Last time I tried to create a throwaway yahoo mail account it demanded a mobile number.

Well, its not even that big of a deal when it happens. You just go down and get a new one at the hand store.

It probably won't solve the issue, but have you tried using the fresh player wrapper to run chrome's pepper flash with firefox?

There's a wrapper "fresh player" that allows chrome's pepper flash to be used in firefox but I'm not sure how reliable it is. I haven't used it much yet but it did seem to work.

I watch Downton Abbey on the pbs website for free.

I think that is his point though. In the past Microsoft certainly did show up late, and then through sometimes nefarious (bundle it with the OS so everyone has it, offer a free version to snuff out the competitions revenue source) means they got their copycat product to the front even if they had to fight a long time to get there. But they don't seem to want to fight anymore. Which is perplexing since they clearly have the warchest to fight this kind of war on multiple fronts.

Now they just release a product that is at best "just as good" as the competition's and when that isn't enough to immediately draw the whole market to them they abandon the product wholesale. Not only does that half ass strategy not win them anything, it taints the whole brand and makes savvy consumers unwilling to even try your untested product since they know you'll likely leave them twisting in the wind.

I don't really have a problem with F2P games, or I didn't anyway. I just didn't play them because I believe all F2P games will eventually transform into pay to win even if they are not in their original incarnation. Its just to easy to go down that path. But when I started having games retroactively turned into F2P that is when things looked bad. Its not just MMOs, think of TF2. Luckily I was never into that game to start with and I only owned it because it came with another game I did buy, but I did not like the precedent it set.

I thought that's what MS released service packs for, right?

This is why we had one really. Do I honestly think the thing is going to save my kids life? Not really. What it did do however was allow my wife and I to go to sleep ourselves instead obsessively looking at the baby monitor trying to determine if she was still breathing through that. It was more of a hack to work around our own insanity really. When I think back on all the piles of weird baby stuff we own that we barely used, that device actually seemed like a bargain at $80-100.

Well, the lack of any consistency in clothing size even with the same item for one. My recent pants shopping expedition has shown that one size 34 waist pants from the same brand, in the same store taken off the same shelf as another can still be wildly different in fit, length and waist. The QA and manufacturing on these things is so horrible that you'll never know how any individual item fits unless you tried it on.

I thought they were working on a feature that allows you do this...again like in the good old days, kind of.

http://store.steampowered.com/sharing/

This is by design. The goal is to get people stuck in Microsoft's crap store where they get a fat 30% cut of all software sales by trickery. That's why you had the Surface Pro...the flag ship product that could do it all and actually filled a niche. And then there's the Surface RT, the turd no one could love if they knew its dark secret...but its a Surface and it was cheap so whoops I bought it because I got confused like I was supposed to be.

But the word is out RT means abomination now. So its time to go with the even more ambiguous Surface nothing to muddy up the waters even more. Coming next year expect the RT version 3 to be re-branded as "Surface Pro E" or maybe they'll go for the full power bait and switch and just call it Surface Pro 3.0. This last change would have come eventually though, the obvious end game to shoe-horning their app store into existence is to close the door on any software sales they don't get a cut of.

I think the opposite sort of happened though. RT actually ruined the whole Surface brand rather than the Pro artificially elevating it. Probably a lot of people (ok, probably not that many people) bought the RT under the mistaken assumption it could do things only the Pro could and then returned it to the store before washing their hands of Surface tablets altogether. Here's the part where Microsoft screwed up, they forgot its a lot easier for a customer to return a tablet to a store than it is for OEMs or customers to return Windows 8 operating system software.

As a yacht salesmen I must respectfully disagree.

With XP I think you need a valid volume license key, which I'm not really sure how hard that is to find. I seem to remember some hubbub about MS blacklisting keys and the regular keys I think they did some kind of checking (since they should only match a single machine by nature). This was back when XP came out though so my memory is hazy. Prior to that any old key could be used and I wouldn't be surprised if half of China had the same 98se install key. Anyway, the Windows Genuine Advantage Activation tool was not part of the original XP release and is separate from all released service packs. You can decline the update. I always do since it provides no end user benefit anyway.

If it was a dog it would have been put down already. But killer whales are much more expensive and difficult to procure. Their training is also an expense. Human trainers are an inexpensive commodity in comparison.