Seems like every Galaxy owner I've talked to has their own list of twenty things their phones does really shittily.

20 things? Wow... I've been entirely happy with my S3. My only complaint was the battery barely made it through the day, no matter how little I used it.

My new S5, solves that problem amply.

And really my only complaint about it, is a complaint about android in general... the UI is a bit schizophrenic (google vs touchwiz vs ??? ) and it shipped with two browsers ("internet" and chrome, two voice control systems, (google and s voice), multiple IM apps... messenger, hangouts, chaton, etc... so its a bit overwhelming.

As a linux enthusiast, schizophrenic ui, and overwhemling app redundancy is par for the course. After all, only on linux is "yet-another-X" a common naming pattern. :)

But i still see it as a flaw in the new user experience of the device.

I guess if i had to have another complaint about it, its that i don't much like or trust google*, and want to do more with the phone without being herded into giving google access to everything, and loading everything onto the cloud, but that's not a flaw of the phone.

* so what am I doing with android if i don't like google you might ask? Well... its simple...I see the walled gardens from Microsoft or Apple and they are even worse.

One reason is that back then, many DOS versions of games only had AdLib or even just PC speaker support, while the Amiga version came with fully digitized audio.
Compare https://www.youtube.com/watch?... to https://www.youtube.com/watch?... , https://www.youtube.com/watch?... . (The sound is actually in stereo, but the Youtube videos are downmixed for some reason.) The difference can be jarring thanks to the inferior music.

As a matter of fact, the Amiga was famous for its sound (and graphics) capabilities back then, *especially* compared to DOS. (Well, until 256-color VGA became common..)

Some DOS games had digitized audio as well, but Amiga could mix 4 channels in hardware. Mixing had to be done in software in DOS, unless you had something like a GUS or an AWE32 sound card.

Fb and twit were instrumental for on location reports during rebellions ... Saying otherwise suggests that you are ... ignorant.

Instrumental yes. In the same sense that Bic pens were instrumental in me graduating university. However, if there were no bic pens I'd have found something else to use.

Likewise, twitter was instrumental, in the sense that it got used, but if there had been no twitter, they could have just as easily organized from something else.

And get uncensored news from buzzfeed

Don't get me wrong, Tor is a great enabler for countering censorship, etc... but advocating that these people need access to facebook and twitter? Honestly. Nobody needs that.

The Virtuix Omni is basically an omnidirectional treadmill.

You use it in a VR environment and to move forward, you walk forward on the treadmilll.

This should solve the simulator sickeness issue.

Sure until you reach some stairs, or a ladder, or need to jump down from a ledge. Or crouch. Or do anything interesting with a portal gun.

And where do I put the keyboard and mouse? Or do I have to line up my shots with a toy rifle instead?

Thus being wasted by people playing in a chair with a keyboard and mouse, because I'm tired from running, and have gorilla arm from pointing. Hell, even the xbox controller crowd will finally have advantage over someone.

Not saying i don't think it would be cool I was actually on a VR setup with a treadmill like this years ago at a tech exhibition (Duke Nukem 3D was the game they used) and it was neat. But it was really neat as a 5 minute tech demo... and that's about it.

Oh, you want to be pedantic? Let's be pedantic, then!

Scandinavian languages don't have "umlauts". "Umlaut" is a concept from German, where vowels are modified into different forms and marked with an umlaut mark. Other languages, however, just borrow these typographical forms to represent vowels with similar sounds. However, while German considers the vowels a and ä to be variations on the same letter, Scandinavian languages consider these to be separate letters entirely, and place them differently in alphabetical orderings.

Thus, there is no "umlaut" in Eyjafjallajökull, there is merely an "ö" rather than an "o".

I know that. That's WHY it its brilliant.

"I got assigned an IP ending in .666. I refuse to support any company with such obvious anti-christian leanings."

Brilliant.

In this case no matter who in the company orders to give him the credentials, the administrator in Swizerland cannot give them or he would be breaking the Swiss law.

Right. And the guy running a local web forum devoted to lolcats can't go on vacation either, since it contains some user information and credentials to access it can't leave the country...

"Sorry kids, you know that lolcats forum? Yeah, I can't come to the family gathering in france. Government says I can't go, I know too much."

Snowden said he wrote emails that he can't produce despite taking almost two million documents. You can't explain that away since you are directly challenging him.

Ok, I'll stipulate that he claims he wrote them.

All this while intending to make the claim that he was a "whistle blower" on the US? And he forget the whistle he claims to have blown, repeatedly, while there? That doesn't wash.

I honestly and sincerely don't even see it as related. He may not even anticipated that someone would challenge. He was seeking to establish beyond credible doubt that the NSA was doing XYZ. That is "the story" he was looking to tell. That someone would try to argue that a big part of the story would be "hey, can you prove you tried to tell someone inside, first" possibly didn't even enter into his mind.

In the big picture, it doesn't even matter. What matters is what the NSA was doing, not how vigorously Snowden tried to change it from within first.

Regardless of how important this particular detail is to you, its at best a tangential detail to the main story.

Its just a small minded distraction to try and divert attention from the main story. Like obsessing over Julian Assange's significant personal flaws instead of focusing on the actual wiki leaks leaks.

Maybe because they don't exist?

That doesn't fly within this thread of the sub-argument.

You'd stipulated they DID exist and contained the NSA's response that they were legal. You can't now argue that maybe they didn't exist, at least not within this sub-thread.

Or they discuss classified programs that are still classified?

They could redact them. Even if they were just "walls of black ink", they would establish that they existed.

I expect that the NSA has done that in the proper forums for discussing classified matters: in meetings with the administration, in closed sessions of Congress, and before the courts in closed hearings.

You are contorting like an acrobat. You are arguing that "if they exist, the NSA is rightfully keeping them secret, therefore we should assume Snowden is lying about their existence, and that they don't exist". That's not even coherent.

Seems to me then, its perfectly reasonable to accept Snowden's claim they exist.

Which "general consensus" is that?

Lets see:
the 5 member Privacy and Civil liberties Oversight Board created by Congress ruled them illegal.

The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled them illegal.

United States District Court for the District of Columbia ruled them illegal.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar...

http://www.wired.com/2013/12/b...

And even the NSA itself, has ADMITTED substantial wrongdoing.

http://thehill.com/policy/tech...

"The one on Slashdot?"

Yeah, sure, the one on slashdot too. ::eyeroll::

Isn't it ... "odd" ... that Snowden could manage to steal 1.7 million documents, but apparently didn't manage to get copies of his own emails showing his alleged attempts to raise the issues through official channels?

a) Because when I suspect my employer of illegal wrong doing doing I always write an email? Oh, wait, no, we're trained that those sorts of inquiries are supposed to go through channels without permanent records for legal liability reasons. You can argue that that's a bad thing, but that's reality in a LOT of places.

b) While I'm sure he'd have been capable of snagging his email, maybe it simply didn't occur to him.

You don't think it could be because even if he did "raise the issue" of legality he was given the reasons why they were legal and chose to steal the documents anyway?

If your argument is that Snowden didn't keep and release them because they would contradict and harm his 'narrative', then why is the NSA not bending over backwards to get them out there?

The NSA should be happy to provide us with such a relevant record that details their dutiful adherence to the law, and how they conscientiously explained to Snowden why he was mistaken in raising concerns.

If you really beleive what you wrote, why do think the NSA is refusing to release them?

And if you really believe what what the NSA was doing was legal, how do you reconcile that with the general consensus that a great deal of what they were doing was not, in fact, legal.

didn't you get the memo?

Lol, evidently not. I don't play D3. Good on them... i guess.

So now you have to use a 3rd party site? Has anything really changed, other than to make the whole situation a bit less offensively in ones face to the people who don't want to engage in that "meta-game"?

Is it still the case, that if you want to be 'competitive' that you will engage in that sort of play-style? After all, just because blizzards not hosting the AH, doesn't mean its not still there, or that its not still the "best" way to advance in that game?

The speed of light through space is distinct from the rate at which the universe itself expands. Weird fun things ensue. :p

I would have picked something more mainstream; its very nearly just as bad: Diablo III for example.

Chest drops, valuable rare farming, AH selling... its all there. And some people are just as obsessed for exactly the same reasons.

It applies just as well.

There are huge tax advantages for income properties, in terms of you can take losses against capital gains on them, but you can't on a property you used as a residence? Why?

"Under 26 U.S.C. 121 an individual can exclude, from his or her gross income, up to $250,000 ($500,000 for a married couple filing jointly) of capital gains on the sale of real property if the owner used it as primary residence for two of the five years before the date of sale."

You can't claim take losses because you have this massive exemption on gains on your primary residence. In the vast majority of cases that's a much better deal for tax payers.