Many games are free to play with a microtransaction model that is totally optional. EA is a leader in trying to make microtransactions required to complete the game or acquire items. Neither Valve or Riot games allow you to buy power or require you to pay money to play games. Valve's "Engagement Ring" was a joke product that is only cosmetic. Cliffy B is full of shit in this case.

Android likely has a bigger install base than any Linux distro out there. It's extremely successful. Also, Linus decides what goes into the kernel. The rest of the OS isn't under his control but he does get to ultimately decide what goes in the kernel.

I don't think the desktop is terribly important now that mobile and tablets have exploded. The desktop isn't growing anymore. The notebook is taking over that market and tablets and smartphones are expanding like crazy. The Linux kernel owns those markets. Why give a fuck about the desktop anymore?

This is not what the campaign did. This is simple micro targeting. The campaign A/B tested appeals to voters, focused on GOTV, bought their ads intelligently (targeting tv shows their demographic watched, etc. They made sophisticated use of the Web and built many of their tools in-house.

Today I learned that old people and poor people don't use snail mail. Thanks for the lesson.

What does that have to do with the story and how can this public scandal be seen as anything other than a huge embarassment for everybody involved? There was no strategy here by any means.

It's not the media's fault. It's the "first past the post" voting system that's in place all the way from the bottom to the top. That's why there are two dominant parties. Until that's changed votes for a third party cannabalize votes that would go to one of the major party candidates and hurt their chances to be elected (see Gore, Al).

Unfortunately for them they won't be donig either.

It's because of what he offers in addition to the model. The color commentary, explanation of why things change from day to day and analysis of individual polling firms after the fact. I was paying attention to him from the start (2008 primaries on Daily Kos) and he does a great job of explaining things to the layman.

This was the case in 2010. Many progressive blogs thought the turnout numbers would be much more Democratic than they were because party ID changed so much in two years. You have to trust the poll aggregates and I believe they have learned their lesson since. Let's see if the Republican pundits and publications do the same or if they declare 2014 a sea change and the beginning of a Republican ascendency just because typically Democratice constituencies don't turn out like Republican constituencies in off-years.

Voting early is awesome in Texas and especially Travis county. We really want people to vote around here. You can vote in any of the locations for weeks ahead of the election.

You mean like how Ford and Mazda worked together on engine design? Or how they collaborated with Audi? The Mazda 3, Focus, and S40 shared the same platform.

Really, what was your point again?

I'm so frigging mortified that I dropped Tim's phone, though. Tim, let me know if it stopped working or anything. That was so embarrassing.

I don't think it's quite so much a problem for the "computer illiterate" as it is for power users who use computers quite often. I want a crap load of windows open and accessible via the taskbar. I want my normal icons and crap. I want to arrange more than three windows on a screen and to use multiple monitors easily. Windows 8 annoys me and I'm not a fan of it so I'll just hoard Win7 licenses.

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Your argument is invalid.