It's an article about two private groups fighting over the use of high tech surveillance drones, and it's perfectly appropriate. What do you come here for, dinner recipes and makeup tips? I think you're on the wrong website.

Consoles don't come close to what I have on my PC and have never been an option. I loathe all things made by Apple, so that's also never an option. Linux, as far as I know, still required you to use a command-line-interface sometimes, (no thanks, I had enough in the 90's) or mess with klunky configuration files. If I could switch to Linux with full software compatibility, I might, but that'll probably never happen.

If an author wants to upload a book to Apple's iBookstore, they can only do it from a mac. Furthermore, you can't even link to books in the ibookstore from the world wide web, unlike books for Kindle or Nook, whose bookstores are easily accessed from the web. When it comes to ebooks, Apple is a private system, segregated from the web. I wouldn't be surprised it they tried to take this further in the future and have their own private Apple-branded Internet for Apple fanboys alone where they'll never have to read a message like this one.

I wish there was filter on slashdot that would let me skip past the initial flurry of posts on every article made by clowns trying too hard to be funny.

I published a geeky sci-fi novel a few months ago and so far the vast majority of sales have been for the Kindle edition. It might be because the paper version costs 5x what the digital version costs. I don't know if it's the added convenience or the lower price, but to me, digital books seem to be the future, and the change is happening faster than most people expected.

I can see by his picture that he's an old dude and by his statements he seems pretty out of touch with this century. Someone who works for the old dude should inform him that every bit of DLC ever released, like any software, is made available by pirates immediately, so that people with pirated copies of games can easily 'complete' them with the missing DLC bits. Horse armor for Oblivion, Dragon Age expansion areas, new towns and dress-up clothes for The Sims3...these are just some examples. All DLC gets pirated, What this man plans to do, really, is just annoy the paying customers who expect to get a full game when they pay for it. If he really wanted to improve gamers experience and build goodwill, he should go the opposite route and abolish DLC for his games, releasing new content at intervals for free, like they did last century before DLC-for-money caught on. As usual, he should look at what Valve is doing. They are doing it (mostly) right, and always have.

You mean no American politicians want to spend money on the space program. Personally, I'd like to see our military and NASA budgets switched. I would have said the same thing 30 years ago, and had it been done, we'd have anti-gravity and flying cars by now.

That's a really weak analogy. That's all I have to say.

I love PC gaming, but I think it's biggest weakness right now is the confusion created by video card manufacturers that makes it a major research project to decipher which codename/model number is actually good. If they would adopt a simple system of making their cards according to their actual capabilities, like CPUs do, for the most part, they could eliminate the confusion. But I think they actually like the confusion they create. The latest nvidia cards have a wide range, with numbers and names ending in GT, GTX, GTS...the biggest sellers now are in the 200 series, but there are also 300, and 400 series cards out, with GT and GTX versions, and some other random letter codes. They've been doing this a long long time. They should get their act together and stop trying to mislead consumers with confusing model names before some regulatory agency forces them to do it.

I saw about 10 seconds of this video before realizing it was just some obnoxious kid acting stupid and turned it off. Thanks, internets, for making this kid a sensation. Get ready for a tsunami of copycat obnoxious kid videos as parents encourage their kids to act stupid for the camera, so they can buy a new house with the money youtube pays them.

I had never heard of Bebo until that video surfaces of the US Marine throwing a puppy off a cliff. He had linked to the video he posted on his Bebo page. I've heard of Bebo a few times since then, and it always reminds me of that puppy killing video. They should sue him for hurting their reputation even more than being owned by AOL did, at least in my mind. I can't be the only one.

The users have it right though. Why should anyone want to care what a router switch is, or how a network works? Why should anyone care about ports and protocols? Remember figuring out modem initialization strings? Putting together a dozen abbreviated codes in a string to make your modem work with your hardware. It was a real pain in the ass, and one day it simply disappeared, becoming fully plug and play. I like to think that all the complicated things about computers will become automatic in time. It's what we should all be working towards. But you are one of the elitists who make us all look bad, continuing the stereotype of the obnoxious computer nerd who thinks he's better than the average user because you know the minutia of how computers work. I do too, but I'd be happy to see it all just work automatically. I resent having wasted time learning about modem init strings, and see virtually everything connected with network administration as more of that. A problem of overcomplexity waiting to be fixed. It's just a matter of time, really.

I hear some people swear by those old things. Nothing like the feel of pressing the keys and having your keypress transferred to strike the paper through an inked ribbon. It's highly tactile. Of course, you'd have to scan the text and digitize it before posting on the internet, but that's just a small price for you to pay to keep that old-school tactile feeling at your fingertips. Manual transmissions? Exactly like this.

It should be a lesson to others not to do the same thing. Advertising based web publishing works fine. This is just greed rearing it's ugly head, driven by one of the greediest and richest men on earth. He can easily take the fall, and put the terrible idea of a web divided by hundreds of individual paywalls back to bed. The only people wh want a change like that are publishers, and there are plenty of others willing to do it under the current system even if they jerks do go hide behind these paywalls while they wither and die. Good riddance to any websites that think they're so special that people should pay to read what they post.