I don't know about GoogleTV but my Android based media player has an option in the browser settings for using a desktop user agent.

Android does. It will display a list of things it needs to access, like device state/network access/ability to turn off autosuspend/etc. Ebook readers for example need to be able to prevent the screen from turning off. Messaging apps need network access. Etc. They are usually inflated from what you think the app should need though. Some are just insane with the permissions they want.

I think it's because of the number of downloads at a time.

You typically have only a handful of torrents running vs many files on the other networks.

One at a time downloading: you see nice fast speeds. Lots of files downloading: you see slow speeds all around even if you're going at the same total speed for all files as torrenting would.

That and the somewhat verifiedness you get from a torrent you get from a trusted source as opposed to searching in the other clients. The thing I don't get is why people assume that just because the search is there, it's the only thing that can be used. I would argue ed2k/magnet links and the like are easier than torrents in that they are just links rather than files. You click on the link, it downloads. Find a trustworthy indexing site (comparable to a bittorrent indexing site) and you've got a fairly reliable system that doesn't go away when the tracker does.

It's also not limited to the people who downloaded the exact same torrent as you but to everyone who is looking for a file with the same hash. Why did they use blocks instead of file hashes in bittorrent?

Torrents don't seem to last as long either. They start out fragmented and, rather than sharing everything they have, only a few are active at a time. It's worse for the general availability of files. Per torrent ratios I think mess things up: uploading to get a 1:1 on a file with 1000 seeds is not nearly as important as uploading anything on a file with 0.

The Merkle thing still seems to deal with blocks of a whole torrent instead of blocks of files that are in a torrent. Similarly with the other, it seems to be more focused on a new hashing method involving trackers knowing what pieces a user has in order to hand out peers that better meet user needs (as in giving a user a list of peers that have the pieces they need, as well as peers that need what the user has).

Neither one really solves the problem of swarms being divided simply because someone else made a torrent of the exact same file. Unless they're file based I don't really see how they would.

eMule collections are nice in that (the plaintext ones at least) are just:
ed2k-link
ed2k-link
ed2k-link
etc

I would say the advantage of eDonkey2000 (or eMule now) is the lack of ratios per file. You share large numbers of files and download large numbers. What gets uploaded is what's needed and requested by others, not necessarily a specific torrent you want to get a higher ratio on.

The no comments/fake filtering/requests/reseeds can be mostly solved the same way as Bittorrent has solved it, with a link site/forum community.

The other major advantage of ed2k is that there won't be two separate swarms for the same exact file like Bittorrent. Bittorrent really needs some kind of standardized hashing method per file, even if it's just added data in a torrent with the original Bittorrent hashing remaining intact. A problem I've seen a few times is where two separate (old/rare) torrents are of the same file but they both have no seeds, only partial availability, so neither one finishes even if together they would have the whole file.

I've actually had better luck with rare stuff on ed2k than Bittorrent because of that lack of (unnecessary) duplication.

eMule Collections (file with list of links) or Magnet Links (uri with hashes/filenames) are kind of my ideal, a hash based system for finding stuff not dependent on any site staying up.

Yes people use AVG still. At least one classroom of my school's computer building has it installed on all the laptops. The only thing probably saving them is that it's 32-bit windows.

I'm glad they have finally done away with it. It wasn't that useful because it was always elevated.

That being said it does seem to have had an impact on some things.

Take Final Fantasy XIII for instance (copied from TVTropes):

By Adblock you mean Adblock Plus right?

It's the automatic list of things to block that you like, isn't it?
Opera has had a somewhat simple content blocker for a while now but you had to either ad things yourself or find a list online and add it to Epera.

I thought most places used 2010/10/20. Isn't that some kind of ISO standard? I try to use it everywhere I can due to its easy sorting.

Just looked it up actually it's ISO 8601
YYYY-MM-DD or YYYYMMDD

PS: Why can't we all just switch to UTC and big-endian times with 24 hours in a day not 12am + 12pm? It would make maintaining computers so much easier and we wouldn't have to keep updating those timezone parts in various things. We could also finally kill off Daylight Saving Time.

IANAL but I was under the impression you needed a warrant rather than a subpeona to obtain DNA from a suspect directly but anything that they throw away has no expectation of privacy because it was thrown away.

From what I understand anyone could pick up your spit off the ground and test it (not just the police). I think the UK has some protections against obtaining DNA for testing purposes without consent but I'm pretty sure the US doesn't.

The match with the son is not really relevant after they find the father as a suspect and wouldn't be used as conclusive evidence because they would now have the DNA from the pizza and would not need to rely on a partial match for probable cause.

http://www.opera.com/support/kb/view/793/
Apparently Opera still works on OS X Panther (10.3) as well as 10.4.

I don't know about handheld but MKV files work pretty well on my Western Digital TV thing. Plays back h264/aac, h264/vorbis/vobsub, mpeg2/ac3/vobsub, all of those in MKV containers.

Other set-top devices apparently have support for mkv files too (don't have any other set top boxes to test it on, the WDTV HD works too well for me to try anything else).

For most games on Xbox Live microsoft hosts the matchmaking servers and the friends thing as well. It means that you should be able to play the game online forever until microsoft shuts down the server.

I know of one non-EA exception which only shut down part of the online component to a mech game that needed a special controller (very niche), and it was for the original xbox.

EA forces online games to use their servers for matchmaking rather than the general ones. It means that at any time EA can stop providing them and you can no longer play those games online (such as all the ones with 20XX in the name) possibly forcing you to upgrade.

The players on consoles are the servers in that they host the actual gameplay related stuff like this person shoots here, this person jumps, etc. The status info (so and so is playing Game X) on the consoles is still handled by microsoft/sony/nintendo.

The whole part of EA being able to stop online play on old games is why I don't buy from them. I could understand taking off old games that were for the original xbox for example but nothing from the last couple years.

Microsoft is banning the consoles though, not the accounts. You can still use your account for example on xbox.com or on another console. Thus you still have the account that you subscribed to and paid for.

It creates a lock file when it has been opened by the first person. All others after it get a prompt asking if they wish to open in read-only mode or open it as writable. As long as the person who's using it closes it when they are done using it or everyone who opens after does so in read-only mode it should be fine. If you run into a problem with it always being locked you can divide the passwords into separate files per category to reduce the amount of conflicts. Unless you have a lot of accounts/passwords that you change frequently you really shouldn't need to open it in write mode that much.

The "not all IT people should have access to all passwords" could be solved by having a different database per task (ex: one for backup account passwords, one for web server passwords, etc).

You could also make a database per group and per user with just the things that group/user needs in it.