And those 16GB usb sticks actually work in my experience with no problems whatsoever on my Xbox 360 for copying/storing data whereas brand name Lexar sticks from Walmart of the same size didn't work at all. And at my local "The Source" store on my end of the city anyways it's an older guy with gray hair probably in his 50's as the manager then literally a few east indian teenager's or young adults still in their early 20's (men and women) always looking to the older guy for help. Still, like you said, it's better then FS or BB drones. If I ever had to go into FS or BB again I do what i've done for years, say "No thank you I'm doing fine" and just keep on walking and look myself!

What you just described reminded me of "Consumers Distributing" which ran in Canada and the USA from 1957 to 1996. Yet oddly enough continues to thrive in Ireland and the UK, go figure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

Same idea though really, you'd walk into a store, look in the catalogue, fill out a sheet with what you want by stock/item numbers and bring it to the counter. The only problems I remember with CD as a kid was my parents being frustrated because the majority of the time you went there they never had much in stock and you'd be forced to wait 2-4 weeks on end for even small things. This lead to CD having the perception of "always out of stock" in Canada and the USA.

I'm beginning to wonder now if this will affect "The Source" stores here in Canada which is what Radio shack for all intents and purposes became around 2009. They too try to push the cellphones and accessories along with some electronics and computers and what seems like smaller sections of pegboards with all the smaller parts that Radio shack was always known for.

Except good luck trying to find semi rare or exotic adapters, converters, or cables at Walmart. Some things I doubt my walmart superstore here in Canada would sell would be things like

3.5mm to 2.5mm adapter
2 ft long USB micro usb or mini usb cable (without the power brick)
Extension cables for 3.5mm plugins (great for extending headphone cable length)

Unless walmart has changed in recent years as I rarely go into walmart anymore, with the last time I was in a walmart store was over a year and a half ago, I doubt they'd want to be like Radio Shack and carry all the small parts and accessories bigtime like Radio Shack did for years.

Except you forgot to mention that they did come back in an odd way as "The Source" now in Canada as of 2009. Only thing I find that's annoying is their name brand "Nexxtech" seems ok for a few things such as batteries, alarm clocks, USB Drives, and cables, adapters, etcetera, but they don't actually print product number's on the packaging which means if you want to look by stock number online then go to an actual store in the mall you end up hoping it's not in the wrong spot.

And, here in Canada too the focus is more on accessories for cell phones, followed by TV's, then a smaller section for computers and small sections on the walls for all the various little items. I remember radio shack used to have a hell of a lot more for converting or adapting darn near anything.

What nintendo needs to consider is going back to what i call the old school roots that made them successful. Make the next console to replace the Wii-U use cartridges again considering that nowaday's we have USB flash drives that can hold up to 512gb currently and in the future up to 1 or even 2TB. When you look at back in the N64 days the cartridges held maybe 64-128mb worth of data it's kind of mind-blowing what they can do now with the same size cartridges if not even bigger or smaller and how much data they could hold in them. And go back to the old school gamecube controller or update it but keep it comfortable to use.

The one main reason I haven't gotten a Wii-U is because of the insistence on using that silly IMHO mini-tablet controller and the fact that you apparantly can't reuse old gamecube controllers and even play Gamecube games on it something which the original Wii was quite good at with Gamecube compatability until it was removed in later models.

Wait didn't Punkbuster die a horrible death years ago when everyone realised it didn't do jack shit on half life engine servers that ran stuff like counter-strike and team fortress classic?

K-Lite Mega Codec pack with MPC-HC on Windows is the best video player period. Even offers you the ability to use ffdshow codecs or the newer and better IMHO quality LAV codecs. If you play music on Windows Foobar2000 is also the best. The one thing that pisses me off about VLC is that for year's people have been asking for a reliable bookmark function so that you can add a bookmark while playing a video as an example and it works, but the second you close VLC the bookmarks are lost until you use an evil kludge fix of adding the bookmark, then saving a playlist file and loading said playlist file will make VLC go to the bookmark position. Why it's so hard for them to actually save bookmarks between sessions doesn't make sense.

Add to that in regards to embedded album artwork in OGG Vorbis music files VLC refuses to show it when lots of other players including Foobar2000 and Audacious as well as others show it just fine. Instead the default behaviour of VLC will be to "download" album art which 99% of the time is low quality pixelated crap and more often then not even the right album cover to begin with. If the people behind VLC would stop being assholes and fix these kinds of problems that have been mentioned before and ignored for years then more people would use VLC again. Until they pull heads out of asses though which may never happen I don't care how many "re-writes" or "new cores" they do it's still the same player that "plays practically everything but is brain-dead in some area's".

FYI that was "fake" with the banning of balls at a school in Ontario.

http://www.cbc.ca/newsblogs/yourcommunity/2013/09/cbc-radio-show-strikes-again-with-ball-less-soccer-satire.html

""The CBC Radio show This is That — a satire of Canadian culture, news, and CBC Radio itself — aired its first show of the new season last weekend and already people are mistaking its spoofs for real news. Again.

They posted their latest offering on their blog on Tuesday and it was believable enough to enrage some sports fans."

But on to the main subject I agree wth the majority here that it was the 19 year old's fault 100%. Obviousely the father didn't teach him enough safety lessons in regards to R/C helicopters and the kid did it to himself by sitting down and landing the damn thing right next to his body on a table. To me that's kind of like eliminating another moron from the gene pool that SHOULD have realized "Um Gee maybe I shouldn't land this next to my body". But I do feel for the father though he'll have to live with not only seeing his son kill himself like that but also realising he could have prevented it by trying to teach him some more safety lessons and hope for the best.

Linux will never reach year of the desktop even with this kernel release coming up. In a lot of ways Linux right now in various distro's such as Ubuntu and variants like it kind of remind me of the Windows 3.x and 95 days. You might have decent driver support for most hardware but come time to upgrading the kernel more often then not you break the official closed source nvidia drivers along with your nice GUI boot screen that usually hides all the normal boot messages from the kernel as it's loaded up until you see your fancy login screen. Same goes with the god awful support of AMD video support in Linux both with official and open source drivers and more often then not your network and ow wi-fi settings might be hosed or you may not even have the WI-FI driver needed and then it's a mad dash off to the official Ubuntu forums for help.

And applications need to be improved too in some area's. There's really only one half assed decent CD/DVD/BR burning program and thats K3B that actually won't produce messed up unreadable discs. Wheras in Windows you have the excellent free CDBurnerXP or if you like bloatware "one does it all" package the commercial Nero Burning rom. Video players in Linux suck too when you don't have much choice been mplayer and it's front ends and VLC. Gnome Mplayer as a front-end example can't even jump to a specific point in hours, minutes, or seconds in a video if you want and won't allow you to save bookmarks.

VLC on the other hand DOES allow you to jump to a specific time, but it sure as hell can't save bookmarks at any point in a video until you use a workaround of saving a bookmark into a playlist file, and not too mention that when playing audio files VLC will absolutely ignore embedded artwork in say Ogg Vorbis and FLAC files and by default will try and download cover art that's garbage in quality or completly wrong.

When in comparison to windows xp/7/8 you have K-lite media codec pack and the great Media Player Classic HC (MPC-HC) that not only has more modern video renderers such as Haala and MadVR but can also use newer LAV audio/video decoders for much better picture and sound quality compared to VLC, and if you don't want to use LAV decoders you can use ffmpeg included with k-lite instead and STILL get better picture quality. Oh and also no problems playing DVD's either when even with restricted-extra's packages in Ubuntu and variants and some other stuff installed to play dvd's you still find the occasional DVD that will not play because of it's copy protection garbage.

Image viewers and editors aren't much better. Irfanview and Xnview are great to use but all you have with Ubuntu is the newer XnviewMP (Multi-Platform) which is really the only decent image viewer on Linux these day's that isn't retarded. For editors sure you have GIMP on Windows, Linux ETC but Adobe Photoshop still has a fair amount of features that GIMP doesn't have. Audio players in Ubuntu suffer too when the only decent audio player is Audacious but in comparison to Foobar2000 on windows which does so much freaking more it's like night and day.

Overall in a lot of ways windows has better apps in some areas or has more development in some area's towards audio and video quality in playback. It's just that for the most part a lot of people are dumbasses and don't take precautions of running ONLY Firefox as a browser with Adblock Plus, Noscript, Cookie Controller, Ghostery (or DoNotTrackMe if you prefer) and Socialfixer (to fix whats annoying as hell on facebook) and don't actually read each popup from an installer asking if you'd like to install "X toolbar" or "X program" and automatically default to YES until you click no or refuse to avoid getting malware and viruses and browser hijackers simply because people are too stupid to read and in a hurry to always click through every screen. That and people who still to this day launch attachments from emails.

Linux is no better either these days with some newer malware packages showing up and with all those so called wonderful Linux help sites with really long command lines using sudo in the terminal, some people will blindly copy and paste it into the terminal and run it without verifying what they copied off the site actually matches what was pasted into the terminal before hitting enter and entering in your password then wondering how linux malware got on the machine.

So overall the point i'm trying to make here and hope i've made is until the applications are improved or better alternatives become available for linux it will never reach the year of the desktop, especially not when you have to live in fear each distro and kernel upgrade if it's going to hose your network, wi-fi, or video driver or your boot/login screens, or god forbid something else. And yes I am aware of WINE if you want to run the majority of Windows programs in Linux but it's still not 100% with all apps out there.

I've been using this program for over a year first in Windows XP and now in Lubuntu and it's really really good to manage books on my Kindle Paperwhite. There's even a quality check plugin that has an option titled "Fix ASIN for Kindle Fire" which fixes it so that the book cover actually shows up on my paperwhite instead of a generic one. :)

Really? My lubuntu install plays audio just fine with no problems. Just because you have issues doesn't mean everyone does.

I've been quite happy using Audacious in Lubuntu compared to say in the past when i've tried Clementine and Amarok and I found they both felt bloated almost like iTunes for windows.

Some people just can't handle concentrating on multiple tasks at once such as driving as well as talking into a phone let alone texting. Even if you have your cell phone linked by bluetooth in a newer car and can answer a voice call via a push of the button on the steering wheel or another method of answering it you're still making most people focus more on a conversation as to what to say and less on the road and driving. My former boss was like this when he'd take me home on occasion in his brand new Honda 4 door from 2012 and he'd answer calls from co-workers and his family and there was a couple times he did get distracted and almost caused an accident or wasn't as steady on his driving as he should be.

I've even almost once been killed by a person who decided she had to grab her cell phone and reply to a text message. Thankfully she's my ex girlfriend but back in 2007 she was doing around 110 km/h (or 68 mph or so) on a two lane road outside of Regina, Saskatchewan (Canada) and she took both hands off the steering wheel and damn near made the minivan almost swerve off the road into a ditch. To put it mildly that I was pretty pissed off and screaming at her was an understatement.

Why bring back an old magazine title when it will end up being more full of ads then actual articles? 10+ years ago I used to read Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, and Scientific American all the time and it was worthwhile reading. Now in the last 4-5 years i've noticed in the above mentioned magazines there is literally twice as many ads with the majority of them being 3-8 page ads trying to hype some product, car, etc, the usual two page ads, and so on. Plus, a lot more mail in cards that everyone basically rips out and tosses in the trash anyways.

I know the magazine publishing companies whine they have to survive in this era to keep making issues but keep a lot less ads in the magazines and way more articles and stories and you'll get more subscribers who prefer magazines that aren't 85% ads and 15% articles.