I'm pretty sure you are not part of the Elite:Dangerous community. The game is almost complete, playable, now. I have my complaints with the game, but the developers never had the attitude you're describing, in fact that is the exact attitude of Chris Roberts and his Star Citizen: keep buying our ships and hangars.

The E:D devs did state that some features will come as an expansion (e.g. planetary landings) but that was stated up-front. They never asked for more money to deliver a new ship or something.

What I think is they are under huge pressure to release the game before Christmas and simply don't have the time to implement & test a proper offline mode. As a note for those not familiar, the game already has a "Solo" mode, where you're online but don't interact with other humans, just NPCs.

I agree that dropping offline support at the last moment wasn't wise, but how would a demo server have helped?

I backed both Star Citizen and E:D. My fear with Elite is the lack of variation and depth. Everything seems repetitive. If they can add more varied missions, interesting space sightings and inject some life into the universe, it'll be a fun game.

Of all the things you could complain about Elite:Dangerous, you complain about money? The extra 15 pounds is for those who preordered the game, if they want to get early access.

Compared to the Star Citizen money grab, what the Elite devs are doing is just great. There are people who spent over $10,000 (real money!) in Star Citizen to buy ships and a "business hangar". Money spent on a game that doesn't even exist yet (there is just a hangar and an in-game simulator and the controls are a pain).

Actually, yes, it is. My phone phone lasts up to 5 days if I turn off wifi & data, 2-3 days with normal use. Charging every night would be a hassle.
And my watch is a mechanical automatic. I never charge it.

I found one of my Gmail accounts in the list - the one I usually use when asked on forums and such. Using https://isleaked.com/results/e... I saw that the password leaked is not the actual gmail password, but the password I use when signing up on non-important sites, including Slashdot.

I'm quite sure the email+password was collected from another site, can't be sure which one.

My watch is a Tissot PRC200 Automatic. Not a very expensive watch, but it would take some effort from a company to make me take it off my wrist.

To even consider a smart watch, it would need to have:
- a classy, attractive design (nothing convinced me so far, the LG G Watch R is the closest to something I'd use but still feels cheap; Apple watch looks too much like a gadget)
- a smaller size. I don't have a big wrist, my watch has 42mm diameter, anything larger looks bad on my wrist.
- much longer battery life. Current smart watches get 12-24 hours. I don't want a watch I must charge every night.

Get these right and then we can talk about software.

I have worked for a health insurer in UK that treated ACID compliance as a bonus, not a requirement. At the time I left them, they had a whole "data correction team" - 12 people working full-time to do live SQL queries to fix database inconsistencies. I wish I made this up, but it's real. If this is considered acceptable practice, I don't want to work in this industry ever again.

Do you even know what ACID means?

Atomicity - either everything is committed or nothing is. I find it crucial to avoid inconsistent states.
Consistency - data is valid in all states.
Isolation - ensure that concurrent transactions work correctly.
Durability - no data is lost due to software crashes or power failures

How could these not be important for banking is beyond me.

While I agree in principle that "cloud"-based services are overrated for reasons we are all aware, the issue with Creative Cloud was a minor one.
I use Adobe software every day and I noticed the error just because I tried make a change in the subscription plan.

The apps run locally and the license is checked every 90 days. Yes, some people could not activate their licenses or they couldn't download an application. This is a DRM issue, like Microsoft's or EA licensing servers being down. This could have happened regardless of Creative Cloud.

The only cloud services are their Typekit and Edgefont font distribution and Behance portfolios.

So let's make this clear: Creative Cloud is a fancy way of saying "rented software". Compared to the traditional model, it may cost more or less, depending on the upgrading habits (personally I used to always upgrade and use the newest version, other users upgrade to every other version)

I haven't coded in Pascal since the good old DOS days, when I was about 17, but at the time was writing TSR apps, picture viewers (GIF, PCX, BMP, TIF), some graphic-mode UI, including mouse support, even some VGA graphic demos. I can't think of anything that I couldn't do in Pascal (and some ASM, I give you that). In fact, it's the reason I never got too heavily into C...

This is not for the benefit of the users but for webmasters.
If you have a site with any decent amount of traffic, you pay for bandwidth and you have a content delivery network. 10% smaller images translates into 10% savings.
Moreover, Google takes site speed into account when ranking sites.

SWF was amazing for its time. Streaming vector animation with synced sound over modem speeds. Even today you need a hodge-podge of technologies - SVG, Javascript and a bunch of libraries to achieve what you could do 17 years ago! And I'm not even sure you can stream a svg animation+sound.

SWF has 2 shortcomings:
- it's proprietary
- it doesn't integrate seamlessly with its environment (browser).

For standalone apps, these are not big issues.

I fail to see how AIR is a problem worse than Phonegap or what Chrome is offering right now as a wrapper over html5.

Making a cross-platform game is world of pain, especially when you're small.

I was able to make my chess game available on web, as a chrome app, as a native app for PC, Mac and Linux and for mobile on iPhone, iPad, Android tablets and phones, even the now-dying Blackberry Playbook. The game is quite complex but 99% of the code is cross-platform, there are very few platform-specific lines.

I've been considering porting it to HTML5 but the amount of work needed is too much for one man. The AI is straighforward (Javascript and AS3 are closely related), but porting the UI, the multiplayer code and then tweaking it to make sure it works with all major browsers is not something I'm looking forward to. With AIR I can keep my sanity and concentrate on features.

First, syncing to cloud is not backup. Second, being at the mercy of a provider doesn't strike me as a good idea in long-term.

Better invest in a NAS. A 2-bay Synology would suffice. 2 4TB drives in Mirrored Raid work great. WD has the "red" line of drives specifically made and tested for NAS storage. They are not as fast but run cool, silent, no vibrations.

Most NAS units run on linux so you can easily add syncing, versioning, "personal cloud", maybe use to play movies on smart TVs via DLNA and so on.

Finally, from time to time do proper backups. For home use, proper backup means burning data on DVD/BD - on 2 separate discs.

This is beyond useless.

I live in a country with significant seismic activity.
We know for hundreds of years that every 30 to 50 years a big (7.6 - 7.8) earthquake will happen. We even know where the epicenter will be. We know how it will propagate.

It's been 36 years since the last one so many people who live in problem areas are beginning to get nervous. But we don't know when it will happen. Could be tomorrow or ten years from now.