- "Unlimited" plans with traffic limits
- Net-neutrality issues: deep packet inspection low-prioritizing torrent and SSL traffic
- Asking for money from 3rd parties to allow customers to reach them

All these "problems" are non-existent in countries with decent Internet connection. American ISPs provide crappy connections at high prices and they struggle to find new ways of scamming the poor customer, instead of upgrading their extremely old tech.

In my country you can pay 15 bucs a month for an external 1 Gbps line, and the provider will not say anything even if you do 500 TB of traffic each month.

The solution is easy, and it was in front of your eyes starring at you for more than 20 years: proper regulation of monopolies.

No. The majority of accounts are trivial crap that nobody cares if it goes down in flames. Let the user choose.

Because password strength is the most important attack vector ever to threaten the security of our systems. Because nobody has ever implemented throttling. [/sarcasm]

How about this Pavlovian technique:
- every time a sysadmin puts a strong password requirement, kick him in the balls
- every time a sysadmin accepts simple passwords or completely skipping auth for trivial stuff that nobody ever care to "hack", give him his salary

[...mutters something about 80 accounts for a person, from which 78 are trivial accounts, while searching for a sysadmin to beat to death ...]

Smartphones are not tied to contracts. They've never been. There is not even one mobile provider on this planet that will refuse to hook your phone to their network because you didn't bought your phone from them!

Those "best explanations" are complete bogus, simple excuses for stupidity.

I'm at the 4th smartphone over 7 years, none of them came with any contract.

You have to understand your mobile service provider is not a phone manufacturer. They will never sell you a phone - they will try to sell you their services.
But there will always be idiots who are willing to pay double/triple masked behind "special deals", just so they don't put the whole money at the start and live under the impression they paid less. Every human on this plant wants stuff for free and the large majority end up growing old without realizing there is no such thing. And then go on the Internet to complain, like Bennett did. If you did that there is none to blame but yourself. Its not Nokia/Google/Apple's fault, its not Verizon/AT&T's fault, its not Obama's fault, its not the entire world that is wrong. Its your fscking fault!

Nice way to catch 146 companies that want to do heavily illegal-everywhere stuff.
The entire world will look away when they get bombed down to the Pacific depths.

One exception: maybe the Chrome one is decent.
But most of them start updating - making your system/app unusable - exactly when you need the system/app the most (because nobody keeps the computer running at 3am).

So people set it on manual. Additionally, a thousand vendors make a gazillion background auto updater services that run all the time, wasting memory, CPU and IO. Then we find ways to take down those pesky background services too.

And then we forget(or low prioritize) to update. And we are vulnerable.

Lets stop pointing fingers and fix the update system - find ways to make autoupdate smooth, viable and with ZERO disruption to the running system. And make it not optional anymore. Then everyone will be forever up to date.

There should be a limit on anything. Too often tiny updates can be annoying and downright disruptive.

Everything is poison, there is poison in everything. Only the dose makes a thing not a poison.
Paracelsus

Is it just me or there aren't many companies hiring software developers in areas that have warm climates?

You are exaggerating. Astroturfing is a WAY more serious manifestation.

It looks to me that in this case they are just begging you to support the product you are working on. There is no way for them to verify you actually did, but maybe (big maybe) the company doing better will reflect on you as well, so it may be in your own interest to show a bit of support. People do this ALL the time, its both legally and morally correct, and its still just a choice for you, they are not forcing you to do this.

People are doing some really crazy fucked up shiat out there, this is nothing. Nothing. Do whatever you want, and create less drama.

Someone, please, just think of the poor children running SCADA systems!
Oh wait, its only Windows XP
Oh wait, its actually in 2 years
Oh wait, its just support

Seriously, do we need a "Windows XP is gone and the world is already burning" scare-article posted every month on Slashdot? For the entire period of 7 years of pre-announced end of support for an ancient OS? This shouldn't even be on idle. Is this a tech site or little Suzie's shopping ground for pink dresses?

After spending thousands of euros on many various cooling systems across the years, I can tell you which one is the most effective:
The good old home air conditioning.

Perhaps reducing the power consumption may beat the environment as the number 1 factor. We don't need more and more sophisticated cooling systems, we need less power consumption and good environment.

Visual Studio 2010 install initial start-up time:
- without McAfee: 15 seconds
- with McAfee running: 4 minutes
Those are real numbers measured yesterday. I had to disable the bloody thing(6 services bloatware!) or I would spend 3 days installing Visual Studio.

So let me fix that for you:
When they are not killing your computer, they're figuring out how to kill people. :)

Related articles, next, previous, most discussed, this day on slashdot, all unnecessary cross-linking for an obvious reason.

Slashdot looks like a SEO link farm these days. Its simply disgusting.

The human race have a disgusting surplus of resources. 2% of us can and are providing for the rest of 98%.
We can multiply by a factor of 50 and do nothing, just get more fat and find more entertainment.

Also, anything can happen in 15 to 20 years, its bullshit prediction.

Indeed. And its not only games, the applications follow already. Operating systems are next.

The reason is simple: online requirement is just a too effective anti-piracy measure to not do it. Those 5% unlucky bastards without Internet can go screw themselves.

Let me give you an example:
Do you think Blizzard's initial success was because of their high quality blablabla? They make compromises just like every other company out there. There was plenty of good video games creators at that time, but most of them didn't bothered to implement a good online service protection. Their success was based on the fact that to play on the Battle.net 1.0 you needed to buy the original game, there was no way to bypass that protection - if you shared your unique CDKEY they disabled it. Sure, after a few years, pirated servers started to appear, but even now, the main original servers is where the real action is about. Pirated servers are slow/unstable/shortlived and only a few people are online there.

In a world where any software protection gets hacked in a matter of days, this online requirement protection survived for even 15 years! One would be a fool not to do it.