I disagree. If it's for your own stuff, it's more of a trailer. Yes, there is the potential for a slippery slope - as seen by, well, trailers. Still, I don't mind trailers, and I don't mind this, either, as long as it's not obtrusive - i.e. in addition to not displaying a jillion car ads, like the reason I hardly ever go to movie theaters anymore, I also hope they don't play the *same ad over and over again*, like the reason I've started to have youtube ads, which I didn't mind quite as much originally. Hopefully they'll be able to figure out that, regardless of how much I might be happy to know about a new show they're planning on launching, once I've seen the same ad for it 3 times, I probably don't care to know about it again, as I've already been informed quite well.

My stepdad was hit by one of these a who months ago (incidentally, I can't believe he fell for it - he isn't sure how he got it, but he's a super-techie, it's surprising he both somehow installed such nasty nalware, and also didn't have any recent backups of important files). Anyway, they asked for 500 bucks (he paid it, sadly, not that I necessarily blame him). $22.88... doesn't seem like a lot of money. I'd pay that without even thinking, if I were hit with it. $500 bucks I'd have to think more about.

No, they should start spamming the *friends and family* of the owners of Uber with eggs. After all, clearly they opted in to such treatment by being related to or friends of the people who did this, right?

I didn't know it was ever an 'internet video meme', but it is definitely an excellent song. Yay MC Lars! Though not all of his stuff is that great, he *has* made a bunch of stuff that is great, and that is definitely one of them.

Needs more facilitation of synergy paradigms.

Whatever color(s) you're most scared of?

Why is intellisense only for people who "aren't that good"? Why *should* you have to have every system call, every function and property of every API you use, and everything in your possibly-enormous codebase that was written by someone else on the team, memorized? How does that help? Knowing where it all is and what it does, yes, but how does it make you a "better" programmer that you remember that a function is called GetData() instead of RetrieveData() or whatever?

I absolutely don't understand people who think they're better because they don't use tools that would increase their productivity, and that includes intellisense. Intellisense is awesome.

It isn't so much that government internet access is good. It's that a. no matter how terribly incompetent and/or bureaucratic our local governments might be, they couldn't *possibly* be any more incompetent than Verizon/Comcast/Charter/AT&T/etc., and b. having any competition at all, even incompetent competition, would more than likely force the above-listed companies to care at least a tiny bit about trying to keep their customers, once the choice wasn't between them and no internet. We have basically no competition in ISPs, and we'd be happy fixing that pretty much any way possible.

That already totally exists, in the form of private servers. Private servers are full of people who might/will cheat, and you are probably not going to get banned for cheating. (They're also generally buggy as frack, but still.)

Hodor?

Would you really want to do business with the company again at that point, anyway?

The coincidence presumably being that they're a bunch of Cox?

Indeed. Do they have ThreeEye from the Dresden Files? Spice melange from Dune? Glitterstim from Star Wars? Jet from Fallout?

I clicked on this article expecting it to be another instance of Microsoft deciding to play follow the leader, that if Google is making a Google autonomous car, then drat it all, we must have a Windows Car! Even though that makes no sense! I was going to say, frack no, robotic cars definitely do not need Windows, please god no.

The answer to the actual question posed, is of course, no they don't technically *need* windows... you don't *need* to give passengers in busses or trains or airplanes windows, either, but you do it anyway, because natural light is good, and because, yes, why *wouldn't* we want to look outside? (Also because there still needs to be a way to take manual control in case of emergency, in which case we'd need to be able to see out for that.)

From what I can tell, the Acela is kind of a ripoff. I just looked into the train from DC to NYC. Acela is 250 bucks, and takes a little under 3 hours. Or I can take the normal train for like a quarter of that, which only gets me there like 20 minutes slower. That seems like a pretty good tradeoff...

LA->SF, on the other hand, is way further away, so a high speed line would definitely be worth it at, or even perhaps a tiny bit above, the cost of an equivalent flight - trains are way more comfortable, and tend to leave out of more conveniently central locations, or at the very least, tend to leave at locations more conducive to using *existing* public transportation.