As a post below me stated, proposition 13 was enacted in an era when the perception was liberals were running amok, spending money on crazy social experiments and then raising property taxes to the point that retirees were being forced out of their homes. The idea was basically the same one Reagan later pushed for on the federal level: force the politicians to curb their insane spending on un-needed and unwanted social "gimme" programs by not allowing them to constantly raise taxes. It was sort of a giant game of chicken if you will, with most of the people in CA not believing the politicians would be stupid/evil enough to cut things like school budgets or infrastructure and instead cut pork programs and "hippy/welfare spending." Well, we found out the hard way, that was not true! The other interesting part about this is the people who bought homes years later (I forget the exact details, but there is a feature built into prop 13 that limits how much your property taxes can increase AFTER you buy new home or have the property appraised) found out that their retired neighbors were paying a much lower tax for the same value property (because they had bought it years before and were tax increase protected.) They started to demand the repeal of prop 13...AS IF THAT WOLD LOWER THEIR TAXES instead of just increasing their neighbors taxes!

Try Vendetta Online. Like you, I also enjoyed the first 2 MOO games. Like you mentioned, MOO3 was so much like work I can get paid for (planning, managing resources in tedious detail) I never got into it. I also enjoyed DiabloII (spent YEARS in game addiction mode on that one), HoMM and Might&Magic series. I also spent time with the Doom, Hexen and Heretic FPS' as well as the excellent RoTT (which I believe now has an Open Source Linux version.) For a while I dabbled in Everquest, Ultima Online and Earth&Beyond. In recent years I tried Guild Wars, Titan Quest and Hellgate London. However, I got really tired of booting Windows just to play games, so never tried Eve (the emulator didn't work and I wasn't in the mood to dink with it to make it run on my PC.) So I was poking around and ran into a VO link on a Linux gaming site. I've also tried some of the games in the $10 bargain bin at Walmart/Target/etc, but having to boot Windows to load them really takes away part of the enjoyment. Maybe some rich guy will resurrect Loki games someday, so we can have more choices on Linux again.

If they were going to do something custom, I wonder if setting-up a RAM based drive would have been faster and/or cheaper. It's kind of fun to fantasy engineer stuff like this: For $1M I wonder if you might be able to buy a decent size UPS and generator (just need it to last long enough to cover a write to a slow drive if the mains power went out) and would need say 2X the storage, 1 in the fast custom-made RAM drives and another in slower/cheaper regular spinner platter drives (or tapes.)

I finanlly ogt over being mad at Sony enough to buy something they were involved in again, so a couple of weeks ago I bought a new Samsung Blue Ray player from my local Best Buy. I actually bought it primarily to watch Netflix/Blockbusteronline/regular DVD's. However, I like Netflix online so much I hadn't plyed anything in it (regular or Blue-Ray wise.) I looked around for a movie that was cheap and also would show-off what Blue Ray could do, but hadn't found anything that struck my fancy and when I saw Avatar was coing-out I thought that would be a good test (also I never saw it in theaters, so wanted to just see it too.) So I got the DVD/Blue Ray combo pack and stuck it in the player. And then heard a LOT of seeking and re-seeking and re-seeking. This goes on for a while (maybe 20 seconds) and really gave me pause. At first I thought the disk was bad, but then it proceeded to the menu and when I played it, it was fine (nice picture quality too, I need to get the Blue Ray Version of King King and see if there is a noticable difference between it and my old HD-DVD Toshiba player I replaced with the Blue Ray.) When I played the movie again later, it did the same thing. So now I'm not sure if this is normal for this player or if its a bad player or bad disk or ??? Let me check and try a regular DVD in it.... Nope, works fine with a regular DVD (LOTR the 2 towers-widescreen) So either the Avatar disk is bad or their stinking DRM is driving this thing beserk when it loads (it has the latest firmware too - I updated it the day I bought it.) My consolation is that Netflix is so darn convenient and the picture quality is "good enough" that for all but a real spectacle type movie (like Avatar/LOTR/Star Wars.) I don't think I will be buying ANY more DVD/Blue Ray's (just no need there are TONS of movis I haven't seen that I can watch for $9.99/mo.) So I'm not really sure I need to do any more "disk hoarding." Now if the movie studios or Netflix get greedy and raise the monthly rate, I might change my mind, but for now, I am pretty much done with buying DVD's/BluRay's for the vast majority of movies.

I bought one shortly after the announcement that they were throwing in the towel and had my inlaws buy one too. They do great as a premium quality upscaler which just so happens to be able to play some really cheap HD movies. As for Blu-Ray, I am going to sit this one out. I hate the idea of a Sony format winning and as someone else mentioned, I have more than one DVD player in the house an in the car, so am in no hurry to pick an incompatible format that's jam-packed with adds, unskipable content and other reminders of how evil the companies distributing video are. I am just about at the point where I hope user dissatisfaction kills the whole stkining mess. Sure, I will miss the latest cool blockbuster movie, but its just not worth all the crap that the copyright industry does to sustain itself.

Unless you work at MS or otherwise have access to the source code, then how do you know that its working as designed? Isn't it at least plausible that some of this mysterious file copy slowness is the result of a bug in the DMR checking? My point is, that if I buy something I need to be able to trust it. In the case of Vista, MS decided to go along with the content industry's view of all people as potential thieves. This means they sacrificed my interests for potential future sales or deals with them. So I not only know they picked someone else's interests over mine, I have to trust them to have implemented it properly.

Its now baked into the OS, and since the OS is not open source, we can't tell that its not the cause. So, we have an OS that runs like a slug and we know that somewhere in there, something is checking to see if the content is DRM or not and if it suspects that it needs to apply DRM it will do so. I think assuming it is at least part of the problem is reasonable. As far as your assertion that an OS which doesn't support DRM won't play that DRM'd content, its bunk. There is no business on earth that would avoid a system that has 90% or so of the installed base on the planet! If MS had remembered that we are their CUSTOMERS, then they would have left that crud out of the OS and it could have been added at the driver/application level for the people who wanted to play that media (and avoided entirely for those who don't.) As it is, they decided to add it to the OS, so you're stuck with it even if you never play a DVD or MP3 on your Vista machine.

XP's insistance on software activations was what turned me from a loyal MS fan into somone looking for the freedom promised by free software. The evil that MS did by resurrecting that DRM genie with requiring activations for XP cannot be understated (before then activation codes, dongles and other wierd schemes had been largely killed off in end user computing products.) Still, once you got the stinkin OS installed, XP ran pretty well. This is just not the case with Vista.

It wasn't fast enough. Whatever bloat they added to make it run slower took it over the threshold of fast enough to the point of "What the @#!!!*&!! is taking it so long?" Add in hardware and software incompatibility and some stability issues and then top it off with a LONG development time and you have a monumental flop.

It is WAY too bloated and is terrible at the one thing MS's operating systems have going for them, backwards compatibility. My notebook PC came with Vista pre-installed and I remember how furious I was when I attempted to copy something and waited and waited and waited for it to decide to complete. This was supposedly imporved in SP1, but I haven't noticed much difference. The same machine with Ubuntu absolutely screams. So, its not just bad marketing: Vista sucks and no amount of product renaming is going to fix that. The hardware will eventually catch up enough that it becomes tolerable (as happened with XP when we moved from Win98), but the problem is there is no compelling reason for us to switch like there was with the move from Win98 to XP (where we got an NT based kernel.)