It's not a sub $200 laptop. Labelling it a laptop is disingenuous, because laptops already have a fairly well defined meaning in people's minds from the fact that laptops have been around for 20+ years. You can run mainstream commercial games on a laptop, you can read and write standard Microsoft office documents, you can read email and share documents, edit pictures, etc.

The "apps" that run on chromeos are toys and web pages^H^H^Happs instead of the standard software people expect, with the one exception being the browser.

The only way to turn a chromebook into a traditional laptop is to install another operating system on the machine and use that. In other words, a chromebook is a sub $200 web browser appliance. That's nice, but I'm not sure it's worth $200ish .

It's not a stupid comment, it's a comment designed to lull credulous people into thinking they're less evil than they really are. That's evil in itself of course, but is par for the course for a three letter agency - goes without saying, really.

At some point, some depressed pilot crashes you into a mountain and you can kiss your ass goodbye. Then you can ask yourself, 'was it worth my time?'

You can say that about any other terrorist, too. Are they worth your time?

Mu. Because, it's not about your choices to begin with.

Yep. Google, we're looking at you.

The fact that someone argues that someone else benefits from their data being used improperly does not in any way change the fact that their data is being used improperly.

Easy, because Uber didn't invent these concepts. They are a me too company in the datamining space trying to follow the herd. So we *know* how this is going to end by looking at how other companies behave. Grow up.

No, he's not. He's a bystander in the deal between Uber and the advertisers. As a bystander, he can do whatever he wants. If he decides to shit all over the data Uber intend to sell the advertisers, that's fine. If he decides to sue the advertisers for wrongful access to his data, that's fine. If he decides to sue Uber for privacy violations, that's fine too. Basically, the sky's the limit, since Uber are illegally misusing his data (at least in the EU - where companies are only allowed to use personal data for the immediate business at hand - meaning getting you from A to B in the case of Uber).

So go ahead, make Uber's day.

[Ok]

Suit yourself. I just want a robot that learns how to be Sheldon Cooper. At least then I know the clothes will be folded right.

Nonsense. Everyone on the planet is able to create artificial life. It's called having sex, and they can do it anytime they like. Doesn't mean the invisible sky giant is having sex.

Nah... They'll probably want 10 years of Linux On The Desktop....

I'm sorry (eh) but the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one...

Don't worry. He doesn't need his Katra. He's part of a bigger community now.

One that gets to point fingers and scream Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

That's exactly the point. Christianity has a kernel of warlikeness in it, which came to light when some smart Romans realized how to make use of it. A truly inoffensive religion wouldn't be employable in this way. Unfortunately, no such inherently peaceful religions have been discovered yet.

Uh, no, that's the hint that you need. It's irrelevant what happens in the CDN.

It's actually far from irrelevant. The CDN is the major reason "streaming" services are viable in the first place. Without the CDNs we'd be back in the real streaming era of RealPlayer et al, right before that small company Akamai saw a business opportunity...

You're still going to stream it to your player.

Nope. Your player reads it from a growing file on disk. If you only want to concentrate on that part and call it streaming, then you've already lost the whole transporting across the network part, including controlling what gets streamed while it happens.

If it starts playing before you finish downloading, you're streaming.

Still incorrect. That's just playing a partially completed file on disk. It's "streaming" in the most primitive way possible. For example, you can't seek forward and play another part of the media until you've waited for the full file up to that point to be downloaded. True media streaming technologies allow the player to seek forward, *and not get the bits in between*. Basically, the server doesn't send any unnecessary bits, modulo the encoding method.

In your "disk as the media server" analogy, you would want to have some way to access the file randomly - that's only possible when the intermediate data has already been stored.

If you have to wait for the whole file to download before you can watch, then it's not streaming.

There you go. We seem to be in agreement after all. If you have to wait for 90% of the whole file to be downloaded before you can seek to the 90% position, then it's not streaming.

There probably are still video services like that, but I don't know of any.

There's an easy test you can perform to find out: stream a large file (large enough to take some time to download) and right at the start, have your player seek to somewhere near the end. If it starts playing the end straight away, it's probably a streming player, but if you have to wait a while, then it's probably a downloading player.

Whether the video gets downloaded into a buffer in memory or a buffer in a disk file is completely irrelevant to the question of whether you are streaming. It only speaks to the issue of how it is done.

Not so. I argue that the difference in technology is sufficiently important to the end user experience that without downloading tech, streaming media business models wouldn't have taken off - as they didn't in the early days when this was tried.

Ultimately, my point is that "streaming" as some of you use the word is a marketing term, useful to give the impression that data arrives on demand into the player and disappears as soon as it has been used, whereas this isn't the reality. True streaming like that is certainly possible and there are servers that do it, but mostly it's downloading files and hiding them. And I happen to like finding them and maybe processing them in ways that work for me.