Steam may be DRM, but it does provide some advantages in other areas that might balance things out.

Looks like Ubisoft is again providing pritates with a great opportunity to deliver a superior product. This seems to be Ubisoft's thing. They probably love pirates, that they're being so nice them.

They're doing a lousy job of it. The US has become significantly less free over the past decade and a half. Keeping your country requires taking an interest in how your own country is run, rather than messing with how other countries are run.

You pay for the cable box? I get mine for free with the digital TV subscription. Well, I pay for the subscription of course, but if that included $10 for the box, there wouldn't be much else left for them.

I'm definitely surprised at how stupid many modern TVs are. It's trivial to include a computer in the TV. In fact, they do exactly that to create that awful menu system. Why not make it nicer and include a recorder and a standardized plugin system that your cable provider can put his cable decoding software in?

But should it be a required to join a streaming service in order to have your videos on YouTube? What about all the truly independent non-musicians that have videos on YouTube? It sounds like YouTube is making a difference between musicians and non-musicians for YouTube access.

I don't understand why 4K TVs exist before 4K monitors do. Firstly, TVs simply don't need a crazy resolution like that. Look at how long it took before HD finally took hold. Is anything actually being broadcast in 4K? And if it's impossible to get a decent signal to it, how do those 4K broadcasts end up on the TV?

You mean that we're about to destroy ourselves. That has been suggested as one of the more terrifying solutions to the Fermi Paradox.

I don't see why. Well, Dyson spheres would probably be visible, but everything else is negligible compared to the power of a star.

No, to me, the biggest part of Fermi's Paradox is: why don't we see the aliens on our own planet? If aliens are so likely, there's bound to be thousands of civilizations that are millions or billions of years ahead of us. Even if it takes thousands of years to colonize a single planet, they've had more than enough time to colonize the entire galaxy several times over. Shouldn't we at least be finding their robotic probes in orbit around our sun?

But if jythie is correct that the sun is an unusually old Population I star, then that makes it more likely that we're one of the first, and nobody got a billion year head start on us.

This is the first time I hear that our sun is unusually old for a population I star. Do you have a reference for that?

Of course it makes every kind of sense that a reasonably high amount of heavy elements is important for the development of life, but I've always assumed that there are far older population I stars than our sun. If our sun is indeed old for its metalicity, then I would actually consider that the solution to the Fermi Paradox. How many other stars in our galactic neighbourhood are as old as our sun with a similar metalicity? It's no use to keep staring at far older planets if their concentration of heavier elements is too low for life to develop.

Though of course the fact that a planet is rocky, and not just a ball of gas, is by itself a pretty clear sign that it has plenty of heavier elements.

They'd definitely go straight to prison in that case. It's hard enough to warn about serious security leaks these days without getting treated like a criminal.

These are good kids. Let's hope they get rewarded and not punished.

Is it possible that the US and UK have slightly different species of bees? Are bees used in a different manner? In a different environment?

That the problem manifests is a different manner doesn't mean there's no problem. It probably means you haven't isolated all of the variables. CCD could easily manifest differently in different species.

If a farm uses harmful pesticides, it should not be called organic. If calling it that is legal in the US, then the word has become meaningless.

"Fasci" means "group", and one of its characteristics is the organization in concentric circles around the group: a strong leader, his inner circle, the party, the people, the nation. Russia with its strong leader, politbureau, and perks for party members, was not so different. Though obviously the merger between state and corporate property was of a very different nature.

I've seen people argue very convincingly that Stalisnism was actually closer to fascism than nazism was.