I believe that office upgrades are the only upgrade they have done right. Windows 8 is so horribly unfriendly to a new user but at least office is still good. So, even though office doesn't matter for tablets it probably is still their best selling point.

I haven't really seen Blizzard make any good decisions regarding any of their games lately. They listen to their criticism but often it's the wrong criticism to be listening to. Feels like the wrong people are running the show right now or something. They need a serious mix-up or just to remove some of the "yes" men from their midst.

Can "gay" not just have another definition meaning bad/stupid? Most words have several definitions that are unrelated. Gay also shares it's homosexual definition with happy but no one is up in arms to use other words to mean happy.

Paypal is the worst option for online banking and payments except for it's one good feature, convenience. They made it ultra easy to sign up for to accept payments better than any other service, including visa and mastercard. The draw back is obviously higher fees and people continually get accounts locked when they hit whatever the threshold is, something like a couple thousand. Plus I'm pretty sure they are constantly hacked. I signed up for paypal on a fresh e-mail and not more than a month later I received phishing scams against that e-mail for Paypal and other sites. This was after not using that e-mail for anything else. I have not used them since except for cases where other forms of credit (cards) are not accepted.

Google the New York debate "Is Islam a religion of peace?" Very intelligent proponents for both sides debate this much better than I've ever seen in an online forum.

This is an amazing development. Honestly no one should be able to read your e-mail ever, even law enforcement, unless the recipient or owner of the e-mail is the one reporting a crime. The fact the government has had power over the post office for a long time and used the threat of mailbombs, anthrax, trafficking as an excuse to open it is no longer an excuse for law enforcement to be able to simply read anyone's digital message. Communication alone isn't going to harm anyone. Start going after people for actual crimes, not future crimes or misinterpreted e-mails. Everyone needs privacy and we need it now. There is no freedom in being monitored.

Trust me it is hell! First, try to cancel using the options or settings in your Xbox, you can search for it but you won't find it. You must go to a PC to even find an online option to cancel but if you try to use the webpage it will gray out your option to cancel, or will give you an error that basically says "it didn't work" with no explanation or link. There is no way to cancel online go ahead and try, I guarantee it won't work. Then you go to support page and it won't give you a phone number, first it tells you to follow all these steps that don't work. Then when that doesn't work it suggest alternate steps that don't work. Still it won't give you a phone number, then it might show you an option to contact a representative with one of those enter you e-mail and phone number and your problem and "well get back to you" things (if you can correctly click through the maze of support links and don't forget to be logged in because you can't get to this without being logged in). And guess what, cancelling or even account management isn't an option for you to enter as your reason for contacting them. Then when they respond you, some time up to two hours later, it is an automated phone call that puts you on hold then redirects you to finally a real person, who asks you a ton questions and keeps hassling you to keep the service with offers of free games and things. They also survey the fuck out of you about why you are cancelling and won't stop even if you say you just want to cancel and not continue. THen, remember all the information you entered online? Ofcourse the person that called you doesn't have it. Remember, they called you with the online form you had to be logged in to use, and still ask for your phone number and other information to confirm that the account is yours. Just search on google for unable to cancel xbox live and you can find a ton threads and complaints.

I will never buy xbox live again because it was so impossible to cancel the last time.

Suggesting that the act of talking to someone through a phone is causing the distraction would be grounds to outlaw Bluetooth or hands-free systems in the car as well. Why are phones singled out as impairing? Is it because it takes a hand off the wheel? If so, I guess we should stop allowing people to drive manual transmissions, change their radio while moving, and ban anyone with 1 arm from driving.

Cell phones have never seemed more distracting to me than changing the radio or taking a sip from a cup. I will admit when you see someone drive erratically or make a mistake, then look and see them on their phone, you realllly want to blame the phone. Fact is though blaming the phone might as well be the same as blaming them for being Asian or a women. A lot of people only drive automatics with 1 hand anyways. Manuals take a hand off the wheel and on acceleration and deceleration, arguably the most important times to be prepared. Maybe we should start banning manual transmissions? I have a friend with only 1 arm that has a valid drivers license. He talks on his Bluetooth while driving and drives perfectly fine. If talking on a cell phone is so impairing, surely the use of only 1 arm is impairing him too much to give him a drivers license because he must drive as bad as someone with a hand to their ear.

The summary gets it exactly right when it says something like 8 lawnmowers doesn't equal a Ferrari engine. The trouble is it is so difficult to find an actual benchmark for processors that measures speed and reliability. The average person does not get into the details and looks at something like higher hertz is better or more cores is better. All else being equal, this is true. I would confidently say that 50% of the population would buy "8 Core" machine that uses Pentium 1 processors over a single core Pentium 4. Consumers shoot themselves in the foot when they don't do their research before buying a computer. There are so many "features" on current processors that are completely incomparable that buying the best processor becomes a crap shoot unless you want to spend hours searching for real benchmarks.

I think the only result that you can derive from that is that people like try marijuana around ages 16 to 19..

Your making it seem like games and menus are difficult to navigate. 95% of the time they only need arrows (dpad) and a mouse (thumbstick), with a few other buttons. Sure it's hard to play World of Warcraft on a controller, but I doubt big picture makes a game that gives the user 50 spells any easier to use them all. I won't be using big-picture and I play tons of steam games, it's over-hyped marketing for "games from your PC on your TV" which is already very easy to use, counter to what you have said. No one does it because it is simply impractical to hook your TV in your living room up to your PC in your office or bedroom.

It's good marketing, but the thing is that anyone could already connect their computer to their TV and there are already ways to make a controller act like a keyboard. The youtube video for Big Picture received way too much attention for what amounts to a patch to allow controllers to be used without a third party app. Props to Valve for slightly improving their product and some how getting news websites everywhere to recognize this as revolutionary.

Religion is often just a beautiful idea that is pleasant to think about. Maybe it's pleasant because it brings certainty or because it gives someone a goal or purpose. This is great and a conversation about spirituality could definetly be brought up in school but not as a truth. The purpose of school is to learn from history and those before us. Our own experiences build on eachother just as society builds on previous societies. Why is "religion" exempt? Religion doesn't need to deny what people see with their eyes and feel with touch. That moves beyond religion or faith and into lunacy.