Last year was a very mild winter, so I can't see this year being anything but harsher.

The fundamental problem is you're confusing a mention of the near universal trait of humans to believe in some sort of "powerful other" controlling the universe. Some people are more prone to that "need" than others, but it *is* present in the vast majority of humanity, from those who hold deep religious convictions to those who go to worship once or twice a year for "big celebrations" and even to atheists who fall back on "scientific method" as some panacea of what is right and just and purposeful.

Rather, it is you who confuse "faith" with a fundamental urge to believe in something, whatever that something may be. One can have faith in processes, in kitschy homilies and phrases, and other such "wisdom" with no more "proof" of their validity than a theory of there being some form of god out there. Of course those who have such faith are far more inclined to call it "knowledge", and to consider it to be beyond reproach.

Faith and belief are not the same thing. Faith is acceptance of something as "fact" without evidence. Belief is acceptance of something because all prior experience has demonstrated the "fact" to be so.

The problem is even atheists still feel a need to believe in *something*. Which is silly. Planting Science as your God still means you have a God and are not an atheist.

Unfortunately, a lot of people aren't willing to accept the simple credo of "do good". Which really is all that most religions were ever telling people in the first place, with varying details of what they consider "good". People don't want to think about what "good" is -- they want someone to *tell* them so they can follow some leader like sheep.

Like moral issues have ever stopped anyone. :(

To me ala cart means picking the shows you want, not the channels. Even on channels I like, 90% of whtat they have is crap I don't watch.

Torrents, man. Season torrents of shows. That's the way to go.

"We couldn't find somebody with deep pockets that we could sucker^H^H^H^H^H^Hconvince that we had a 'great idea', so we tried crowd-funding, and we couldn't find a 1000 idiots we could sucker^H^H^H^H^H^Hconvince to part with their money. Life is so unfair."

Look, buddy, the bottom line is "great ideas" are a dime a dozen. As a professional programmer who made a career out of slinging code, I've lost track of the number of "great ideas" people had that they wanted me to develop. They all claimed we'd be "rich", if only I would do all the work for them for free.

Without a demo, you're not showing you have what it takes to do the job. Even with the demo, you're not showing you have what it takes to handle the business side of things.

I mean, seriously, you want "angel investor" money for the "payout" of a "free copy of the game when it comes out?"

How many decades did people wait for the last "Duke Nukem", and that was from a reputable publisher who knew what they were doing!?

Why would anyone with a functioning brain cell trust your "great idea" to ever deliver?

One Windows. One platform. Every device.

And we suck farts off dead chickens on every single one of them.

But you'll keep buying our crap, so we'll keep shovelling it.

So your friend's husband bought a web-connected device, knowing fully well that they live in a rural area with shitty web connections?

What your you going to complain about next? Not being able to tow semi-trailers with your Yugo?

Perhaps the OP beats with all the energy of a sloth on 'ludes... :P

You're missing out on the fact that every one of these so-called "smart" watches requires a smart phone to do the heavy lifting.

As they stand, they can not do one single thing of the items you listed without a phone. And if you have the phone for those situations, you don't *need* the watch.

Let me know when we have "quantum" processors that actually out-perform "traditional" CPUs on the tasks that quantum processing is supposed to be good at (e.g. graph optimization.) Until then, it's all marketting smoke and mirrors and not worth shit.

I have no idea how many weekends we got together for a night at the office for a TFC fest. We used to have about a dozen regular players, so it was enough to keep things fun without overloading the server at the office. Our bosses were big into gaming, so all the machines were equipped with 3D cards for those weekend gatherings.

Good times, man, good times.

For me, that was the heyday of gaming. But to be honest, it was the people that made it so much fun; the games were actually relatively primitive when compared to modern eye-candy.

TFC was the game. :)

Rather than building one from scratch, you could buy a box that's certified to run Linux. Unlike the old days, I find that nowadays you really can't build a box any cheaper than you can buy one from companies like Lenovo or HP, and Lenovo has several boxen that are "Linux ready."

Personally I think my box-building days are over. I no longer play video games, so all I'm really interested in is a fast CPU and a PCI16 slot for my "silent" (no fans) video card, and audio and networking that are supported by Linux (which is pretty much everything Lenovo sells; I haven't looked into HP -- I don't like their reliability ratings.)

Regardless, I couldn't come up with pricing any better than about $800 + tax + shipping no matter how I scrounged, and that was only for a Core i5, not a Core i7. It's about another $150 to bump up to an i7, but I don't *need* a quad i7 for what I do. I'd *like* one, but I don't *need* it.

I think I'd get more of a performance boost out of using my PCI video card to offload the memory access from the CPU channels than I would out of bumping from an i5 to an i7.

Ay ah tol' ya and ay ah tol' ya....