..a highly ingenious way to warn us about something that has close to a zero chance of happening. I guess it's like the rest of Homeland Security's efforts, just without the ingenious part.

When I bought my Macbook Pro, the first thing I did was create a Boot Camp partition, and install a fresh Windows 7 Pro on it. In the 18 months that I've had the machine, I've never once used it. I was sure there would be some Windows software I wouldn't be able to live without, but between OSX and the Linux VM I have on there, I've not needed it at all. It's just a waste of 80gb at the moment. Thankfully I got the Win7 cheap as a student.

I had 6Mbps back East. It was pretty usable, but if you're paying for 1Gbps it's an insult.

I pay for and get 60Mbps now, but it's data capped, so I'm allowed just under 15 hours of that speed a month (720 hours in a month). Every other option in my area is also data capped, but slower. This whole system is fucking bullshit.

1Gbps speed for the first 2GB, then $10 per GB after. Or maybe they'll just throttle you down to 6Mbps for the rest of the month.

Given that BBT is basically geek blackface, and loathed by most that I know, I wouldn't take anything said about B5 to be anything more than a semi-obscure reference the writers put on there to make the primary audience of non-geeks laugh. I'd be wiling to bet that most people that are fans of BBT have never seen a B5 episode.

I would agree with Alibre. I bought it years ago for some work a friend and I were working on. Like all 3D software, there is a heavy learning curve, and there is no free lunch here. Alibre came with around 6hrs of training videos, and of course, there is YouTube for lots of other questions that come up.

I think you'll find after reading all these posts that there is no easy way to do this, you sort of have to pick one and go with it. Alibre is very well supported, and has a pretty big following in the home machinest/hobby crowd, and their monthly news email has cool stuff that people are doing with it. I knew I didn't need a full multi-thousand dollar pro system for the cad work we were doing, but I didn't want a buggy open source solution either. Alibre was the best blend between the two I found.

I was a so-so Linux user, primarily using Windows for most of my tasks, and just sort of playing with Linux. I went to OSX for a laptop, and although didn't like it at first, and still have issues, I'm reasonably happy with it. New job though, and I'm in front of Mint Linux 100% during the day. I've found it surprisingly adept at just about everything I do for work (heavy embedded work, libre office, web, pdfs, etc)....enough so that I have a VM of it at home running 24x7 on my Windows machine, and use it quite a bit. In fact, I've scaled back the things I do on Win7 quite a bit, and with a few tweaks, think I could be happy running Mint full-time. It runs well enough as a VM that I'm inclined not to mess with it. I don't think I'd gain much from having it native, except the endless stream of background Windows updating that's always going on. I can't slam Win7 that bad though. It is rare as hell for me to need to reboot the machine, maybe once this year so far.

I don't see any point in trying to enforce something like this. What I would like to see would be a "Bullshit Inside" badge attached to a game that meant it had any of those things. Then I could choose to spend money or not. We had to put stickers on music that had a naughty word in them, and we have ratings on games for every other type of potentially offensive content. Doesn't seem like a stretch to blatantly mark something as DRM enforced, or additional money required.

You want to see a drastic change in the user interface for the worse, take a look at the latest Microsoft Visual Studio. Totally flat looking, devoid of color. It's almost unusable in the sense that I have to spend time visually hunting for things on the screen all the time. There are no real patterns for my eyes to lock on to. Complete fail.

I'm also trying to figure out the point to this.

It's exactly the same in all the pre-med classes I took. The instructors had to go to great lengths to separate the Indian students on test days. There were numerous cases of where Indian students in one class of a professors would steal the exam during a test, and give it to students in a later class. The professors had a huge burden of extra work to come up with different exams for each individual class. The Indian students didn't seem to care or protest one bit about being singled out for cheating, as it just seemed part of the game to them.

...protecting ourselves from extremely rare occurrences that affect a very small percentage of the population as a whole, but that isn't how we do things in the US unfortunately.

I still wouldn't be able to participate in something like this because of the data caps my monopolistic cable provider has. It's one thing for me to pay for my own monthly usage, but having my limit sucked dry in a few days and either paying a great deal for the overages or having my service cut off goes beyond my willingness to help out.

I get the Apple is evil thing. I do. Please though, tell me what company I can trust? Should I trust Google with one of their phones for example? I think that ship sailed. I was thinking maybe one of the new Ubuntu phones, but wait, Canonical is in the middle of user privacy issues.

Last month I bought my first new TV, having owned a lot of castoffs from friends. A shiny new Panasonic plasma "smart TV". My first thought was that I'd never use that stuff, but the picture was the deciding factor. Since the router was nearby, I went ahead and attached an Ethernet cable to it. Next thing you know, I'm surfing around on the built in Netflix and Amazon Prime apps, and less than a month later, I actually cancelled the cable TV service that I stopped watching.

Maybe it's just that I value my time differently, or that I don't spend hours randomly cruising through the channels on the off chance that I catch a show when I want to watch something. I want something on demand when I have time, and at least on my TV and internet connection combination, Netflix HD looks absolutely amazing.

Of course the cable providers know this, which is why heavy caps are in place in a lot of markets, and why I had to up my internet plan with my ISP to give me a higher cap, but if I was a big TV watcher, I'd still bust it.