It's an acceptable tradeoff for me. Though I have loathed it since its inception, I have warmed up to Steam over the years, mostly because the huge discounts offered through sales have resulted in a vast library of games that the Steam client organizes pretty neatly for me. It also does away with any sort of installation hassle. I do not miss having to hunt one or more patches on a publisher's site to apply to my 1.0 version. I also don't miss physical media being subject to damage, having to search for a CD or no-CD patches or paying more than U$5 for a game.

It's not that I actively like Steam DRM, it's that, in light of the benefits it provides and in how is doesn't affect my usage pattern, I don't mind it. It's only when compared to activation limits, mandatory connection for single player and other aberrations that is shines in a benign light.

Yeah, just remeber Mass Effect was just as bad with its cookie-cutting, but since combat was fun and characters were interesting (compare and contrast: Garrus and Wrex versus Anders and... Fenris), it ended up being a good game. DA2 was so easy and repetitive it was painful. It's not what ruined it for me, though. At least not solely. Terrible dialogue, limited control over the poor plot and needless and jarring redesign (the Qunari and Flemeth, for instance) all contributed to a slightly below mediocre experience.

Some people like to keep their interests neatly divided.

Personally, when I open my music player, I want to see only songs, not videos or what have you. And I want to see them divided by folders, not by artist, by album, genre or whatever. Folders are way easier to organize - at least for those of us that kept a fairly organized selection from the start. So my (admittedly retro) software bundle of choice is Dolphin > Totem. Extremely simple and with a fairly clean interface, just the way I want it. I think I'm in a small niche, though.

I wholeheartedly agree. Also, McGovern puts the -Mc in Govern, so he's probably the man for the job.

Arguably, we have not properly adapted to cars. Traffic accidents are consistently among the top 3 causes of death in a bunch of countries. So, reponding to the OP, we are fucking dumbasses and that's that. Of course, self driving cars seem to be a much better alternative to a phone that enters silent mode when being driven around. Solve "driving" and you atuomatically solve "phone use while driving".

Double mismanagement: one is screwing up the update cycle deadline and the other is moving to Win 7. Win 8 is crap, but it's newer - by going with Win 7 they are effectively eschewing a few years of support. Of course Win 8 would be only marginally smarter. The sensible thing, of course, would be to run Linux, so in the event of another amazing display of incompetence like that (which is probably already in the pipeline), they could support an older version in-house for a tiny, tiny fraction of that cost.

Even CentOS is already using 1.0.1, and we're talking about a distribution that is still using kernel 2.6 and Gnome 2 (not even 2.32, but 2.28 still). So yeah, OpenSSL 0.9.8 and 1.0.0 are extremely ancient.

Yeah, that's not racist, just stupid. Why should you have pride in something that's not an accomplishment (except for the late Michael, I guess)? And, if you don't believe your skin tone to be superior in any way, how would pride even enter the equation? I take my initial comment back: having pride on your race, whatever it is, is both racist and stupid.

I concur. For me, religion died the moment someone told me there were several of them. I briefly asked around about them (there was no internet then) and they all seemed contradictory and presented equal proof to their claims (none at all), so I chose none. In my case, though, it was the internet that brought back my faith, when I found a good book in which all answers are contained. It is called tvtropes and it is my god.

For me it would definitely be "replace your SoC without needing to replace a still perfectly good, expensive screen and/or battery"

I hear you. LG's G2 is pretty much the same device as the nexus 5 but has a ~25% larger battery to accomodate the humongous display. It seems that pretty much the only companies not shooting for the highest specs possible today are Apple and Motorola, and they are both making pretty solid devices nevertheless. I also own a Nexus 4, and I'll hold out on upgrading until I see a Moto X2 or something like that. In fact, I was thinking about "upgrading" to a less powerful phone, like the Moto G, because shit, my Nexus 4 is underclocked to 1026MHz, undervolted and it still never lags, but drains my battery like mad. I love it, but only until the low battery alert pops up. Can't imagine making the switch to a device with a 1080p screen and 2.5 GHz quad-core processor.

I don't know about scary, but it's definitely weird. While both corporations and governments are, morally, ever-changing amorphous blobs, governments have access to the police, among other entities entitled to use physical force. Especially in the current tense climate of terrorism, shootings and kiddie porn scares, I'd fear the government getting wrongly suspicious of me and letting loose their brutal human-stomping machine much more than just being targeted by a corporation, even though I know some corps can also destroy your life by filing lawsuits until you're broke, if they so desire. It's a complicated scenario, especially since things aren't so black and white and the government tends to bow to lots of corporations and do their dirty work for them, but still the government worries me way more than some corp, be it Google, Microsoft, Monsanto, BP, RIAA...

Well, a Harley also doesn't offer enough protection to make it reasonably safe, and I think they sell pretty well in the US. Bikes sell about 500.000 units a year in there, that's a pretty ok number, roughly one in every 600 people seem to buy one each year (is my math correct? It seems too many people). There are lots of drivers, like me, ready to sacrifice safety for efficiency. I'm not saying it's a smart choice, but I think it's a choice made enough times as to create a hefty market.

Apparently this will be done on an approved device's universal IMEI range. Vetting individual IMEIs is neither practical nor legal, as you can't stop someone from using a government approved, legally imported phone from using it on all networks.

And how is XP, by the way? I'm running 98, but it's getting a little long in the tooth. I'm thinking about upgrading to XP this April 8, when I'll consider it to be fairly well tested.