Whoa, whoa, whoa. I have severe problem with this. This is like looking at obscurity and declaring it a soul. The measure of intelligence is that we can't understand it? Intelligence through obfuscation? There should be no way for a designer to not be able to figure out why their machine produced what it did given enough debugging.

Sure give them that information. Then ask them this question: Would they rather see advertising and have that information tracked, or would they rather pay a monthly fee to use Google services? I have a feeling you'll be severely disappointed in the number of people who would rather have their information tracked.

Just nitpicking, but the write speed of a dual-layer Blu-Ray disc is nearly 12 minutes at 16x. What I'm mainly worried about is that the spin rate of a plastic disc has a definite RPM speed limit. I think we've all seen the videos of what happens to discs that are spun too fast (and if you haven't, there's some neat videos of it on YouTube). Will these archival discs be made of a different core material to facilitate faster spin speeds?

This from an organization that, when they recently redesigned their website, *still* didn't get around to forwarding http://nasa.gov/ to http://www.nasa.gov? Who would've thought?

No, if this NSA kerfluffle has amounted to anything, it's that open source software and open standards only give users a false sense of security if no one is willing to audit the software. See: The Dual EC_DRNG algorithm.

Of course, that only helps if people are able and willing to thoroughly look through the code with an untrusting eye. How many non-code submitting users ever analyze the source?

"Valve's attempt at a console-killer"? Really? No, this is Valve's panicked reaction to what had been the Xbox One's planned digital game sharing, which MS had to temporarily shelve while they re-wrote how the Xbox One handles disc-based games. If you don't remember, the Xbox One was originally going to let any console owner set 10 people to be members of their family sharing plan. Those "family" members (MS stated that they didn't have to be family), could then check out any game out of the owner's library at any time.

Here's the difference between the two plans:

Steam: If the owner of a shared game wants to play any game in their library, any person playing the shared game will be booted, even if the owner wants to play a different game than the one being shared. You are accessing a shared account, not a shared game. Also, Steam knows this immediately. The person accessing the shared library "will be given a few minutes to either purchase the game or quit playing." You can infer from this that shared gaming will not support offline mode... I.E., Always-on internet access is required to access a shared library.

Xbox One: The system treated shared games as a temporary license transfer. The library wasn't shared; individual games were. Your friend could play the game you lended to them without interrupting your play of any other game on in your library. To handle this license sharing, the Xbox One would, once per day, detect the status of the games and licenses on a console. Despite the constant FUD, the Xbox One *never* required an always-on connection. The requirement was for the console to be connected to the Internet at least once a day while the system did a license check for lended games.

So yeah, you can call this a great accomplishment by Valve and their "console-killer" if you want. You can hail the greatness Valve. But you have to ask yourself, why when Microsoft did it, were they burnt the stake and when Valve does it they're uplifted as a savior?

Exede user here. Here's my typical experience with my satellite connection:

• Minimum latency: 700 ms
• Download speed: Paying for 12 Mbps. Real speed: around 20 Mbps. Yes, actually faster than advertised. However, due to the built-in latency, websites feel a little slower to load.
• Upload speed: Paying for 3 Mbps. Real speed: Usually 1 Mbps. They obviously put low priority on uploads.
• Data cap: 15 GB/month. However, data is unmetered between 12 AM and 5 AM.
• Internet access Essentially unfiltered. Bittorrent is throttled. However, enabling protocol encryption bypasses the throttling.

My main issue with Exede is that it's DNS is flaky and sometimes requires me to cycle my network connection to fix. Even worse, it uses a proxy to hijack all port 53 DNS requests, so you can't choose an alternate server with the standard port. Netalyzr's log info on this:

But other than that, it's still a *vast* improvement over the dial up I had for 15 years.

And if we're going to be pedantic about it, why are you saying "ton" at all? Ton isn't an SI unit. What you should be saying is megagram.

Metro is intrusive? Your inexperience with Windows 8 is showing. If you're using the desktop, you'll likely only ever see the Start screen for a couple minutes in several hours of PC use. Even then, for most purposes, it works exactly like Windows 7 and Vista. Hit windows key->start typing to the first couple characters of the program you want->hit enter. You don't ever need to use the tiles unless you have some urgent need to use non-desktop apps. Even things like the classic control panel are still there and are easily accessible via a large shortcut on the the "Computer" section of Explorer.

Unless they're coming from Windows XP, almost all the behaviors from programs they know and love should work exactly like they did in Windows Vista and 7.

The main problem I've had is that every newer router I've tried in the 3 or 4 years have has had horrible reliability problems... dropped connections and the like. I got tired of messing with them and spent the $50 on the WRT54GL (which is what it's still going for on Newegg: and haven't had an issue like that since. Sure, the wireless is slower, but my WRT54GL's been running stably and consistently despite not having been rebooted in over 2 months. whereas the newest router I had required a full router reboot every couple days. That wasn't my doing. That wasn't a faulty hardware. That was the default setting in the router's setup page under its "maintenance" page. The default setting had the router set to reboot on Tuesdays and Fridays.

Do they make new routers that can maintain a stable connection for under $100?

I wish I had the latency of dialup. I'm currently using Exede satellite broadband. So I exchanged a 56 Kbps connection and 250 ms latency with a 12 Mbps connection and 750 ms latency.

It's a trade-off that I had to make. No DSL/cable broadband in my area (southern Indiana).

If you're using software in which 16 GB of RAM is way too little, perhaps you should focus more on desktop computers instead. You're trying to use a butter knife to cut a steak.

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