I'm not sure "grandma" is synomous with senior citizens, but I guess it's as close as we're going to get real data on.

But either way, even if they "aged into being a senior citizen" ... there's still more of them using the Internet than not. Yes, they are often terrified of viruses and the like, and if they aren't they should be ... and I recall fixing up my mother in law's computer on a regular basis because it was riddled with crap ... but she still used it. She loved it.

And the "riddled with crap" problem isn't restricted to senior citizens. My children's computers have similar problems, and that's why I refuse to even let them use mine and set them up with their own ...

That said, if I had it all to do again today ... I might have set my mother in law up with a Chromebook or tablet or something instead, something that's pretty resistant to all the crap. I think it would do most of the stuff she wanted to do. My kids are digital natives and they want more than a tablet or Chromebook will provide -- but even so, that covers much of what they want too.

Many "grandmas" have embraced the Internet.

For example, this study from two years ago says that more than half of senior citizens now use it. They often don't know how to use it well, granted, but they're using it. And many of them *do* know how to use it well.

There's a difference between blindly trusting random crap you find on the Internet and not ever using it at all.

At least in my circles, the truly smart people fit into neither category. That said, if you must pick one or the other ... the latter is preferable.

But that's a false dichotomy ... even better is being able and willing to find things on the Internet, but having the wisdom to tell what's crap and what might be crap (and therefore needs to be confirmed) and what's probably accurate (but keep in mind, it still might not be.)

Let me explain it then ...

You've got this term "liberals". This term is expected to describe some group of people -- either you've labelled people with this term, other people have labelled people with this term, or maybe people have labelled themselves with this term ... it doesn't matter.

And you're now surprised that people identified by this term do things that seem contradictory or mutually exclusive?

Well, that's easy to explain ... this group is full of individuals with their own beliefs and goals. You or others have thrown them all into this bucket called "liberals" but that doesn't magically make them all behave the same. The reality is, even among "liberals" there is a wide range of beliefs, and when you say "get all upset" and "at the same time attack" -- you're generally talking about different individuals.

Individuals are often hypocrites, yes, but "liberals" (or "conservatives", or members of any other group) are not hypocrites simply because one individual does one thing and another individual does a contradictory thing.

Not surprising -- gasoline has a higher energy content than ethanol -- 34 vs 24 MJ/L.

So you really are getting less energy when you buy a gallon of E10 or E15 vs. a gallon of pure gasoline.

I've currently got VoIP through Google Voice. I paid $20 one time to port my number over and no other fees. Service has been perfect, using an OBI box to handle it.

Alas, google is discontinuing this any day now. But it was a great deal.

$7 in 1997 seems too cheap.

Did you get metered service back then? I remember that being an option where you only got X calls for the month and that reduced the price by like 75%.

Of course, even then you had to not pay extra for caller ID or touch tone (really? touch tone was extra?!?!?!) to get it that cheap. I suspect that there is some change in service between these two figures.

Sure, but I'm not sure that I'd call their use of Gamespy back in the day as a mistake.

Instead, it was a business decision with benefits (they don't need to roll their own and it already enjoyed a large customer base) and risks (the service might go away or be changed.)

Had they they benefits of your 20/20 hindsight, they might have made a different decision, but given the information that they had at the time ... it sounds like a good decision. And really, even if they'd known that the service was going away in 2014, they might have still made the same decision -- Gamespy served a need, and for a long while it served that need better than anything else available.

Nice combination of loaded question and strawman.

EA is incompetent because they didn't write Gamespy's servers for them in such a way to make them easy to migrate? Nevermind that the 1) EA didn't write them at all, and 2) the servers don't even need migrating -- the problem is that Gamespy is turning them off, presumably because they're not making them money any more.

Maybe EA made a mistake back when in actually using Gamespy ... but at the time, Gamespy was quite popular, and if this was a mistake, it was a mistake made by many companies.

These games use Gamespy's servers to find other users who want to play, then once found the computers involved talk amongst themselves. EA isn't running servers for these games that I know of, but even if they did ... Gamespy is still being used to find other users.

With Gamespy disappearing, EA can't just "migrate its servers to another host" to fix the problem. They have to update all the games and release patches, mucking with code that they haven't touched in many years. All this for a game that barely sells any copies at all any more.

In this case, I think EA is making a wise business decision. So no, in this case, EA is not incompetent.

It doesn't take a "megacorp" to need to go to all that trouble.

Even a relatively small company is likely to go through a similar process when their entire company depends on this system and it's complicated enough to span multiple computers. They probably won't have a dedicated team for it (and note that anything that requires a dedicated team is not pocket change, even for a megacorp) but it still requires a lot of resources -- it's usually way more than just rsyncing some stuff around, though if the OS is *nix, there's likely to be some use of rsync in there somewhere.

You really don't have a valid point, as the point you're trying to make doesn't even apply to the situation we're discussing at all, because EA doesn't own Gamespy's servers. What EA would need to do here is pay programmers to pull their old game source code out of mothballs and update them to support something other than Gamespy -- and this is likely not a trivial matter at all, and needs to be repeated for each game. Games that aren't making EA more than a tiny bit of money any more.

And don't forget that the hardware itself may be compromised.

... and this has already happened, with new stuff coming to light all the time.

And so far, most people don't really seem to care. Not enough to do anything about it, anyways.

1) who knows how far NSA has its fingers into everything. If they've hacked the voting machines ... perhaps they *can* control who we vote for.

2) it doesn't have to be the NSA. They may have the most resources and the most support from our government, but China could do similar things. And the part about getting back doors into open source software doesn't require a government agency at all.

The most recent poster child of vulnerabilities that nobody noticed was of course Heartbleed, but who knows how many other problems either 1) have been detected but not reported to anybody, or 2) were deliberately added but made to look benign? And it's always possible that the vulnerabilities aren't where you think they are -- for example, the idea of hacking the C compiler to detect when it's compiling /bin/login and adding a back door if it is is decades old, and it's only one of oodles of possible scenarios.

You can't trust open source either.

Devices like these often have "binary blobs" that aren't open source and could contain backdoors (one of the reasons RMS has been rallying against them, but probably not the primary reason), but even more fundamentally than that, it would be naive to assume that the NSA can't hire programmers to contribute to these projects and that they can't be good enough at what they do to make a backdoors that would pass a code review without being detected.

That said, at least with open source you have the chance to find such things, so there is that. But either way ... I think we're screwed.

Again, by your definition, in the real world ... almost nothing is programmed correctly.

And I imagine that Gamespy is far more than a single server. The server side is probably at least a rack of servers, with databases and who knows what else. And it's owned by a totally different company than EA, a company that wants to shut it down (probably because it doesn't make them any money) so it's not just a matter of "migrating a server".

Companies often spend weeks planning migrations of their services, and often the migration itself takes dozens of people weeks to complete. They often test their migrations on totally separate hardware just to make sure they understand all of the issues that might come up and make sure they can overcome them.

And even with all that planning and testing and redundancy ... they often still screw something up.

Blame it on being programmed poorly if you want ... but it's reality.