> If you watch your movies via streaming, this is not an issue. 2015 people, 2015.

Yes. In 2015 there's still plenty of stuff that's not available via streaming or is only available at a price that most people aren't interested in paying.

Some us actually use this stuff and don't merely talk about it.

In other words, you have a BD player too old to matter in this context. Current players do more than just decode spinning plastic. They also have all of those apps that connect to all of those interesting video services that you just conveniently ignored.

> It's a machine before the TCP/IP and Internet times.

I ran a machine like that with TCP/IP on the Internet. The main problem would be getting an ethernet port working on the thing but the software side of the equation is well covered.

Been there. Did that.

Meanwhile, there is this PC platform that wiped out all of it's other bespoke competitors probably before you even touched your first computer. PCs are MUCH more diverse than Android phones. But if you started whining about "fragmentation" to PC developers they would look at you like you grew a second head.

What do "desktop users" even want? Do they even have any real desires or do they just mindlessly take whatever is force fed to them by a Microsoft dominated OEM channel?

These are the same "desktop users" that turned their noses up at MacOS in favor of DOS.

The idea that Linux "lost the desktop" is assinine. It was never there to take. It was owned by DOS from day one. Quality of the product accounts for ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

By Lemming-centric market metrics, even MacOS is a failure.

Thankfully most other markets are not quite as broken and I am not stuck eating dirt. Only in the computing market is the notion of not wanting to eat dirt seen as extreme or subversive.

...in a VM perhaps.

Go beyond that and Windows is a royal pain to get up and running. It's actually far more problematic to get up and running than Linux is.

It's hard to see this if you've never actually installed a proper copy of Windows on bare metal.

This Linux gaming renaissance is most likely a side effect of how every other gaming platform besides Windows uses "something else". That something else is Linux compatible. That reduces the distance between Linux and what has already been ported to.

Android, MacOS, even the PS4 and Wii's are intermediate steps towards Linux.

It's no great surprise that the most interesting ports for Linux are being done by a MacOS porting house.

Beyond the big titles, Linux is a significant part of the market. The indies were already porting to Linux because of this.

While the NUCs are overkill for HTPC duty, the PIs are also not sufficiently there either. A PI just has problems keeping up with the user interface (XBMC).

Something like a Chromebox is the sweet spot. Decent enough GPU for video decoding and a CPU that's not ridiculously anemic.

You mean that Canadians have a nasty spending cap and get turned down for treatments that Americans take for granted? That kind of cheap?

Don't swim in the kool-aid.

Better yet, if people are re-inventing your work why do you even think you should be granted ownership of it? Chances are that you contributed nothing to the state of the art. You didn't publish anything that's actually useful. Patents are rubbish as documentation. So if that's all you've contributed to the world, then you didn't contribute anything really.

The fact that ANYONE could "re-invent" your stuff means the patent should be tossed.

Patents are evil that way. They allow patent holders to claim ownership of the work of others. It's legalized theft.

I don't have to "imagine" anything. I have seen it firsthand. I have seen the no-talent schmucks from India used as scab labor and I have seen the overqualified and highly talented types from 1st world countries. Both were underpaid and in a vulnerable position.

Talent worth importing is talent worth importing with full status and no strings attached.

No. The H1B debate is about creating an easy to exploit underclass. Even the "talented types" get abused by corporations. Corporations get a free pass to rape pillage and plunder because that's just (Ayn Rand) trendy these days.

Corporations want people that are easy to exploit. People with full legal status are harder to abuse. They also have higher expecations and higher overhead.

I wouldn't even go that far. In all of the locations I looked at where I have some knowledge of the going rates, that data actually showed that the H1-Bs are on the low end of the scale.

This data doesn't appear to be anything to brag about really.

Well, the idea of taking at least one day off every 7 is a pretty old one. I am sure it's not limited to one particular nation state or culture.

It's a pleasant fantasy that you can drive labor indefinitely but the physical universe (and human bodies) has finite limits.

The problem with the argument is that it tries to distort the situation and ignores any useful discussion of the market value of the item in question.

What is the single value of an impression? How does that relate to the value of a single broadcast? How does that relate to the value of a single?

Most of these headlines are loud whining that depend on general innumeracy.