Your post... has a Facebook icon next to it.
I knew Slashdot was going in a different direction, but... Facebook? The alt-text says "From Facebook". I'm not even completely sure what that means, but I don't want anything "from Facebook" in here. I hope you know your post has fucked up my world. I'm going to have a hard time sleeping now. Bro... your post has a Facebook icon on it! However you managed to get that to appear, don't do it ever again! And tell all your friends not to. Together, we can make Slashdot sane again...

That's pretty much exactly what people have been saying they do for the past 40-50 years, if not longer. I've tripped on several different psychedelics and these pictures are uncannily close to the effect... so ridiculously close that my jaw just kinda dropped when I saw it.

Are there any higher resolution pictures available? I'm sitting on a crappy 1024x600 monitor now, and these pictures don't even max it out. Seriously, why are these pictures in such shitty resolution?

I've been getting calls and texts on my cell just fine, and I've never had a "100 MB phone update". Come to think of it, none of my phones have even had 100 MB of storage, without expanding it with an SD card. I have heard of people being able to travel to far-flung locations where their phones won't work - and I imagine they'd also have the resources to buy a phone that works in that country.

Fast internet access is becoming a necessity for several reasons, and a good idea for many more. Firmware updates for your toys isn't one of them. I don't think you have an idea of what "the poor experience" is. You're sounding a bit like a fool.

I'm not sure why you think those countries take care of people. Better examples would be Finland, or Norway, or to a lesser extent the UK. FWIW, I am looking to move to one of those places as soon as it becomes financially feasible for me to do so. It sounds like your knowledge of living standards worldwide is either 60 years out of date, or willfully ignorant.

Lol, spoilers... we all knew Aeris Dies WAY before we knew that Dumbledore Dies. Although I guess there are some players young enough not to know either.

I'm actually alt-tabbed out of the new AA as I type this. I assume you've played it so I won't go into details of how it sucks. What I will say is that it seems like the old AA players have left for games like Arma... I've not played it personally, and it's not free, but could be worth checking out.

Did they ever bring out more guns or maps in AA3? I played around 2012 and remember it being a decent game, but getting so bored of playing on the same three maps with the same three guns over and over. Sometimes I wonder what the hell is going on with the franchise... they keep putting out beta games that are stuck in development hell then just giving up on those and starting on a newer, crappier version from scratch.

Shenmue was pretty big around 2000, or whatever year it came out. It was hyped as being one of the reasons to get a Dreamcast. IIRC, it was eventually ported to Xbox a few years later, but games were advancing quickly in those days and it no longer held as much weight by that time.

If Peter robbed Paul first, it seems fine by me.

There's this insinuation in your post that casual games don't exist anymore. Really, in recent years, games have moved in a decidedly casual direction. Even developers and series that were reliably "hardcore" - BioWare, Elder Scrolls - are watering things down so that the games can be played in smaller chunks.
Those games are still probably outside of your parameters, but ever hear of say Angry Birds? I realize that one's a few years old already, but I don't have a smartphone or a Facebook account, so I'm not up to date on the latest. But that certainly seems to be where a lot of today's hyper-casual games are. There's also the Wii (or "Wii U", I think that's their new console). Nintendo probably can't compete with the phone/web games on cost, but they do seem to be gunning successfully for the "aging cost-conscious casual gamer" market.

Honestly, it seems like the whole industry is bending over backwards to serve gamers that want the hit-it-and-quit-it experience. If you're not finding it, it's because you're not looking. "Looking" might even be too much for the Wii or phone platforms, pick a game at random there and it's likely to be casual.

Seems pretty religious to me. The ethical arguments all boil down to the axiomatic belief that human and animal consciousness should be valued equally, which might not seem as ludicrous as it is at first glance. But that assumption raises questions like: What makes it OK to keep pets in any kind of confinement? Why shouldn't animals have the same legal rights (and obligations) as people? These questions should get you to see how ridiculous it, is depending on how for gone you are... There was actually an animal rights group, I believe in Europe, trying to get a chimpanzee declared a legal person... If you're on that level you're beyond hope. But to me it seems like most vegans just heard some famous guy talking about it, or read a hipstery blog - and the emotional ploy worked, and the future vegan thought, "Hey that sounds like a good idea..." Then you have the various spotty economic and nutritional justifications for veganism, hastily cobbled together to support the emotional conviction. It's 4:30 am so I won't go through all those, but they're mountains made from molehills, and they've got all the holes and tensile strength of a block of Swiss cheese.

Now the part that tends to draw drive-by vegan bashing like in the GP's post is the smugness that lots of vegans have. That's a characteristic they share with other fad dieters. These days your diet is like some kind of fashion statement. "Is veganism too hippie and effeminite for your no-nonsene Libertarian lifestyle? The Paleo diet is for you!" "Like exercising but need more variety than a caveman? Try our low-carb gluten-free menu"... The field of nutritional science, at least as it gets reported on/discussed by the general public, has become so filled with this garbage that I've been led to mostly just tune it out. When the discourse becomes this overgrown with emotional appeals and politicking, the truth gets stifled.

Apparently they don't have DSL either, since the article is about "broadband's arrival." TV is definitely something they can cut out though. There's more than enough video entertainment/edutainment on YouTube et al. to completely replace, even exceed, what's available on TV.

I've been ignoring Beta fine. Do they still have Beta?

At the last call center I worked at, that would get you directed to the byzantine cancellation form on the web site. If you complained hard enough, it would maybe get you transferred to someone in the billing or "retention" department where you'd get to start a whole new runaround (notice how it's the "retention" department, not the "cancellation" department). What it would not do is get you to any kind of higher level tech support or get your issue resolved more quickly.

Generally they will have someone there with the skills to resolve your issue. They may or may not be available on the phone when you call (or available on the phone at all). You have to navigate the service providers' bureaucracy in order to get to them. There is no shortcut, there is no magic word - at least none that will work consistently across different providers. The system is designed for them to feed you BS. Trying to reverse that will be futile at best, and might just convolute the process further.

Maybe they were doing it to earn brownie points with other US gov parties - military guys, other intel agencies, politicians. I can think of reasons they would all want to get to Kaspersky, so the only reason the NSA needs is that they want to stay on all those parties' good side. Internal cooperation is needed to keep the whole US gov system working. The NSA can't put troops on the ground and the Army doesn't have some of the NSA's spying capabilities - they need eachother to keep the whole thing afloat. (How's that for "checks and balances"?)