He must have one of the few reliable ISPs in america. Even though I have broadband, it's kinda shitty because options are limited (at&t, please roll out u-verse already, the people a fucking block over have it). It tends to be flaky, so I don't really like things depending on it not crapping out. And I live in a comparatively civilized area, so it only gets worse. They must not be paying attention to the state of internet in this country. Things just aren't good enough right now, same reason they're not going straight to digital distribution only just yet. Maybe in a decade, but right now this is a recipe for disaster.

Plus, I'm not sure wtf the point is in the end really. Piracy wasn't a serious problem this generation, outside of maybe on the Wii. Just securing things effectively should be more than enough to prevent piracy, and you just need check-ins to lock used games out. (Though even that probably alienates a large enough portion of consumers to matter). It just seems like they're shooting themselves in the foot.

Previous generations usually achieved this by having the chips for the old console in them, in one form or another, when playing just one generation back at least.

As someone who has 16gb of RAM in their pc, I'll say that games rarely use more than 1gb, and only see them use 2gb on very rare occasions. Some of this is likely due to things being held back by the current console generation, but I definitely think that it won't be the kind of limiting factor is has been for developers this generation. Sure, we'll hit it eventually, we always do, but to be honest I don't see it being a big deal.
As for gpu power.. I agree that it's a little skimpy, but it's because they have to save money somewhere, and to be honest I think that the "average" console player is starting to not care about graphics as much, as things get closer to the "good enough" range for most people. Not to mention that console games tend to run a bit closer to the metal, coupled with being specifically targeted/optimized for the platform generally gets a solid amount more performance compared to how similar hardware on a pc. Obviously PCs will still have better graphics at the mid-high end, but that's just how this always is :)

I got a 47" one for more like 600, it's not super fancy, but it's not terrible either.

Maybe we need to come up with "Facist America" jokes instead

This is obviously more work, but you CAN always fliter out specific content using the - operator, such as -site:experts-exchange.com, or similar. Obviously an inferior solution, but better than nothing if you need to cut some things out.

You probably already knew this though.

True, but there's still lots of illegal content out there, hosted in other countries and the like. Of course, filtering that sort of stuff would probably be nigh impossible, but I can at least understand the sentiment.

I have to wonder if this would really do anything useful. If they just mean banning porn that's depicting actual violence against women (and I don't mean bdsm or something, I mean actual rape and sexual assault, not consenting staged acts), then that's perfectly reasonable. But if they're banning *depictions* of violent sexual acts, then it's probably pointless. It will do somewhere between nothing to spurring the people who are into that to find other "outlets." Potentially as far as committing actual sexual violence.

As a woman who is proud of her sexuality, this offends me. There are many other things that can be done to improve equality than ban porn. If anything, banning porn may well increase sexual violence.

The original fix in question was feeding /dev/urandom into /dev/random because the entropy pool was running low and sometimes running out, which is what was causing ui hitching.

Of course, it was actually just an old android bug that'd been fixed ages ago, iirc.

Here, (in Kansas), liquor stores have to close at 11pm. 8pm on Sundays. Bars and etc are allowed to serve until 2am. It's all rather silly and annoying, since I tend to think "a beer sounds nice, should go buy some" around 11:30.

I agree that this is true in theory, but my experience thus far is that things are very.. quirky.

I ran Win7 until I moved to Win8 about a month ago, and getting games that ran fine before to start is sometimes an issue, particularly games that use GFWL, ironically. Other weirdness is not uncommon as well.

Another issue I'm having, though honestly it's hard to pin fault for this, is that every boot I need to reinstall graphics drivers (nvidia), or games will just crash if they use dx10/11.. the error can even be traced back to something nvidia-related via the event viewer.

It's not the end of the world, but you'd think most games, especially GFWL games, would work just was well in Win8 as 7.

People will say that it's a new OS, and that things will be fixed in time, but they're missing the point. the ball is being dropped, and other platforms look more attractive because of it. Plus, I used Win7 starting at the first RC and never had any extra issues getting games to run, unless they were games that didn't run without hacks in vista either.

Considering that loads of places with free wifi exist (even if there are still other cost issues like transportation), it's still more cost effective to just download things if you're going to make effort to get them.. the only thing I could fathom being worth purchasing physical bootlegs of would be hd video content, particularly 1080p content, as going somewhere to download that could be impractical.

Obviously this requires access to a computer that is not completely locked down, but you'd need one to use mp3s as well.

It should also be noted that the above is only reasonable for the developed world, but that's what I assume we're talking about given that TFA is about the USA.

I would assume that anyone intelligent enough to want/be able to use mp3s would also be smart enough to just go home and torrent it, so they aren't much of a market.

Pretty sure bittorrent hashes things for a reason..