Better yet, run your own servers to serve up your content, a la Steam. Ensure that unlike P2P, download speeds are always fast, and in these days of shrinking bandwidth caps, you don't cost your customer more bits than necessary.

Make it reasonably priced and *MORE* convenient than the illegal stuff.

"And TV standbys if done properly probably cost around 5p per year. Not a fortune."

Right. The problem is the hundreds of millions of these leaky devices combining to drain a significant amount of power, not your personal cost of 5p.

Anyone who has *any* clue at all will only be confused by random product codes for only as long as it takes to type that product code into the google/wikipedia search box. In google you most likely won't even have to click a link - the short summary will have the specs. Additionally, there are guaranteed to be links among the first few leading to reviews and comparisons to other CPUs. The 'research' involved in CPU shopping is not involved at all.

And as for people who go out and buy a computer without knowing a core from a hard drive, and don't enlist the aid of someone knowledgeable (salesmen don't count), they generally buy by price anyway and won't be using it as a gaming rig so the innards are largely irrelevant.

You might not care who makes the turbofan for the plane you're flying in, but I'm sure the airline did their homework to figure out which engine manufacturer suited their needs the best. And while *you* may not care about what kind of engine is in your truck, many do, which is why a hemi is specifically advertised as such.

I thought they handled the fdiv issue quite well. I was sent a replacement chip along with prepaid packaging to send back the defective P90. Nevermind that for most users the bug was a nonissue, esp. with OS workarounds.

And yet a Q9650 still costs the same as it did 2 years ago. Fuck you, Intel.

I think they were referring to the Corvette in that episode - they seemed amazed that a pickup truck suspension could result in such great performance.

"Thus the fan aren't working at constant speed, but are varying their speed to constantly find the perfect balance between silence and avoiding the card catching fire under the load."

And that's the problem with NVIDIA cards. The fan stays at 40% until the card is near overheating, and only then will the fan jump into 100% "oh shit" mode. And to change this behaviour you need a 3rd party util because what NVIDIA provides (a driver addon) is broken, and has been for as long as I've been using the latest NVIDIA card.

It's pretty pathetic for NVIDIA to write drivers that require the use of 3rd party utils to achieve sane fan behaviour. The GTX260 I bought was the first video card that I'd bought that required such a massive cooling solution, and I thought that since the cooling hardware seemed fairly capable, the software wouldn't be a problem.

Imagine my surprise that, by default, the fan is set to run at 40% without *ANY* ramping, and only jumps to 100% when the card reaches ~85C - when it's basically overheating. Thanks NVIDIA but I'd rather live with a bit of noise from higher fan speeds than turn my case into an oven.

You can download an addition to the NVIDIA drivers that allows you to manually set the fan duty cycle (which works), load profiles with alternate fan duty cycle % depending on temp (which works, badly, because the profile loading locks the comp for a second, and this isn't fun when you're playing a game), and set a fan ramping profile with a graphical curve (which has never worked, and since it's been 2 years, I can only assume never will)

Why they can't fix this is beyond me - RivaTuner is capable of directly reprogramming the fan controller, and is trivial to set up to smoothly ramp (without any CPU load) the fan speed in response to GPU temp. 40% at 40C and 100% at 65C. On demanding games I usually top out at ~61C and 80% fan speed. Sure it's a bit noisy, but that's always been the price of good cooling (barring some exotic expensive solutions).

I'd be willing to consider W, which is Wolfram/Tungsten...

Yay, IPV6. Unfortunately, as a Canadian, for the 1st 10 years of having broadband, I had no limits and paid $30/month. 2 years ago I started paying $40 for unlimited. Now, for the same price, suddenly I have a 50GB/month cap. So I would assume that to coincide with a protocol upgrade, I'll get to pay $60/month and get a 10GB cap. By the time I hit retirement age I'll be paying $300/month for having an active connection, plus $5/MB starting from the first byte transferred. Thank you Bell/Rogers/Telus and their chums at the CRTC.

"Except The Pianist, or City of Lost Children, or any Harry Potter film"

Pianist budget: 35M City of Lost Children budget: 18M. Hardly large budget films. As for the Potter films, if they were original screenplays, you would be right. Unfortunately the plot IS predictable in that the profitability of said plot was established through the huge book sales.

That's a lot of annual fees! I've had CCs for 13 years now, and have paid maybe $20 in interest and $0 in annual fees. I have, however, received several hundred dollars from various 'reward' CCs plus I've used the extended warranty coverage provided by many cards. CCs have saved me a nice sum over the years.

This is the only appropriate way to use CCs IMO. You already pay a ~2% credit card tax when you purchase anything in retail, since the retailer has to pay that percentage to the CC company for the privilege of accepting those cards.

Maybe he didn't disengage his parking brake fully before setting off. I did that once and was mighty surprised by the brake pedal going almost to the floor and not doing much of anything. Add to that a stuck throttle (floormat or otherwise) and an idiot who can't think to turn off the ignition or put the car in neutral behind the wheel, and there's your accident.

"I've had power steering suddenly fail on me. It is not easy to drive a car in that condition, and trying to drive it in an emergency situation?"

Please. The only time power steering is useful is when you're turning the wheels while stopped or going very slowly. Losing it doesn't make a car difficult to drive. Hell if 8000lb UPS trucks can manage without it, a little passenger car sure can.