that Defense Grid didn't make the list, I've put over 148 hours into it and would have expected most people that own the game to have done the same. It's the only game on Steam that I have every achievement for.

I've got 76 hours on that one, and steam says I've got 57 of 87 of the acheivements. Honestly. I'm impressed that you completed it to 100% some of the expansion pack stuff is pretty brutal.

I think the most interesting thing though about the defense grid stats is 'first blood' ... only 87% of the people steam registers as having played killed even a single alien. So that's 13% who started up the game, and then exited it without doing anything.

I've got a WHACK of steam games bought as part of bundles (humble bundles, steam bundles etc...)

I bought a steam halflife bundle at some point... I've played HalfLife 2 to completion, but have never played HL2 deathmatch, hl2 ep1, hl2 ep2, hl2 lost coast, hl deathmatch:source, hl blue shift, hl opposing force, hl source.

I bought an ID pack at some point. I've got 2 Hexens, Hexen2 and Heretic that I've never played, with 3 quakes, 3 quake 2s, and 2 quake 3s. So far I've only played Quake II.

I bought the Sid Meier humble bundle which came with Civ5 a bunch of its expansions, and Civ IV, and III ... I've played Civ V a bit so far... but have 8 separate entries for Civ IV in my steam library, along with Civ III that I haven't touched. Along with Pirates! and Railroads. I'll probably play Pirates! at some point... who knows about the rest.

I've got and Sam & Max set, that I'm part way through... so 3 titles I haven't touched out of 5.

I've got 5 episodes of Back to the Future that came with another humble bundle that was worth the price of entry to me for something else. I might try it at some point, who knows... its pretty low on my priority list though.

I wouldn't be surprised that others who are avid supporters of humble bundles have lots of games they've yet to try.

etc, etc, etc.

Only a fool would count on their saving being there in 25-30 years. The US is a ponzi scheme of welfare benefits and government debt.

That's why you'd use international diversification. And if that doesn't work, odds are you are going to have bigger problems than your savings being wiped out at retirement.

I'm not at all skeptical of your claim, but I'm curious: married? (dual income?) kids? own a house?

$40k to $50k today is a decent standard of living. 40 years from now? It'll be below the poverty line.

If you are retiring today 1Million is enough. If you are retiring 40 years from now and aim to have a million... you'll be deciding between a card board roof or cardboard food.

1 million dollars invested in a conservative bond fund will yield $40,000 a year, with no hit to principle. Most of America lives (comfortably) on that (or less) today. In addition to that, you will have social security.

And if you are of retirement age today, 1Million is enough. Now project that forward 30 or 40 years.

To put it into perspective, if you had 500k in 1980, that gave you the same purchasing power as 1 million does today.

So if you think 1 million today is enough to retire, and you plan to retire in 25 years, you actually need to aim for 2 million.

If you are just entering the work force (18 to 20), you are looking at working 40-50 years, and will need even more. close to 3 million.

After retirement age, you also receive social security payments

Only a fool would count on it being there in another 25-30 years. Its already seeing the force of the boomer generation hit it. If you've got a million+ in capital at retirement I wouldn't be surprised that your social security will be stripped to zilch. I can hear the politicians bleating now... "we're paying middle class millionaires social security...is that worth a tax increase?"

This. I expect to require 3 million to retire comfortably, and be able to live off the interest without drawing down the capital leaving the 3 million to the kids when I go. At this stage I'm skeptical I will make that 'stretch goal'.

I think I require 1 million at minimum to retire comfortably, and be able to live off the interest, drawing down the capital as I go, and have enough to make it to my death.

Both scenarios bar major health expenses like paying for live-in-care out-of-pocket.

I have not factored any likely inheritances from my own relatives either, as I do not expect to receive substantial money. (And frankly find it rather disheartening watching some of my peers live extravagant idiotic lives on the assumption -- in some cases, the correct assumption, that when their folks kick the can they'll be covered. -- but that's a separate issue)

And I'm maybe half way to retirement. Anyone just entering the work force now will need even more than that due to inflation.

There's almost no point in it being a lego toy, because you're just assembling a crude model of an x-wing, and the only thing you can make with the set is...an x-wing. Why not just...play with a model x-wing?

Seriously... watch the lego movie... or hell just look at some of the sets they've released based on the movie.

I think this one illustrates my point:

http://static.indigoimages.ca/...

Take a good look at it. The 'goblet' piece is a gun. The wagon wheels are the engine turbines, the turbine housings are those molded castle tower pieces. The half-barrel is the pilots seat. Torches reworked into a missile launcher. The working catapult?... well they kept that.

They took a medieval gate and cart and turned it into something akin to a pod-racer, as an official set.

The lego movie and movie sets simultaneously agrees with all your complaints ... and then proves your conclusion wrong.

Granted a single small lego set is usually only much good for a particular model or a variation on a theme. But after you've got 5 or 6 lego sets especially if they are from different themes you can build pretty much anything. Medieval space ships, sailing ships out of space lego, Giant transforming robots out of lego city vehicles.

Honestly there were a bit of a bad spot in the late 90s where the lego wasn't as good, but the current sets and over the last 5-10 years are an absolute joy.

I recommend any parent with kids becoming lego aged to start with a basic bulk bucket. I think there's a yellow bucket out right now 600 basic bricks for $40 bucks.

Then you throw in a star wars or batman set or two so the kid has a couple minifigures, droids (my son loves r2d2s), light sabers, etc. And then build out from there.

The new lego master builder academy sets are BRILLIANT too.

http://shop.lego.com/en-US/Mas...

The instruction books alone are nearly with the price of entry.

I'm pretty sure Microsoft can retag them as 'automatic'; and just hasn't done so. I'm pretty sure I've seen some of this happen previously with other updates. New IE versions start out as optional, and then get moved to automatic. IIRC.

They can even 2-stage it, similar to how the genuine advantage stuff works -- where stage one is mandatory and automatically run, but in turn it could suggest the 8.1 update, and make it as simple as hitting 'next' to initiate it.

They most likely don't even know what Windows 8.1 Update 1 is, much less that they should be on the net researching how to get it installed.

Windows update will take care of that for the vast majority of them. For the ones that it breaks on and for which MS doesn't fix, then how is it any different than any other time a home user's windows update got messed up for any reason?

I mean, odds are when you find a home users PC with XP SP1 or SP2 still on it because windows update failed or was turned off or whatever, you'll also find they haven't done any security updates on it since then either.

It's not obvious how to do this though. And when someone does figure it out, sometimes it breaks during the upgrade with no solution.

So therefore one should not update?

This seems at worst, an embarrassing problem (for microsoft) that -will- be sorted out soon.

I mean, I recall the various XP service packs having issues on some systems too over the years, and never once was "I guess we'll just stay on SP1" the answer I or any other competent admin ever went with.*

* - to be fair there are some bits of software that some companies relied on that only worked on XP SP2 or earlier etc, and competent admins elected to stay on the older service pack, but that isn't the case here, and isn't relevant to the case here. No one is choosing to stay pre-update because of 3rd party issues, only issues with installing the update itself, and it should be plain to all that resolutions will be forthcoming for that.

I'm not even sure what the article meant by ASP vs .NET ? Surely they aren't talking classic ASP? I doubt anybody is 'starting new projects in classic ASP -- so what is ASP? and how is it not .NET ?

The rest of the article doesn't make a lot of sense to me either.

Just patch windows 8.1 with the update. It makes the OS unequivocally better. Whining about it is just silly.

Do they have standing NSLs with all the media organizations out there?

I think there'd be less Snowden leak coverage if there were. :)

You could go outside the country, but those newspapers are government by their own countries version of the NSA who's working in close relationship with ours

Like China & Russia? Governements want their own security as much as their own intelligence agencies want to break it... there's too many pieces moving in opposite directions for there to be a credible global coverup of a transparent audit of open source software.

Technically, if an NSA backdoor existed in the codebase, you would be prevented from reporting it by an NSA letter, subject to immeadiate imprisonment and confiscation.

Two responses.

First, I suspect if they were confronted with an NSL they could go the lavabit route and simply suspend the audit project with no explanation. IANAL but I don't think the NSA can compel them to falsify the audit results.

Second, if they are smart, they can have it audited multi-nationally with independent auditors to make it harder for any government gag orders to stick.