same reason you need a space shuttle rocket to go to the corner store for milk.
The same reason you need IBMs Watson to balance your checkbook in Excel.

Indeed... Are we learning anything yet?

That goes without saying.
The detail you are missing is that you don't need a literal atomic scale physics simulator just to play games.

[Homer Simpson] I just need something that can send email
[Sales Guy] Oh my, you'll need a top of the line model for that! This baby here NASA uses to calculate their taxes!
[Homer Simpson] I'll take it!

Exactly.

Using the same base assumption, I have conducted research that finds a two billion dollar super computer cluster from IBM is way over priced from grandmas email and facebook browsing point of view.

I have also concluded my research showing the NASA space shuttles are way over priced from a running to the corner store for milk point of view.

Now where are my millions of research dollars?!

No, simply no.

If they have a method to extract and keep data used against me and my case, then that proves they sure as fuck have a method to extract and keep data used to protect me and my case.

On a pure technical level both actions are identical.

They are claiming they can't save X bytes of data that help someone, but of course they can save X bytes of data to ruin a persons life. X = X = X

But I bet the game didn't even bother changing the default passwords on the real world signs. Clearly this was all the games fault ;P

While all you said of AT&T is very true, in this particular case the biggest extent of their evilness was selling off the "AT&T Wireless" brand name to a non-AT&T company, thus creating this confusion.

Remember Cingular Wireless? That is the company that wanted to confuse by changing names, and we now call AT&T Wireless.
It's mostly even the same management to this day.

Cingular was/is pretty evil too in fact. The only reason their evil is on such a lower level is the huge head start AT&T had by existing for so damn long.