Ever since "digital cable" showed up years ago, people have steadily gone complacent to bullshit TV problems.

channel change lag (change the channel, count to 10, picture materialized out of pixelated garbage) - This is bullshit, VHF/netflix/hulu/hell even youtube kicks the shit out of this, it is a horrible experience
Fluxuating sound and lag when local commercial overlays are pumped into the service you already pay for, not just advertising, but also making your experience much worse, -- This is bullshit
Rebooting this bullshit machine takes 5 minutes.
What did we gain from putting up with a piece of shit hardware box to decode cable signals? A buggy as hell, Ad stuffed "guide"

This isn't unique to ATT, although their turd definitely does suck. When held to any kind of UI standard, Direct TV, Time warner, comcast, sudden-link, every single cable solution I have seen since "Digital cable" came out has been pure garbage. Bottom line, if you aren't interested in sports you are a masochist if you use Cable, and I am not convinced sports fans are anything less than masochistic, perhaps signal noise and digital picture artifacts are their fetish.

Not through a cable box. The experience is so bad that I would rather pay to stream.

If you have Uverse, pay the extra 15 dollars a month for their most crappy TV service. The TV bandwidth is through the same series of tubes, and paying their 15 dollar a month television fee removes their ability to charge you for overages. But like all ATT services, be sure to manage your own DNS settings, as their default is so horrible that all my neighbors thought their "internet was down" when it was just a DNS server from hell.

I don't actually know for sure that the TV vs Bandwidth thing is a fact, but I can tell you that I no longer get charged for overages, and my Router's stats tell me I am using more than ever, and the only change is I signed up for "limited basic" or whatever it is called + HBO (for HBO Go) and the TV receiver is sitting in shrink wrap in my closet.

+1 to the parent. Selective enforcement blows.
The saying goes: "If everyone is guilty of something, they can punish anyone for anything."

Don't like someone's youtube channel? Find a video which has a poster of Tinkerbell in the background and get Disney to DMCA
Don't like someone's racial background or religion, wait until they fail to stop 10 feet behind an intersection and give them a ticket. Search their car while you are at it
I commit thousands of crimes a year, and so do you. That isn't a problem with me or you, or even law enforcement. The letter of the law is so screwed up that there is no possible way to root out corruption and discrimination.

20 devices currently powered on PS3
5 iPads - 4 are required for kids school
3 phones
Kindle fire
kindle paperwhite
2 laptops
5 desktops
2 Roku
there are a few that have been on my wifi recently but were retired. dead laptops, old tablets, Nook, etc.

If there is one thing I have learned... it is if you have this many devices, you have to get solid router hardware, or you have to replace it every month or so. Routers that are forced to burn twice as bright, burn out twice as fast. My latest and most solid router to date is a Netgear Nighthawk.

I only get paid in money.

sincerely a dude who once had $900,000 "on paper," for 6 months in 1999.

sure, those are the Hugo award rules. The words themselves can mean different things to different communities, but for Hugo, they have a specific quantitative meaning.

On the official site

When Google offered me a job, I could not believe how little they wanted to pay me. 67% of what I was making at a megabank doing a small amount of very high level innovative stuff, but mostly brain-dead SOAP integrations and listening to conference calls.

That is why I laugh when I get a recruiter or ex-coworker that tells me I should go work at amazon or yahoo or netflix. The bigger the name, the bigger the h1bribe pool, the lower the salary.

Short story under 7,500 words
Novelette 7,500 and 17,500 words
Novella 17,500 and 40,000 words
Novel 40,000 +

I know you were trying to be cheeky, but there is a specific answer to your question.

Those poor ex-visual basic programmers have suffered through strong typing for too long.

you have to follow director/producers like you do with Hollywood movies. You can be reasonably sure a movie that contains "Spielberg" in the credits will be watchable... Watch Anything by Ken Burns and you won't be sorry. Almost all are available on Amazon Prime Instant video too.

If Gartner is talking about it, you know it is only hype.

It is on a graph so it must be true!

Could you make a heat map or a spider graph to show me more??

DNLA sucks. I can run a DNLA server (plex or windows media, doesn't matter) on a pretty awesome box and it will still suck. Transcode beforehand to h264 aac MP4 and you can play it on lots more devices, and you don't run into problems on the server side with multiple clients like you do with DNLA... but you do have to set up a webserver of some kind (although NAS often comes with a simple http server nowadays, and my router can do it too)
As much as we all hate to admit it, home computers are STILL not really up to transcoding on the fly for multiple clients (or sometimes even single clients).

Plus if you just go ahead and transcode beforehand, you can play the file in a browser, (including xbone), ipad, android, Roku, an ancient PC or whatever.

about 10 years ago I was looking forward to a time when I didn't have to pre-transcode... and I assumed it was 10 years off... now I would guess we are about 10 years off from that point.

Applicant Tracking System - This is the buzzword for an "apply online" type thing. I work for one of the big ones.

Here are some excuses
1) Employers can get sued if it isn't done a certain way. All of the laws are based on horrible paper applications.
2) Employers are scared of "the cloud" so you have to fill out a new application every time you apply to a new job even though the last 10 places you applied were using the same software
3) The perspective employees "candidates" are not the customer, the HR Director is the customer.
4) Statistically, longer, harder application processes result in higher employee retention rates.

that last one is a big one. My software can do all kinds of pre-employment testing for all kinds of things... skills, personality, mental alertness, etc.
The longer the testing process, the more "candidates" quit before completing. HOWEVER, the longer the testing process, the more likely an employee will be successful at their job.... To put it frankly, if you will wade through the shit to get hired, you will wade through it to stay employed. It doesn't even statistically matter what the results of the test were. Simply testing for anything at all will reduce employee turnover. The same can be said for unwieldy applications. If a candidate is not serious about filling out an application, they will not be serious about work either.

That said... I promise our applications are better than most, at least our javascript works, and progress is automatically saved... Still it all sucks (blame the lawyers), we just try to suck less.

it sounds dumb, but I thought FarCry 3 did a really good job in building this kind of "feeling"
it is a psudo-open world which hints that you are on a pacific theater island long forgotten by governments (and since taken over by drug runners) after WW2. You find fortified caves with decayed weaponry, bunkers, etc. You get the feeling you described... except with 'the requisite splosions and video game stuff

I am not meaning to trivialize what you are taking about, but you can get a small taste of what you describe in a fantasy video game, and I enjoyed it coming through that lens.