Is a useless "feature" that goes through review and testing, but is more for amusement of the coders and/or customers than for any practical purpose, not an Easter egg just because it was known by the developers who wrote and tested it?

Oh, get the stick out of your ass. A little immaturity never hurt anyone (as long as that's all it is). Put the egg through review and testing like any other feature, or write it as something impossibly simple (undocumented program flag that prints out the programmer's name or something).

Done correctly, it's no more harmful than adding any other bit of code that wasn't explicitly asked for, like extra options/modes that were useful during development and don't hurt the function of the end product.

There are "real" easter eggs in Android related to this: http://www.askvg.com/hidden-secret-easter-eggs-and-daydreams-in-google-android-devices/

Duverger's Law. Due to a (presumably) unforeseen tendency of the US voting system, there's a strong tendency toward a two-party system. In the past, there were other prominent political parties. The tendency is that a party makes a major misstep, and a new party gains popularity, replacing it. Occasionally there are groups that split off into their own movements, but most of the time they fade away or re-absorb back into one of the major parties.

That's a much better argument than the AC made, and it's a fairly valid point (depending on area, of course). It worked halfway-reasonably for me on anything that wasn't a twitch game; with that kind of thing, even the display lag of most LCD monitors can be a downside, so I'd expect cloud gaming to be out of the question, even streaming purely over the local network (like that Steam streaming capability).

If they've got to pay to get the hardware in the first place, then have to pre-pay for service, then I don't see the problem. You won't get money from the people that don't give it to you up-front, and if they take it to pawn? *Shrug* All well. The hardware has the worst margin out of the bundle anyhow, so they're doing you a favor by spreading it out so that more people can sign up for the service.

In even a halfway-civilized country? Bad parts of town are where they're likely to get more work, anyhow. They're used to it.

You're making a lot of assumptions about someone you don't know. Do you need a hug, AC? It sounds like life has treated you roughly. I'm living my hopes and dreams. If your dreams are to ridicule strangers on the internet, then I'm glad that you're doing something that you find fulfilling. Otherwise, keep your chin up, I'm sure things will work out for you somehow. Have a nice day!

Sometimes the font is unattractive, and I'm sure that Netflix would prefer to have captions that appear the same between their different offerings. Plus, it's better to have nicer text than the stuff that was optimized for display on a 480i CRT.

Hahahaha. OK, AC. You can't even put your own pseudonym to your post. I get it; it's scary. Go spend time with your "cool" people, and don't worry your little head about things beyond your ken. Laugh at the goofy nerds, and buy whatever privacy-leaking/invading shit you'd like.

And? Money is money, and there are a lot more poor people than rich ones. Unlike the car or furniture, the streaming service wouldn't even have to send out a repo man if they didn't pay, either. They'd just cut off service.

They inherited that policy from IBM. I've got an R32 from about 2003, and learned about its BIOS whitelist while researching upgrades (it was a gift, and didn't have wifi capability when I got it).

Some DVDs only provide bitmap captions, without the text encoded anywhere. In fact, more of my DVDs work that way than actually have a text CC stream. If you have a bitmap of some text, OCR is the way to go to extract it.

Kind of like furniture rental, right? You've got to provide locations close to your customers, and your prices have to reflect the additional overhead. You don't have to have lower prices *over time* as long as you have lower prices *right now*. Sell (or better, rent out) a $50 streaming stick+bluetooth gamepad, and offer subscription plans for $20/month, or something. $70 to start playing right now is easier to stomach than a minimum of $250 for a console and $20 for a game, the same way that $50/month (or whatever) for a couch is easier to stomach than $500 to buy the thing outright. It's a good idea in theory, going after the people that can afford a small-ish monthly payment, but can't (or won't) pay a larger upfront fee to actually own the system that they're using.

The first nasty thing from Sony that really stands out in my memory was the root kit in 2005. I'm sure that their history of customer-hostile amoral actions goes back farther than that, but I'm not specifically aware of what those actions were. It was before the time that I really had a reason to pay attention (since it wasn't my money that they were taking before right around that time).

My point is that there's always someone getting impacted by their first Sony Evil Action, so it's expected that every time they do something shitty, some new person is going to be surprised by them. I'm sure that they were also doing questionable things before 1992...yet you were also their customer at one point. You obviously should've known better, for the same reasons that the GP should've known better, right?

"An Em-Oh-Oh-See", or "A mook". The choice of indefinite article tells you which way the writer was thinking about the acronym.