I don't doubt that it's possible, and that it may be a common occurrence on some machines, but it happened rarely enough on my system that I don't have a clear memory of it happening (although even my Win98 install was put on top of DOS).

I remember being able to exit to DOS voluntarily, I just don't remember the entirety of Windows crashing and dropping be back. I've got a computer installed with DOS and Windows 98. It still has the option to exit to DOS. I suppose that it was Windows ME that removed that option, but I've never used ME; its reputation preceded it.

Using Windows 95 and 98, I don't remember it throwing me back out into DOS (or if it did, it was a relative rarity on my machine). What I remember is a BSOD popping up, but giving me the option to press a key to attempt to continue, sometimes 15 times in a row before the computer went back to working again (well, until I retried whatever had just failed and got another flurry of errors).

Well...either that, or you got a message saying that you needed to lower/raise the bit depth of your display, enable/disable some memory manager, or something similar. I kind of missed Windows 3.1 too, until I started playing with it in a VM and kept running into all the antiquated bits that I'd forgotten about...then it would make one of the classic "ding" sounds, and I'd forgive it in a wash of nostalgia.

Right, I get that, and I should've been clearer in how I wrote my comment. It was more of a rhetorical question to acknowledge that the system that I described is a little round-about, and that if the use-case was more limited, there would be better answers for a subset of what you want to do.

I've been playing with OBS "Open Broadcaster Software" streaming video from my PC to a Raspberry Pi. OBS is designed for live-streaming games, but seems to work well for general video as well. In my experience, there's about a half-second of lag, so it's terrible for UI, but the transmission is smooth, so actual video playback is nice.

You should be able to simultaneously run a remote desktop session or VNC on the Pi to control the UI in a relatively lag-free way, hit a key to start streaming, and enjoy the video. Of course, this whole set-up only makes sense if you don't have a smart tv, blu-ray player that supports streaming, etc. Otherwise, why not just use what you already have and set up network shares on the PC?

I played a good bit of Arkham Asylum by streaming it from the PC in my office to my laptop in the family room. There was a definite reduction in video quality, but I never had any serious problems with lag. Some was noticeable, but it wasn't that bad, and I really stopped paying attention after a couple of minutes. Obviously, anything that really relies on millisecond timing will be impacted (fighting games, online FPS, and so on), but I was impressed with the experience overall.

I'm not against amending laws as improvements are found, I'm against changing laws that should already cover some specific antisocial behavior so that they basically list off all the tools that can be used to facilitate that behavior (in this case, adding "using a drone or UAV" specifically into the law).

It can't be as vague as just saying "peeping", but it can be as vague as describing the behavior that it's meant to prevent, in as much detail as necessary to be clear what is or isn't covered by the law, and attaching punishments to variations in the situation, if necessary.

I was talking about direct injury by blinding with those examples. Other situations would be covered by other laws, of course. Causing a distraction in traffic leading to injury isn't a new situation; the fact that a laser was used isn't directly relevant to the situation.

And the same to you =) My point was that in my area, where they weren't outlawed, they still don't commonly cause problems, despite being cheap and widely available. It's a proof by example that a ban isn't the only effective way to handle abuse of a tool.

Then it's a shoddily-written law that targets the methods of doing the action, without addressing the action itself. Actions should be punishable; methods should not be, unless there's a special reason to change the punishment based on the method used to perform the action.

If I were a lawyer, or otherwise versed in the appropriate legal terminology, I would've used it. As it is, I stuck to vernacular English.

I'm not talking about penalties. I'm talking about a threshold of occurrences before I think something should be done about the problem.

Bullshit; a law exists. Assault and battery would both apply, and possibly aggravated assault, to emphasize the life-changing damage that blinding someone would cause.

That doesn't seem to be true, at least in the U.S. Lasers of various powers are widely available. The change, as I perceive it, is that the novelty value wore off, and most people in society began to recognize that using a dangerous tool as a toy is irresponsible. That being said, I can still go to a pet store and buy a class-1 laser as a cat toy. I can buy a class-3 in a store, marketed for pointing to stars.

I don't "let" my family do anything; I give my input, they make their choices. You have a very immature conception of what "respect" means, as well as what "a shit OS" is. An OS is a tool to run software. If an OS doesn't run the software that you need, then it's an ill-suited tool for the purpose. Windows runs the software that they need, and is the only OS that does. Thanks for the input though, this has been a wonderful, enlightening, and useful exchange of opinions =p

Fuck the Xbox One too. After the shit with the GUI change on the XBox 360, I'm not going for another bait-and-switch. They've lost my business, just as surely as Sony has. I feel like Nintendo's going in a direction I'm not interested in either, so I'm sitting at least one generation of consoles out until some things change direction.

Sony has some wonderful products. Shame that the company has made some of the decisions that it has.

As far as an OS, Linux covers all of the software that I need and most of the software that I want. Maybe I could do the work to get the rest running through Wine, but who has the time for that? I don't, so my various machines will keep their Windows partitions....but like the consoles, I'm sitting out of the upgrade cycle until they're actually selling a product that I'm interested in buying.

The massive invasion of privacy is already going on; one of the places that I considered buying the item from is the one that told the advertisers what kind of thing I was searching for (that, or I suppose that maybe there's a cookie in the browser, and the ad guys were told indirectly. I haven't been curious enough to figure out the exact mechanism for the transfer of information).

Harassment is harassment. Peeping is peeping. I don't see the point of singling out one particular technology that can be abused. Kind of like how fraud is fraud; I don't think there should be a separate consideration for fraud occurring over phone lines versus data lines versus in-person. The original law should be made broad enough to cover all kinds of fraud to which it's meant to apply; same thing with ways that people can abuse toy helicopters and the like.

I'd put different thresholds on imaginary privacy issues and safety issues likely to result in death. It's like putting a ban on walkie-talkies in the 90s because you could eavesdrop on cordless phone calls with them, versus issuing citations for not wearing a seatbelt in a car. They aren't really comparable situations. One is rare, of limited scope, and isn't likely to hurt anyone. The other is a preventative action that lowers traffic fatalities.

No idea. Pseudoephedrine is controlled (as a precursor to amphetamine), and there are probably other substances that are, but I don't even know what isopropyl alcohol would be useful for that ethanol wouldn't be.

I have, with the exception of games and other programs that don't have Linux equivalents.

Because they want to do things that they can't on non-Windows OSes, the problems I have with Windows don't bother them, and because I respect my family enough to not change their computers to suit me better while making them suit their purposes more poorly.