What makes a product or service from Yahoo unique?

Flickr for one is now unique. It was not before. But the new all-out focus on always seeing the largest image possible is quite different than any other photo sharing site. All of the others, even 500px, drill down into a single image view with a small image, Yahoo displays as much as possible in the window it is given.

"In your face from outer space" - Motto of the USAF Space Warfare Center, Falcon AFB.

That's from 1996. SWC never really quite lived up to that motto, and their successor, the Space Innovation & Development Center, is more of an R&D operation. It's becoming closer to reality, though.

We'll know it's real the first time some space-based weapon zaps an individual on the ground.

Oh well, at least they didn't pull an Apple and label it "The New Xbox(tm)".

Volkswagen is even worse about that. First they had the old air-cooled Beetle (except it was actually called the "Type 1"), then they had the "New Beetle" (from 1998 to 2011), and now they have the "Beetle" (from 2012 on). So now, to avoid confusion, I have to refer to my 1998 model as my "old New Beetle" and my friend with a 2013 model has to refer to it as a "2012 Beetle" because if he calls it simply "new" people will think it's the 1998-2011 version!

(And no matter what we call it, we'll still get asked "is the engine in the back?")

I'm talking about a hypothetical situation where somebody bought Portal but regrets their hypocrisy (re: DRM) now. In other words, a "you're usually not OK with it, but sometimes can't help yourself" thing.

It's not really that tough a job. The thing is about 4 lanes wide, and not excessively tall. There's less than 20 miles of road movement at each end of the trip. So it's going to be a routine big move with brief road closures. Probably late at night.

The rest of the trip is by barge, down the East Coast, around Florida, and up the Mississippi, Illinois, and DesPlanes rivers to Chicago. There are standard barges which can easily handle something of that size. The locks on that route have 110 foot width.

If you're OK getting something like Portal, than you've... well, your anti-DRM ideas have their price in some sense. (I'm not trying to criticize here -- mine definitely have their own price -- but just be realistic.) And at that point it's the old joke about how now it's just a matter of haggling over price, as you've established that your attitude is "DRM decreases the value of something" instead of "I won't buy DRM at all." And at that point, who's to say that the console price isn't below the limit?

Or you bought a DRM'd thing during an irrational lapse of judgement.

The consumers (aka, the mindless bleating masses) may repurchase all of their games, but the customers, the ones who are able to make intelligent decisions instead of just blindly accepting everything their corporate overlords throw at them, would just hang on to their 360 consoles in order to play their 360 games, and only purchase new titles for this new system, if they decide they want it.

"Customers" would never have bought a 360 in the first place.

So what you're saying is that PC + DRM and other assorted lock-in = Xbox? I think you should direct your "fuck, you are stupid" comment towards those who actually decide to buy it...

Most of the articles about this are rehashes of the press release. They even use the same language. OK, there are 8 CPUs. But what kind?.

The new Kinect supposedly is a real per-pixel time-of-flight device. Any more info on that?

I totally agree, that's why I've ignored this and the PS4 "launches". As far as I can tell it's really more of an effort to poll people about what they like than any kind if real launch.

Rather than one it seems like zero might have been a better choice.

You may want to re-think that... use the old rule of imagining what taunts third-graders can make of your name, now think of "Zero" again in that light.

One is way more Zen.

I see you posted AC to avoid rebuttal. Bad luck for you; I read AC posts sometimes.

You know that's 'in public' by all definitions except for yours right?,

Only an AC considers private restaurants public space... Sadly that gaffe was the intellectual highlight of your whole post.

You get that people can turn them off right?

You understand that there's no indicator if they have, right?

You know this how exactly?

Because that's how people are using them (ref: Scoble).

And assuming that something legitimately wrong happened, this is wrong how exactly?

It's not wrong. It's Wrong. And it points out that anywhere they go there is no more Private space - my original point. Do try to keep up even if it means you have to tell the driver of the short bus to accelerate a bit.

I'll let you have the last response so you can claim the throne of clowns as I know you are so itching to do.

Somebody didn't get the memo that vampires are over.

You can track this at a Barnes and Noble store by noting how many bookcases in the teen section are devoted to a subject. At peak, there were four cases of "Teen Paranormal Romance" and two of "New Teen Paranormal Romance". That dropped to three cases total, then two. "Survival" books are big now - there are two cases of Hunger Games imitations, not including the table of Hunger Games merch.

We already have "knowledge bases", "community support", and support outsourced to Far, Far Away. Microsoft did some work with Bayesian statistics to find out which questions a support tech should ask first. Much software already "phones home" to send trouble reports and crash dumps. There's been some good work on automated crash dump classification, to group similar crash dumps together and send them all to the same maintenance programmer.

I wasn't aware it was bad form morally to ask not to be taxed twice on the same revenue..

Indeed, the entity that seems to be crossing a moral line is the one asking Apple to pay tax a second time.