I don't think piracy was that big of a factor. Sure, it required no modding... but it did require you to downloaded several hundred megabytes per game. The Dreamcast was released in 1999, so that means over dialup. I'm too lazy to do the math, but my guess-o-meter says you would have to tie up your phone line for the better part of a week to complete 1 game download. And hope you don't get disconnected, because then you have to start over...

Spliffs are better before dinner, to enhance the meal. Of course, you can always smoke before AND after, that's usually what I do.

I was thinking more about people who have a natural aptitude for logic, critical thought, and independent study, but hard knocks often come into the picture too.

In the end it's about judging people on their merits, not their background or some rubber-stamped credentials.

Seems the price has jumped. When I bought my Asus *book (eeepc 1000he) it was $350. So I thought, hey, this new model must be way more capable right? Yet in the article it's stated:

Golly Gee Willikers, that's exactly why I bought the eeepc. And it still worked for those purposes in 2014. And I'd still be using it in 2015 too if WinXP got updates or there weren't Linux driver issues. (This model did not ship with Linux.) Hell, I did more than web surfing on it - it made a sweet portable SNES emulator, as well as something to watch movies on. I even did some basic video editing on it if you can believe it or not - although admittedly, processing effects and encoding took a while.

Given the hardware advances in the 6 years since the 1000HE was released, I find it hard to believe Asus can't put out a computer that serves the same purpose for the same amount of money. Or less money.

Perhaps it's just over-spec'd for the stated purpose. 8 GB and 1920x1080 for web surfing and document editing? My gaming rig runs on 4 GB and 1440x900.

There are plenty of smart people who have never had to do a "thesis", if you mean a project to cap off a university degree. Conversely, there are plenty of dumb people who have degrees. That number is only going up from grade inflation and degree devaluation as the idea that everyone needs to go to college permeates deeper into society. An idea fed, in part, by comments like yours.

Instead of pulling this traffic light crap (which can increase accidents), they could just legalize marijuana... seems to be bringing in quite a bit for Colorado, in spite of the industry not being fully developed, and the banking problems the industry still has from the federal prohibition.

It looks like this is a more advanced method to accomplish the same thing. Meaning that recovering sanded serial numbers is not new, but this particular way of doing it is.

If you're working at some Silicon Valley tech firm, you're well off by any measure. The wage stagnation for people making $7.25/hr is the real issue in this country.

And yet, this article estimates it at more like 24 hours. It does make a lot of assumptions though - maybe the older article made a different set of assumptions.

Yeah, someone working in the police force there is either very incompetent or very shady. I think the latter is more likely. It's not 1990, this sort of data will be backed up unless someone specifically decides not to.

There are already equivalent or better levels of monitoring within the US. Now they're monitoring places that don't have the capacity or will to monitor themselves.

I'm well aware of iTunes, I actually use its AAC encoder on a regular basis. By "in the wild" I mean music that get distributed person-to-person, like on torrent sites. Where the uploader has a choice of formats to use. Not Apple's walled garden. My suspicion is that a good deal of AAC uploads you see on torrent sites do in fact originate from iTunes, and that we'd see a lot more of them if it weren't for things like Apple embedding your username in the file. I'm actually not sure if they still do that, but stuff like that hangs heavy on the memory.

The only good AAC encoders (Apple, Fraunhaufer, and debatably Nero) are proprietary. There are open-source encoders, but the quality is so poor that they aren't worth using.
This doesn't even take into account licensing/patent issues, which I believe come into play as well.

There never really was a "format war" as far as codecs go. Or if there is a war, it's ongoing.

In the 90s when music over the internet became a thing, MP3 was the only game in town. MP2 existed, but it was less efficient. At that time there was no such thing as "hardware support" so users were free to pick the most efficient format.

By the early-mid 2000s, there were several formats beating MP3 in listening tests. Musepack, Vorbis, AAC. You don't see many of those "in the wild" now, but I certainly see more today than I did in 2005, putting them on a slow upward trajectory. Once disk space and bandwidth come down a couple ticks in price, there will be no reason not to go FLAC which will make lossy compression irrelevant as you can transcode to whatever you want/need.

IIRC the number of accounts reached 7 digits around 2006, meaning he's probably been here 7 or 8 years.