This is one of the reasons I don't plan on buying any current gen consoles.

Not only that, but on the WiiU front, Nintendo has released the first game I might actually be interested in for the WiiU, but I'm not about to shell out a bunch of money just for one game.

To add to this, the WiiU's other big upcoming title (Smash Bros.) is also going to be on the 3DS... which nearly all my friends already have. As opposed to the two of them who have WiiU consoles.

You realize that the PS4 was only out for the last 6 weeks of 2013 in North America and last 5 weeks in Europe? And wasn't out in Japan until February 2014?

In the US, the government (the National Science Foundation specifically) ran the Internet backbone through April 30, 1995. Then it got privatized... which was a mistake.

It kind of annoys me that the Vita TV never reached north America. The Vita games I'm interested in don't actually need touch controls and in Japan its like half the price of the Vita itself.

I did a few shenanigans here and there. Most were just weird things though.

I do remember accidentally making a command attached to a room that would essentially delete your inventory if you were a wizard because it turns out there was an admin command with the same name. And another that would fill up your inventory with undroppable items.

Oh, and I can't forget the rooms that moved you automatically between them in a circle so fast that you had to spam directions and hope you exited to a room that was outside the circle of spinning rooms.... it was supposed to move you from room to room every 2 seconds or so (to simulate a giant spinning gear in a clock tower), not every .2 seconds or whatever it was doing... whoops.

Then again, I suppose I should have actually learned C before monkeying around with LPC... this was back when I was in my early teens and my only programming experience at that time was BASIC.

Oh god, I haven't done coding for LP mud stuff in almost 20 years... while I don't remember doing any crazy shenanigans like that (although I should have seeing as how my brother was also a wizard on the same mud), I do remember making some interesting oopsies.

I never did get back into it after mud ownership passed to a new person, who didn't make backups, and the guy hosting the mud lost his temper and deleted the whole thing.

Except that's exactly what Apple claimed in court in the Apple v. Samsung cases.

All hail Dollah!

If this was true, it certainly isn't as of May 2010, when HL2 was updated to the then-latest Source version so it could be ported to Mac. Like all of Valve's games, HL2 and its episodes are SteamWorks games and require Steam to function.

It helps that Steam doesn't need to validate games every time you play them. I think it validates them once a month.

It looks like Valve finally managed to iron out Steam's inability to switch to Offline mode if an Internet connection isn't present when Steam starts, too... so you should be able to play installed games if your connection goes offline.

There have only been a minor handful of widespread issues with Steam's system, the most notable being Half-Life 2's launch... in 2004.

Now, if only they could invest in better infrastructure for their Friends service and matchmaking systems (affects TF2 MvM, CSGO, and DOTA2) so they wouldn't go down 2-7 times a week...

I think people forget that GNU has their own communications library for secure sockets... [url=http://www.gnutls.org/]GnuTLS[/url].

I know why OpenBSD won't use it (because it's LGPL), but why won't anyone else?

So, I'm surprised no one has come up with this term yet to describe the vision of the FCC: Net Neuterality.

I'm sure it has Bob Barker's support.

...and cable lines, since you seem to be forgetting that the cable providers are also telecoms.

Created Microsoft, no.

From what I've heard (I think the source was Cringely's Accidental Empires / Triumph of the Nerds), the US government mandated that IBM couldn't create its own chips or operating system for its upcoming line of personal computers due to its monopoly position in the mainframe/minicomputer market.

So, IBM went to this company named "Intel" and licensed their 8088 and 8086 processors for use in it.

IBM also went to Microsoft and licensed this product called "DOS" as their operating system... which Microsoft in turn purchased from Seattle Computer Products.

So, while the government didn't create Microsoft, they created the Wintel monopoly that existed for 20ish years prior to the rise of smartphones.

Why? Surely the shaders remain stored in the video card's memory and don't directly interact with the host OS.

We do have common baselines of GLSL and HLSL, but those are converted into hardware specific instructions on the card itself.