Last time I tried, I had to use DosBox and FreeDos (or maybe DOS 6.22) on a VM to run Descent and the Devil level editor. The game would only run on one, and the level editor on the other. I can't recall which was which. I used a floppy image on a file to share data between the two. Pretty nostalgic going back and playing that old game.

No, actually typing isn't more work. I can type the first 3 to 5 letters of a program name (which is usually enough to narrow down the possibilities enough) way easier than I can move my hand over to the mouse, and click through the hierarchy of menus (or scroll through the huge list if you don't organize things) I like I had to do in Windows XP.

I think that people are just being babies and looking for something to complain about. I'm not a big fan of the Windows 8 interface, especially when you don't have a touch screen (actually, I think it's awesome when you do have a touch screen), but after using it for a little while, I found that the interface didn't really hold me back at all. You hardly even see the start screen in your normal day to to day work when you're running desktop applications. It shows up when you push the start key, but after you've typed in the name of the program you want to run and clicked on it (which is so much easier than previous versions because the click target is now huge), you are sent right back to the desktop. Plus with more and more devices coming out with touch screens, there's less of a reason to turn back now.

The problem with that is that you have to get your plans approved by 300 separate city councils. By going the other way and getting a car that works on all roads, they don't have to ask the cities for permission. Building a quality rail system is actually quite expensive, especially if the city was badly designed in the first place. Plus, there's a large number of people who don't want to take public transit even if it is good. The car is a sunk cost. The will own the car regardless of whether or not the public transit is available. The cost of public transit for the end user is cheaper than owning the car, but often times isn't cheaper than the incremental cost of driving the miles if you're already paying for the car. Most people will choose to take their own car even if it's just 5 minutes quicker than public transit, or if they have some other reason to justify it, like making it easier drop by the grocery store after work for a copy things they need.

I think your last two points hit the nail on the head. It's the same reasons they decided to make an operating system for phones. They want people to be using their online services all the time. If autonomous driving ever really starts working, to the point where we don't have to pay attention to the road, then they will have reached their goal. We'll be able to browse the web while our cars drive us to work. The may even have a device in the car like a tablet. They can sell us more apps, books, music, movies as well.

Just want to chime in as another vote here. I think it's a very vocal minority that make Aaron Schwartz into the poster boy he is. It helps his case that he was well known personally by a lot of prominent bloggers. I think many of the supporters are too closely connected to him to look at the situation in an objective manner. I don't really blame them. I'd probably be doing something similar if one of my friends had something similar happen to them.

This. Youtube isn't much good for watching anything other than short clips because it will often stop playing in the middle of a video, and be unrecoverable without reloading the whole page, and then you have to search for where you were. I have a fast connection, Netflix and other video sites have no problems. I can download a 2 hour movie in 10 minutes on bit torrent. But for some reason Youtube can't play 360p videos properly.

Sounds complicated. Just finished a provincial election here, and paper voting makes things so much simpler. Walk 5 minutes down the road to the nearest school. Present voter registration card and ID, or proof of address (bank statement, etc.) and ID, get your ballot, fill it out, drop it in the box, walk home. It would probably be at least as complicated to do it online, and I still would feel less assured that my vote was being counted correctly. Total time to vote by paper was like 15 minutes.

According to the first link I found on Google, there was 2.4 million deaths in 2010. Saving 100,000 lives would mean there would be 4% fewer deaths. That's a pretty good outcome. But how long would that last? Everybody dies eventually. When you save a life you're really just putting off death.Is prolonging death. Eventually those people would die. You could probably put off death for a few years, bring up the life expectancy by a few years, but eventually the number of deaths would approach what it was at before.

My favorite example of this is warnings about using a variable without it being assigned a value which can usually be made to disappear by assigning a value of null to the variable. The variable is null in either case, but explicitly assigning null makes the warning disappear. A null reference exception would occur either way. Also, the warning still appears even if the use of that variable is an if statement checking if the value is not null.

Well, obviously the saved game would be stored locally on the machine, so you could still play without an internet connection if you wanted. The reason for connecting to the cloud is for backing up in case the hardware dies.This is added functionality, and not really necessary to play the game. It also wouldn't have to sync every 24 hours. You could sync your saved games once a week or once a month and not lose that much play time if you aren't a heavy gamer. Allowing the user to copy the saved games to an SD card as the Wii did definitely caused some problems with piracy. Had they just eliminated the ability to transfer saved games to/from removable media, they would have cut out a lot of piracy.

I think a lot of the problem has come with game ratings. The old Mortal Kombat blood code is a good example. The SNES version had no blood, and no cheat to obtain it, mostly likely because Nintendo demanded it. The Sega Genesis version on the other hand had a cheat code to enable blood. Having hidden content that you have to type in a secret code to get to probably makes it difficult to give ratings to games, even if the cheats only reveal things like infinite lives. The existence of cheat codes would probably leave them questioning what else what hidden in the game.

Also, in terms of copy protection, I don't know why saved games are even exportable on current consoles. Really they should just be backed up to the internet so that people don't have to worry about backing them up. They should also sign the files with some kind of key, similar to how the executables are signed already to restrict what can be run. Perhaps they should just use whole disk encryption on the hard disk because now the game is stored on the disk, and any file can be tampered with, leading to vulnerabilities.

Not that familiar with their public transportation situation, but if selling access to parking spots is anywhere near profitable and worth your time, I would say there exists at least a bit of a problem with "too many cars". If you can afford to pay for the parking spot, and afford to own the car to occupy the spot, plus have the free time to vacate the spot reasonably quickly when somebody has bought it makes it seem unlikely that somebody could do this for profit. Most people probably just use it to make back a little bit of the money they had just spent on parking. If spots really are that scarce, upon selling the spot, you wouldn't be able to find another one to occupy to make a second sale.

Or they need better public transportation so people don't have to drive their cars everywhere.

Well Microsoft has a pretty good history of offering long term support, which is something severely lacking from many Android offerings. I bought a computer 8 years ago with Windows XP, and they only recently stopped putting out updates for that. And if I bought a copy of Windows 7 or 8, I could continue using the same hardware with updates for quite a few years to come. I wish the same could be done with a phone. With high end phones priced at over $500, is it too much to ask that we get software updates for a few years? The last laptop I bought cost less than that, and came with Windows 7, so I'm expecting quite a few years of software updates on top of the 2.5 I've already got.