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.

Steam is DRM. Steam is run by people. DRM is pure evil, thus people are pure evil. To kill DRM, we must kill people. All of them. Nuke them from orbit! With flower and chocolates, while being screwed! Someone think of the rights of our children!

Logical fallacies are fun.

How dare you bring cold hard boring facts into a scandalous funny flamebait! :)

First of all, this TV was presented in January, so this is 2 months old.

Secondly, the camera is for gesture and facial recognition, used to interact with the UI of anything that runs on the TV platform, of course including any 3rd party application(app store, hello?). Its the exact same thing as Kinect. So this is just pure tinfoilhattism.

365.24219878125

That's all, really.

You don't get it. They entire business model is about making money from copyright trolling YouTube videos with an automated software. They have no incentive whatsoever to reduce their error rate. More error = more money. Its like a money printing business.

Note that they name YouTube as a "partner". YouTube is in on this one. Advertising whores.

Its a whole new low-standards bar. The human ingeniousness for producing money from low-morale crap never cease to disgust me.

No lawsuits required:

1. Falsely report copyright infringements on YouTube for tons of videos (especially popular ones). If the posters dispute it, dispute them back.
2. Make more accounts, report a shit load more bogus infringements
3A. Profit for you. Push it until it tilts into 3B.
3B. YouTube bans all your accounts, they realize their system is not working and change it so this cannot be abused anymore. Everybody wins, you are a hero and you also made tons of money.

As a charming side effect, Ramblefish's trolling Youboob business model is out the window. This is not a problem in any way. Its a pure win-win...-win situation.