Windows 3.0 was the first version I used to any significant degree. It looked so high-tech, though to 2015 eyes it looks like something from the old stone age. It did some cool stuff. It also gave us General Protection Faults, the predecessor to the Blue Screen Of Death.

For a long time I recommended Windows 98 to non-technical users. Some people claimed there was a USB implementation for Windows 95, but after careful study I have come to the conclusion they were mistaken. My first exposure to Windows 95 was an early alpha (I worked for the evil empire at the time) that crashed and required reformatting the hard disc after attempting to reconfigure the mouse.

I was intrigued by some of the other options out there. I sent my resume to Quarterdeck - I thought DESQview was neat - but only got a thanks-but-no-thanks postcard back.

...laura

Now for a Jamming Gripper that works...in space!

What if it's a smear job on Take Two? At taxpayer expense?

1. This isn't at taxpayer expense. It is at television owners' expense. Only people with televisions have to pay the television license that funds the BBC, not all taxpayers. To conflate the two is disingenuous.

2. So what if it is inaccurate or a smear job. That is part of having a free press: the right to get it wrong (and if you do, be eviscerated and/or humiliated by everyone else). The BBC has a very good record and deservedly good reputation, because despite the occasional imperfection, by and large their reporting and documentaries are first rate.

This lawsuit is an attempt to undermine the free press and apply inappropriate pressure to the editorial process, and frankly, Rockstar and Take Two deserve a severe smackdown for trying to do so, irrespective of the program's content.

In a nutshell, what they're saying is:

"If we can't control your editorial content in reporting about or dramatizing our behavior, we're going to sue you in an attempt to make it not worth your while to report on or dramatize our behavior"

Fuck them. I hope the BBC has the backbone to stick up to this sort of corporate bullying. If the show isn't flattering to Take Two, they can suck it up like anyone else.

I agree. It may only take a few seconds to google, but that's a few seconds unnecessarily wasted because the summary poster was too lazy to provide a definition (though to be fair, with as inaccurate as some summaries have been lately, this isn't the worst offense by far).

And in exchange for higher taxes on driving, they get the privilege of providing Oregon information on how much they travel and WHERE THEY TRAVEL.

It doesn't have to be that way. There could simply be an annual check of your odometer when you get your annual emissions check, with a bill due for the miles driven in the last year * rate per mile, payable in 60 days, with a slightly higher rate if you'd like to pay in installments. No need for GPS tracking at all.

Of course, they'll no doubt push in the direction of GPS tracking because big brother likes his data, but really, we could have per mile taxation without big brother intrusions if we as a society would stand up and demand it.

Fiber is amply fast.

The bottleneck is the cavalier attitude of web designers to network resources. You do not need to load 25 different URLs (DNS lookups, plus autoplay video and all the usual clickbait junk) to show me a weather forecast. Or a Slashdot article, for that matter...

...laura

Iridium Corporation has been healthy since the bankruptcy (amazing what ditching your debts can do...). They've already launched some replacement satellites and are planning to replace the whole network over the next several years.

You can definitely do this (I have, back when it was a lot harder) but I'd suggest picking a PvE server and a stealthy class like Rogue or Druid if you plan to explore areas significantly beyond your character's level. Stay out of enemy cities and give mobs with skull icons a wide berth and you can explore a lot of the world with a low level character. As beautiful as the zones are, though, I'm not sure you'll keep busy for more than a week or three *just* exploring.

On the other hand, there's really no grind to speak of until you approach/reach the level cap. Pick up a questline and follow it, run some dungeons (there's so many at low levels you don't need to do the same one twice) and you'll level up extremely fast and with very little boredom. If you're a casual player, the rest system will make your leveling go even faster. There's even a class they added recently, the 'Monk', which gets an big boost to leveling, and their refer-a-friend program bonus makes leveling just ridiculous. And if level capping faster than most single player games wasn't enough, they've started offering a huge boost when you buy the current expansion, so you can start a character at close to the maximum level, ready for almost anything in the game.

Of course things get dull again not long after you hit the level cap, so you might also consider rotating MMOs; there are tons of them these days; play one till you get bored or hit the "grind starts here" level cap, then switch to another; when you get back round to the first it should have new content to keep the grind away a while longer.

Also, would he rather Firefox baked EME into their own code instead of using an Adobe plugin?

...and was he just as mad at Apple a few years back for *not* including a proprietary Adobe plugin with their mobile browser?

People cheat at every game, because there are always people who want more reward for less effort. WoW was actually a lot less grind-y than other MMOs when it came out, and it's driven the competition to be more friendly to casual players. It's been some time since I played, but from what I hear they're still making efforts to make things easier for casual players, and if you're not obsessed with minmaxing and getting rare stuff you could certainly explore and play for years without ever grinding content. With upwards of 10,000 quests and continents bigger than many games' worlds, it absolutely puts the 'massive' in MMO.

If you *are* grinding, I'm sorry, but Blizzard isn't forcing you to aim for piles of gold, rare mounts, or heroic gear sets. *You* want to be a top tier player with better stuff than everyone else, but then you complain about having to work harder than other players to get it. It is hard because you want it to be hard, it is a chore to keep the 'riff-raff' out, so you can show off what a special snowflake you are. If the stuff was easy to get...you'd want other stuff.

Now I won't argue that Blizzard is guilty of exploiting players' OCD; there's always something you really want tantalizingly within reach. It's very much a 'one more quest...one more battle...one more level' addictive sort of experience. It's well balanced, in that lots of things seem to be *just* worth the effort to aquire them, and once you do, there's more...and more...and more. Addictiveness is of course not a bad quality in entertainment, like a novel you can't put down, but if you can't keep in control and balance it with your life, or have to resort to exploits that make the game worse for everyone, then it's simply not for you. Sorry!

"James Bond has a license to kill, does he not?"

"That's right."

"Shoot someone, get off scot-free?"

"Yes, why?"

"So then, why do computer crimes carry a worse sentence than murder?"

There's tons of extant hardware from the late Core 2 era which would still be perfectly serviceable were they not loaded with XP (obsolete) or Vista (slow and obsolete). Microsoft charges so much for standalone licenses that you might as well buy a new PC these days.

I don't have much sympathy for pirates either, but this also means millions of potential PCs for elderly/low income/third world families will now be just that much e-waste.

And yes, I know Linux is still free, but I've yet to find a distro that the average user can accomplish more with than browsing web sites.

It's a good thing that cows don't eat.

"I use electricity, and electricity has killed people, so I'm a murderer, and even if I kill myself others will use electricity at my funeral, which is more murder, so I might as well go around shooting people".

You can always tell when somebody starts with a conclusion and works backwards.