It has been a long time since I was extremely familiar with the "extended universe", but at one time I had read somewhere around 50 of the books from this universe...and while many of them were great individually as a universe the universe as a whole was set by 20 different writers with different prerogatives...so for one I don't think the expanded universe is even a great universe but then on top of that it just totall ruins any ability for creative writing. There is hardly in an unaccounted for day in that universe.

Lucas screwed up a lot in the prequels but I think some of that was due to trying to fit his story into the expanded universe. Primary example: midochlorians are right from the expanded universe. But he obviously referenced it throughout the films, the whole clone wars business -> mandolorion armor -> boba fett business was defined in the expanded university and then Lucas made his story to match that mold and it was the worst thing ever. I'm not totally blaming the expanded universe, Lucas is awful, but there is no reason to follow it.

So anyway I will be glad to see some surprises. Hell I wish they'd forget the prequels happened and we just started from scratch after rtoj. the only real expanded universe bits I'd keep would be shadow of the empire and the bounty hunters...they don't pidgeon hole the story. Or start inventing new ships and tech and forcing the writers to reuse all these predefined assets.

I am certainly not a lawyer, but I don't how understand how someone could be compelled to lie to the public, regardless of the intent -- maybe there would be a recourse of a conspiracy charge for setting up the canary in the first place, but to be in contempt of court for refusing to lie or speak about the issue? If a third party asks directly about something covered by a gag order, and the party under the gag chooses to decline to comment, is this really any different? And if so would there be a legal difference if the canary were to be run by a third party site, who would have someone call the admin of the site in question and directly ask them the question? If they decline to answer the canary is killed by the third party... Or I wonder if it would make a difference if by lying to stay in compliance with the gag order, another crime was committed for instance by lying to investors?

I would think this would be automated such that the canary would die if the admin didn't perform some action that would be difficult for the law to compel.

I envision a questionarre the admin must take once per day where the question, "has any secret search been executed which the users have not been informed of?" is asked and if the answer is "yes" or the questionarre is not taken the canary dies.

From a legal standpoint it would be difficult to justify compelling someone to actively lie. And even if the admin were to be threatened with being shot, if the questionarre is failed purposefully, the canary dies and the damage is done. While someone could still shoot the admin, it would serve no function to continue to threaten them.

I would also consider that the canary system is meant to work within a lawful system -> if the system is totally unlawful a more meaningful defense may just be a gun.

What do you even want a microsd slot for? The device will still have storage, most likely much faster than an sdcard. You can simply plug your android device into a computer and use this storage as a USB drive AND your phone can use the storage at the same time. More computers have USB ports than have SD slots .. Then you've probably got to use the micro SD to SD converter card... And to get to the sdcard you almost always have to remove the cover of the phone. What benefit does an sdcard provide?

It sounds like you are describing the current system, not the new system. And if you don't like the current system, you are going to hate the new system.

What I would consider the old system would be something like SlackWare(RC scripts) where the system might have 8 or 9 different shell scripts called during the boot process, but it's essentially one giant autoexec.bat. Simple to make modifications to the boot process, but installing new services or upgrading the system may require manual merges and break your installation.

The current system is more like RedHat/SuSE/debian(Tradtitional init), where there are tons of scripts that call other scripts and it gets pretty complicated, but for the most part everything is a script and can be easily traced. This is more difficult for the inexperienced to modify, but is reasonable for those familiar with scripting and is great for adding new services and upgrading the OS. Basically the scope of a change is smaller, so less stuff breaks.

The new system is something like Fedora/Ubuntu(Systemd/Upstart). There are config files for everything from services, to devices, to sockets that are parsed by a binary that isn't very open to inspection. This leads to a very fast boot up and has neat features like the ability to view the logs of a service with the same command used to start it, but is also like sticking your dick in a box of razers, because when something goes wrong you can't just pull out vi and look at the logic being used to boot the machine. It also leads to somewhat unsettling things like a merged /usr and a /run.

To be fair this might be somewhat unfair to Ubuntu, because I haven't invested much time into Upstart. If it was something worth looking at I'm sure the Fedora/SUSE devs would have dropped systemd for it though.

What would be really nice is if Debian built a version of systemd that didn't have a big binary core, or at least split the thing into several different services. I like the speed and slickness of systemd, but if anything goes wrong with a system using it, I will have no idea how to fix the thing -- and that's after using systemd on my primary laptop/server for over a year.

I recognize the economic value of purchasing a single device instead of two, but I refuse to recognize the Surface Pro as a replacement for either a traditional laptop or a tablet.

The Surface does not offer the system specifications or expand-ability of a real laptop, and Windows 8 is not most peoples first choice for a full fledged OS.
The Surface also does not provide the battery life/weight of a real tablet, and once again comes with Windows 8 instead of a better suited tablet OS like iOS/Android.
The Surface Pro is really nothing new; This is the same device every other manufacturer has been offering as a Wintel tablet solution for years, so it's really no surprise consumers aren't biting.

The Grandparent which I had replied to claimed there was some benefit in having development tools on the surface.
If you know what use development tools would have that wouldn't involve coding on the device or something equally ridiculous, feel free to illuminate.

Sure you can take the tablet from your desk and be severely limited by it's battery life/applications, or you can leave it on your desk and be severely limited by it's specifications.
I would love to see the Frankenstein setup for a true keyboard/mouse/external drive/ethernet/cell phone charging...
Oh you need a $200 dock for that and you are still limited by it's CPU/Mem/GPU in comparison to a real laptop? Great.

For basic surfing, flash is the killer feature the Surface is meant to handle?

Android had flash and when it was removed I barely noticed.
Almost any flash video can be played directly without the flash component.
NetFlix has an app.
Hulu has an app.
Mobile browsers have tabs for effective browsing; If you need to write a research paper or perform actual work, please use a real computer and not a mobile entertainment device.

These two form factors(workstation/tablet) just don't merge into one device easily.
An analogy: Most people want a car and a house, so a company starts selling campers. Now no one needs a house or a car right?

The only thing the surface does better than it's competitors is run a full fledged operating system, but what is the point of this?

You mentioned you can run development tools on it, but why would you want to do that? I couldn't imagine attempting to lean back on the couch with a tablet and write code on a touch screen, it would be awful. Of course you can slap on the crap keyboard and sit down at a desk almost like it's a real computer... but then why don't you use a real laptop/desktop. You could run office, but why? You could run full blown outlook, but why?

You say you want more than a tablet for mail/surfing.... Are you writing multipage emails on a tablet? What kind of surfing requires a full fledged OS?

Surface Pro is the answer to a problem that doesn't exist.

RHEL doesn't install it by default in some of the more common installer selections.

I honestly love PC gaming, but it is not a total replacement for console gaming.

Video and audio cable management for TV display can range from annoying to impossible.
Controller configuration per game can be annoying.
Navigation of a mouse oriented interface with a controller is painful.
Bugs, security, and game requirements all need to be managed.
Can not just pop in a dvd and have the software run.
A $100 graphics card will not make all current gen games run smoothly, let alone next years games. Hardware requirements can be annoying and costly.

And then the really big ones:
No local multiplayer.
No high quality games using innovative controls like the wiimote, kinect, psmove, or wii u game pad.
No access to first party exclusives Halo/Mario/Zelda etc. (no emulated games from 2 generations ago don't count)

You are suggesting that paying someone for goods despite the poor behavior of the seller is done by both gamers and drug addicts to make the point that they are both addicts, however this behavior is wide spread and has nothing to do with actual addiction. Probably a good portion of this site's users hate their ISP or cable company, yet continue to pay those bills. Many people dislike WalMart, but continue to shop there. This has nothing to do with addiction and comes down to the buyers evaluation of whether or not something has enough benefit to justify dealing with the seller. The console makers can try whatever they like and people may still buy things from them, but they aren't sticking needles in the buyers arm and if you provide the user with a better value they will probably take that into consideration with their gaming purchases.

You can make a single LV that is striped across separate underlying disks or RAID sets. That's kind of half the point of LVM.

If you really absolutely wanted a consistent snapshot of the whole fileystem you could just use one LV, although there are of course many good reasons not to do that, but I can't really see a need for /home and /var to be consistent with one another. If you want a DB snapshot, then just snapshot /var, unless your database product is crazy files shouldn't really be changing anywhere else.

Linux absolutely has production level encryption through the device mapper and support for snapshots with LVM.

Data deduplication is something I'm not as familiar with, but Microsoft just got support for this in Windows 2012 and Linux has had some dedup support for at least this long. I don't know how production ready either are, but I'm pretty sure I don't trust your accuracy on the matter after your previous claims.

Why would you spread a database over multiple Logical Volumes. That just sounds like a poorly engineered LVM setup. Am I wrong?

I thought it was fun, but I'm more casual with racing games and usually prefer them on the console. Who knows, I'm sure I'll give it a play next time I'm in windows.

By the way, I did have the refresh rate set to 60, however that usually doesn't have an effect on FPS in games unless sync to vblank is enabled... and I just looked into the configuration and vblank IS enabled by default, so you are correct and it was running capped at 60 FPS.

So I booted into windows and tried out the game.

I don't see anyway to set the FPS or report the FPS through the menu items anyway.

The graphics here are pretty simplistic, and as you mentioned very tronesque. I first played it with the motion blur left on, and to be honest while I was picking up the controls I didn't find it very distracting, but after I had the basics down it really did start to annoy me when either I was moving at a decent speed or when taking a lot of turns. It is as I have seen before blurry, watery, and unnecessary.

Playing without the motion blur, just made the graphics "cleaner". Of course this also made the lack of detail a little more apparent as well as any FPS blips (which somehow I got a few of despite have a pretty respectable gaming rig) a lot more apparent.

I only played through the tutorial and the first level, so maybe I'm missing something. I could see how in a screenshot it might look "prettier" with the motion blur, but I can't say I see an advantage during gameplay.