I don't live close to my job and I still drive nowhere near 15,000 miles per year. I would have thought that a 12 mile commute one way was a lot, but that's still only ~6,000 miles per year. Even throwing in a very generous 2,000 miles of weekend driving and a yearly 1,000 mile round trip to the beach, I'm still only at 9,000 miles.

I'd really love to know how many urban or suburban 2-car families actually manage to put in 30,000+ miles a year in driving

Netflix's own website goes out of the way to block the use of unapproved browsers. I found this quite annoying.

Well, since Mary Barra worked in their human resources department at the time, I do find a little hard to believe that she was retroactively responsible for a fault in their engineering department.

Bill Simmons had an article on ESPN.com about that. He describes in great detail, from a large number of NBA sources and his own experience, how Sterling was always a hated asshole that everyone wanted to get rid of, for at least the past 20 years.

I'm not sure why you were modded down - this seems like a reasonable question. Netflix, Amazon, Youtube, Hulu, and other video streaming services already account for half to two thirds of internet traffic in the U.S., and that's only going to grow.

I think you're being a bit pessimistic, and I definitely have to disagree that this is a new trend. I'm currently reading Vanity Fair - a book written in the 1840s that's mainly about the social and domestic life of the wealthy and wannabe wealthy of England after the Napoleanic wars. I was surprised to discover how many of the accoutrements of wealth were actually rented by the British nobility. They would borrow hunting horses from a livery stable, rent a (furnished) townhouse from a middle class landlord, rent books from paid lending libraries, and even rent their clothes. As I understand, this occurred because most of the wealth either came from quarterly rent checks out of the family estate (their tenant farmers were renters too) or from interest on perpetual bonds bought from the Royal Exchequer; so regular rental payments were much easier to budget for than large capital outlays. Renting many of their possessions was necessary for all but the ultra mega wealthy in Britain before the 20th century.

For a more technological example, remember how IBM thought of mini/microcomputers in the early days - forty years ago, they envisioned users renting computer time for use on a dumb terminal, and scoffed at the idea of home users owning their own computing resources.

So I don't think that this de-emphasis of personal ownership is a new or permanent trend. Hopefully, the benefits of renting/streaming/etc. will outweigh the downsides.

The thing is, Valve makes the vast majority of its money from Steam. Everything else they do, like the Steambox, their first party titles, etc., are designed in some way to further the usage of Steam as a platform by gamers and publishers. The Steambox isn't a product that they expect to make much money from - it's a hedge against Microsoft iOSing Windows first, and an advertisement for Steam second. So I don't think that a more typical gaming company would have rushed this thing either.

I'll second this opinion. Valve's current darling is Dota 2, which I play frequently. I think Valve has done a fantastic job of releasing a free to play game that is simultaneously profitable and utterly free of the annoyances that plague most free to play games. However, it's very clear that Dota 2 is intended to be a "reference design" rather than a cash cow franchise - its a demonstration to other publishers that they can use Steam to make profitable but non-exploitative freemium games. Heck, Valve didn't even develop Dota; they just persuaded Icefrog to give them the rights to it, and incorporated it into the Source engine.

I think of Valve's first party titles these days in the same way that I think of Google's Nexus program. We're seeing Google wind down the Nexus program because it has largely accomplished its goal of convincing OEMs to make their phones more Googley (for better or worse); Valve is likewise de-emphasizing their first party titles.

While the results of this particular study may be questionable, it's annoying to see how many comments dismiss the study out of hand just because it was performed by osteopathic physicians. I can't speak for the rest of the world, but in the US, "Doctor of Osteopathic" has a specific meaning - they are legitimate physicians whose training differs from that of allopathic physicians in philosophy rather than in medical knowledge or practice.

The only medical distinction between a "traditional" MD and a DO is that a DO undergoes an 8 week course in osteopathic manipulative treatment (OMT), which is a specific therapy for lower back pain, and which NIH studies have shown to be "mildly to moderately effective." Other than that, medical training between the two branches is indistinguishable.

There's a common quip about quack medicine: "What do you call alternative medicine when it gets scientifically verified? Medicine." I find it comforting that at least one group of (former) quacks in the US actually took that sentiment to heart. Now if only chiropractors and homeopaths would do the same...

I'm from the U.S. (from the Deep South even), and I can't remember ever hearing the phrase Central America used differently from the way you describe.

I'll second that statement. Microwaving is especially nice for me because I can make the bacon crispy without having to char it, which was always my pet peeve about bacon.

Presumably those were two non-overlapping groups of whiners?

I don't have a problem with capped internet. I know, it's heresy to many people here, but I really don't. The marginal cost for bandwidth isn't zero and no amount of wishing by Slashdotters will make it so. It makes sense that there's a mechanism in place to limit the impact of heavy users on lighter, if they're both paying the same costs.

Of course, having said that, I fully expect Comcast to go about implementing a theoretically sensible idea in the most discriminatory, expensive, heavy-handed, and frustrating way possible. What the hell is wrong with those guys?

How nice of you to make that decision for everyone else. Believe it or not, it is actually possible that sometimes the more expensive, more secure option doesn't offer enough benefits to outweigh the increased costs in certain use cases.

I'm sure that my cheapo router at home doesn't meet your lofty standards of safety. I understand the potential security risks that this router poses reasonably well. I could have spent $50 extra to buy a "better" router, then spent an evening or so figuring out how to hack it so I could put your approved firmware on it. But I don't, because it's a freaking home router, and I've made a reasoned decision that the security benefits don't outweigh the extra time, money, and hassle. Maybe I'm wrong about that (though I seriously doubt it), but why shouldn't I get to make that decision?

But, at least to me, the main benefit of carrying a credit card is that it lets me avoid cash and cash equivalents, not to mention the need for juggling multiple accounts. I don't have to treat my credit card like cash. Why anyone would deliberately want to deal with something "like cash" when they can avoid it is beyond me.

I, on the other hand, am horrified at the idea of trusting either Paypal or Google with any personal or financial information. My credit union isn't perfect, but I'll take them any day of the week over your suggestions.

On an unrelated note, I find it slightly amusing that you disparage restaurants for getting their payment processing equipment from Ebay while lauding the use of Paypal...