+1

I never understood the diet hate. Personally I cant stand the regular stuff for the syrupy taste and mouth/throat feel, plus that coated mouth after taste. Its also why I prefer pepsi in general since even diet coke the moment it gets to a non-frigid temperature also starts to leave a funky aftertaste for me while pepsi has never done that

Same here, also in colorado, and we always get the notice we are using more than our neighbors. Our furnace and AC are brand new(well 4 years old) and both pretty high efficiency. We also only have 2 people in the house and the heat/ac arent constantly cranked all day long. So Im with you in thinking they just put that on the bill as encouragement. I also get the same drops as you, summer it says Im doing better

Computer gaming is nowhere near as bad. If you can wait 6months you get the game for 75% off+. There are plenty of games with large single player modes and I have yet to play a single game where I had to pay to play multi-player

Unless your only playing MMO's almost nothing you said about PC gaming actually applies

except his (IMHO utterly horrible) animals track copied about 3 other tracks. Electronic music in general would completely dissappear since everyone takes little bits and pieces from everyone else. House(funky especially) has been my goto genre for 15 years or more now, but they really just cant sue each other or they would all go down in flames. Hell 1/3 of all songs relesed in the past 5 years could be taken down by eric prydz for sampling his pryda snare hit straight from his track (it would be a straight look n feel type of thing), good thing he said he doesnt particularly care, he's just annoyed

Except he does license (at least the vast majority) of the tracks he 'sings' over, same goes for flo-rida. Having been to a pitbull concert(the woman dragged me there but it was actually fun) was like listening to the past 10 years of electronic music all over again. Every single one of his tracks was some popular-mildly popular house track that had been released in the previous 10-15 years. Same goes for all of flo-rida's songs. I looked them up a while back though and both of them generally pay royalties/licenses/credit/whatever since even though the majority of people out there wont recognize the tracks, they are basically taking all of them as-is to rap on top of

I get that, I mean that is what the U's are designed for. My issue with them, more the manufacturers, is that they are putting U's in non-ultrabook form factors. The only way to get non-U anymore is to buy a 'gaming' laptop which usually costs 2-3x as much as a laptop used to cost with the same processor

This

Also the games being cheaper on a PC is a huge factor if your looking at it from a gaming/price stand point. If your willing to wait 6mo you can have the same title on PC for 10-15$ or even less vs. still paying 50-60 for a console version. After a few games the price difference in hardware between a console and pc vanishes. then your left with what is still a vast cheap library of games and a piece of hardware that is incrementally upgradable

but it doesnt have to be like this, its because the manufacturers have been pushing the ultrabook class cpus into everything because they are cheap.

for example, you used to be able to get this processor in a 600-700$ laptop
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cp...

That is 3x the performance of these U series processors. It even matches my 2600k. However since the U's are much cheaper, and as stated in the summary, most users wont even know the difference since all they do is surf and watch movies

Its an embedded system, 3gb is not uncommon in the embedded space, especially when you are trying to hit a certain BOM price point

The thing that has pissed me off about the ultrabook push is that since the processors for them are cheaper than non-U processors manufacturers started putting them in almost all laptops, not just ultrabooks. The common consumer is not aware, they have no idea what the U designation on the processor means. For them though it can mean half the performance of a non-U spec'd proc.

I was attempting to buy a laptop during this transition a few years ago and eventually gave up when I could find only one out there that was still in my price range that wasnt a non-U anymore. Over the period of a month or two every manufacturer transitioned all of their models to U processors, halving the performance but at the same price, same case, same ram, etc just to feed their bottom line. Now I only see non-U's in gaming and higher priced models

The other issue that they may be facing is that they are not in control of the text to speech aspect. There are a couple vendors out there that provide this functionality, nuance being one of the large players, and most of them work in this manner with some sort of xml/json and a binary blob of the pcm data. If the vendor they are using does not support encrypted data on the server end, then there isnt much samsung can do besides going and finding one that does

big +1 to enhanced steam, adds so many useful features and allows you to remove the cruft

Its a shame steam shafted the dev, they invited him to come talk with them about features, enhancements, etc, and then basically jacked all his ideas and implemented his features 2 years after he did it and refused to offer him a job even when he was struggling to make ends meet

The good thing about this outlook app, it must interface differently than adding an exchange account in ios or android through the normal means. This app does not require any sort of locking on your end or allow your company to erase your device. I just swapped out all my email clients on my nexus5 and ipad for the outlook app first because of that, but also IMHO it works so much better then the ios mail or gmail integration

Ive done it, plenty of times. Which is one of the reasons steam shut down gifting games from russia (along with the whole currency drop thing). There were plenty of reputable russians out there, so you didnt have to deal with dodgy key sites, who would sell you the game for the russian price with a small mark up on their end. They are completely legit in the instances where games were not region locked which used to be the vast majority. Its how I got the latest civ game for 60% off for a pre-order. Russian prices are usually vastly lower than the USA pricing, i.e. GTA V is 30$ there, the latest COD was 15$ at one point

the only time its not legit is when you are required to use a vpn in order to activate your game since you are violating the TOS at that point. But to have a region non-locked game gifted to you is no way against the TOS. The reputable sellers wont sell you those games anyway since it impacts their business as well. Since you are getting the game gifted the chances of a bad key also go way down, its already in their inventory and most likely purchased directly from the store

As another reply said, go look at nuuvem, as long as a game isnt region locked to brazil (their country of origin) they have no problems selling you a game, which is usually at a vast discount because there are no issues with it, the key could from from the USA, UK, it doesnt matter, its all from the same pool at that point.

it was the jerk and the opti-grab