posting so I can remove the temptation to mod -1, Overrated ;)

Who is seriously calling Gates scum for giving away his money?

You're missing out on the key fact that Gates, Vanderbilt, etc. all made their money ruthlessly. It's not that they're rich, it's that they're rich and got rich by being an asshole.

Usually to make billions and become a tycoon you have to break a few eggs.

There are some great examples of hyper wealthy people who didn't, like Warren Buffet(relatively speaking; compare Berkshire Hathaway vs Bain Capital).

I mean, say what you want about Apple's pricing structure or business practices(including the non compete deals with other firms), but they didn't make their money like Microsoft did with incredibly onerous OEM licensing deals. They made products. They made them desirable. Then they sold products.

Steve Jobs' estate and Steve Wozniak sure are wealthy, but they didn't make off with as much as they could.

You're seriously missing he forest for the trees here.

Shared real life spaces like hotels, apartments, etc. require you to play by the rules and be a good neighbor.

You can't start blasting heavy metal at 2AM every morning and then get upset when you get evicted.

Similarly, cheating completely screws Blizzard's economy, and can ruin the PVP experience depending on the cheat. So you're disrupting other people's enjoyment of virtual space.

MMOs are shared spaces. Play by the damned rules.

Depends, what are you using the NUC for?

Games? For 200 bucks you can buy a PS3 that plays mostly the same games, has a BluRay player and plays digital media. For 400 bucks you can get a PS4 which has a better GPU.

For anything else, depending on how much horsepower you need. If you're rendering video or editing RAW photos or audio, sure, it's probably unbeatable for size/power consumption.

Anything else though, we're at a stage where things are pretty much Good Enough.

The check engine light can come on for any manner of things, including things that are very expensive to fix, but have no effect on safety. You can't judge the condition of a car by whether or not it is on.

I don't know what code that light is indicating. I'm 99% sure I'm going to reach my destination, so I hop in anyway.

Still, doesn't make me feel great to do so.

They really don't. At least not where I live.

I live in NYC. Yellow Cabs here are impeccably maintained. Maybe you live somewhere that doesn't care about taxis? NYC is run on taxis.

There's a few reasons I can imagine Apple was mum on this. Either it just really isn't actually useful, or meant to be released, or the software/frameworks aren't ready for primetime.

Still, my biggest concern is water resistance. It's exposed pins and it's a wearable. I can't imagine a strap alone is going to help matters here. Right now the watch can survive in relatively shallow depths for short amounts of time, but I wonder if it'll even survive getting dripped on with the diagnostic port exposed.

wow you must've been a bad lay.

Don't punish people for carrying out commerce.

If you think paying taxes and playing by the same rules the yellow taxis have to play by is "punishing people", then I don't even know man.

The cars are also owned by the drivers, who will notice when something is wrong, and get it addressed quickly, since they have to pay for it and don't want damage to compound.

Yeah, that's a nice fantasy there. I use Uber and Lyft to get around sometimes and the number of times I've gotten into a car with a check engine light on is astounding.

I never review drivers and ding them for it because drivers can review me and make it hard for me to get car service.

Here's the thing, it's not the consumer's responsibility to make sure that what they're consuming is fundamentally safe or not. I'm not an inspector. I don't have the tools, money, access, and most importantly time to vet every single one of my drivers. When I need to get across town in twenty minutes, I don't have time to shop around for a cab. I get in the one I can get and go. It's not like I'm shopping around for a washing machine, a video card, a pair of pants, or any other consumer good.

Fortunately, there are people out there who make it their job to ensure that commerce is done fairly with proper levels of oversight to take care of that for me. I elect them. They need to do their damned jobs. And in the case of the Yellow Cabs, they do it amazingly well.

As much as a lot of /.ers like to whinge and complain about IP rights, Skyrim IS Bethesda's IP. So marketing a mod for sale on the Steam store does put Bethesda in the right to take a cut.

Maybe not *45* percent. HOly shit who's idea was that?

I think the character from MGS V: TPP is supposed to be Dr. Pettrovich Madnar

Given the fact that Snake now gets a bionic arm and Dr. Pettrovich's work was in cybernetics? Yeah.

Just because a tomato is a fruit doesn't make ketchup a smoothie.

you could also get a NAS if you're nerdy and you want storage. with gigabit ethernet and extremely fast wifi, NAS almost feels like a local disk

But it doesn't run Windows out of the box and the parts aren't the same kind of parts you'd find in the average desktop it's all custom boards and in some cases, silicon. Especially now on the MacPro and Retina iMac. By that logic a Cray Cluster is a giant box of commodity PCs.

Demand might be there, but the problem is that OEMs are really *REALLY* awful at business.

Selling lots of machines at razor thin margins to compete with everyone else selling machines at razor thin margins has been a massive albatross on the neck of the PC market. When there are no more OEMs, who's going to sell PCs to people who don't want to build or want notebooks?

While it's possible that savvy enthusiasts not willing to make the mistakes of their elders may rise from the ashes, I'm not holding my breath. Part of the problems with the PC business right now lie with the fact that Windows is *the* desktop OS, and Windows has problems tech people and non-tech people just accept as being "computer problems."

That watch is also available for 350 bucks if you don't want it to be super spiffy. Even comes in a range of colors too.

Given the thing is backordered into June, I think you're underestimating what's going on at Apple. But I don't count them as a "PC" company since they're not building commodity Windows hardware to begin with.