OK, cool. Keep that attitude, and maybe we can stop "usability" from getting in the way of actually getting things done. Lots of simple things are easier on Windows than on Linux. Problem is, when you want to do the unusual things, that's when it gets impossible. Linux? Of course it's possible. Spend enough time, and you can swap any part out for something you like more. There are a dozen ways to do most things, and you get to research and choose which one you like. I like that. Now, if I'm going to play a game...reboot into Windows. Lowest common denominator OS for a lowest common denominator activity, and it works beautifully for that (unless the dev used a 32-bit number to represent the RAM in your machine, and the game refuses to start with your -{big_number} amount of RAM).

Hyperbole. Of course you can, if you design the software to handle that. One of my employer's pieces of software is compiled on SLES10 (from 2006) and runs on current Linux distros without a hitch. Code from 5 years ago compiled with gcc 2.95, and I'm sure that I could have that running both on a Linux release from 2000 and one from 2014.

Now, if you've got a programmer that doesn't have that as their specific goal in how they compile and package the software, then there will be a problem. With non-commercial software that's distributed by the developer as source anyhow, what's the reason for them to take enough care in packaging it to support forward-compatibility? If their software is popular enough, they know it'll be recompiled for inclusion in every new distro's repository anyhow, so they won't focus on supporting the goal of wide compatibility of the binary.

Netflix would be streaming a video that may take 4x the bandwidth and 4x the storage for them to keep around, so I'd be paying them to do more.

My ISP is being paid to transfer a capped volume of data to me at as close as possible to the speed that I'm paying for. If they increase that cap or increase my max transfer rate, then we can start talking about them getting paid more as well. Otherwise, it's not an equivalent comparison.

4.6Mbps was the world average speed in Q1 2014, as measured by Akamai. The US average was 11.4Mbps, but sure, you can make up whatever numbers you want.

http://www.akamai.com/dl/akamai/akamai-soti-q214-infographic.pdf

It looks like you also draw the individual sprites that make up the blocks, so there might be a 2-block "creation" that's a motorcycle for your character to ride. It's all in 2D anyhow, so 80 blocks goes much further than if you had to account for a 3rd dimension.

The Xbox 360 and One both have access to Internet Explorer, so that's not as far-fetched as you'd think.

All megafauna have a combination of adaptive traits for their environment, some of which may be traits that we'd categorize under "intelligence". Intelligence isn't a scalar value. We might be able to measure its components by providing tasks that measure the presence and efficiency of specific capabilities of the brain and call the geometric distance from the 0-point "intelligence", but different animals will fall within different places in that multi-dimensional space. Some animals will have better scores than humans, in some dimensions. I'd posit that humans would have the greatest geometric distance from "0", though.

So, might as well use "her's" and "he's". Otherwise, you're being inconsistent and "unnatural". And remember to perfectly switch back to the consensus-grammar when not communicating in a casual context.

No, it just bit her.

I used to complain about it because I didn't want to be in the driver's seat all the time. I wanted women to approach me as often as I approached them. That's still what I'd want out of dating.

I've never understood why some men want control all of the time. Give it a rest every now and then.

"Angry wankery" or not, my point was that the story wasn't primarily about sports, and that discussions of legal technicalities would fit under the banner "News For Nerds" just fine. Stupid discussion is still discussion, it just isn't reasonable debate.

Because it's primarily a story about modernizing FCC regulations, not primarily a story about sports themselves. I doubt that a sports site would be as interested in the legal aspects of the change; they'd be more interested in the practical effects (i.e. that they get to watch more sports). Discussing legal ramifications of a regulatory change seems pretty nerdy to me.

Well, there are plenty of football fans (and sports fans, in general) that will pay $$$ to watch a single game, and many more that like watching it on TV enough to schedule their lives around when the football game will be shown. Myself, I'll watch a game every now and then, and I have a general idea of how well the teams that other people in my family root for are doing.

As for whether fans would follow their games onto cable, in the cases that they don't already have cable or satellite, I'm sure that's a question of statistics. Some percentage will follow the sport to cable, some percentage will do more illegal online streaming, some percentage will just google the score after the game, some percentage will just stop watching. "Football fans" are different people, so they'll react differently.

True. In cases where mass shipment isn't also feasible, the economy of scale hits a bottleneck.

I think you're missing the point. Mirix was trying to say that injection molding will always be cheaper, for mass production ($5 being roughly the cost of a mass-produced, injection-molded chair). 3D printing will never match the per-unit price of mass-producing items, but it *will* (and has already started to) make the production of small-run items and prototypes much, much cheaper.