Why don't you complete your posts? Anyway, here goes: ... Steam will come from the fires of thousands of court cases litigating about patents of existing high-performance graphics players (Nvidia and AMD for the most), a few from mobile graphics players, suing the kickstarter project's implementation company to kingdom come.

What is there to design? It is a PC, solved problem, get on with it. Low-ish end PCs that the GP is describing don't take much effort to put into small enclosures either.

Possibly they sell the same PC with Windows too. If there are too many returns, stop installing SteamOS, change the labels, and back to windows. If SteamOS is easy to install from within Windows to its own partition, like Ubuntu, OEMs can keep selling windows PCs, and users can make them Steam PCs.

Low risk for OEMs as no dedicated very distinct product line is required.

Low risk for Valve as there isn't much recoup required as it is not a loss leader. So they can sell cheaper games, supply some free games, charge developers non-exorbitant rates.

So low risk for developers.

Low risk for gamers - potentially cheaper, multi-purpose.

Chances for success will depend on execution, of course, but low risk is one battle won already.

Steve did try it on pancreatic cancer. Didn't work, though.

Nice. But it is stupid to have a browser application having write access to its own binary / installation directory. One arbitrary code execution, even by the attacker getting lucky, means that particular user is pwned for ever.

Linux distribution method seems ideal to me - root owning firefox installation, non-root running it. Can be replicated in most OSes - just don't give write permission to the user running it. Update manually (or automatically) from trusted sources.

And if a person uploads a photo for free to a website in exchange for privacy, who is the vendor? And why?

I don't think the traditional classificatin of business participants into vendor and customer are valid in the "free" internet age.

"Full" is not a word typically used for things with "restrictions". Fanboy speak is different, though.

SquareTrade does say they use robots to abuse the phones to standardize on angles and magnitudes of impacts. They could be lying, of course

So they did need Microsoft's money.

I'd say, small price to pay for compatibility with software (x86) written over last 20 years.

Full? You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.

Right. Looking again, sorry I misread your post.

I don't understand. The "business" can buy a printer exactly like yours, get better deals on materials, and beat you in price.

Which is also stupid. Because the "business" can buy a much much better printer at 100 times the price you paid. Possibly with features specifically required for their kind of "printing". And beat you in price, quality, durability, customer-service, aesthetics, ergonomics, safety.

Well, I used to not enable pin/pattern/password security on my phone because of the high hassle to security ratio, for an admittedly less sensitive device. Motorola Atrix 4G's fingerprint feature made me use it for the low hassle to security ratio.

The "fancy"ness of the security system lies in hassle to security ratio. Whether it is used or not depends on sensitivity of the item. E.g. a very good security feature on my burger where no one but I can eat it may not get used, even though it is trivial to use and incredibly secure. For industrial security, one is ready to tolerate quite a bit of hassle for some real security. Most consumer level electronic items lie somewhere in between.

That is where most of the postponement happens. That it costs money, and a realization of ongoing expenditure to maintain a backup, helps the postponement.

And why would you get disks of the same make?

Completely agreed.

And I showed that at much much lower cost, local backups can protect against events that can reasonably be expected in a lifetime by everyone. Lots of people have spent lifetimes without getting their houses burgled or burnt. Reaching adulthood without at least a hard drive failure / accidental file deletion / virus corruption is nearly impossible (assuming data storage from birth, of course).

So the same benefits are NOT NECESSARY to START backing up. Which is what my original post in this thread was about, parent post of which was suggesting to not even START backing up until you have an all comprehensive backup protecting against once (100,1000) year events.

By dishonestly using bad practices (all drives of the same make? WTF?). By cunningly changing the objective (3 disk failure in the same month is once in 3888 year event, given an average drive fails in 3 years) to saving against once in millenium events rather than reasonably expected events.

And I was arguing about STARTING with local even if remote appears expensive.

I think it is that your disks are not giving any bit rot, but memory. Frequently written data passes through memory more times, and can get corrupted in case of memory errors uncatchable by ECC.

Processors overclocked and overvolted to hell also cause data errors, but I don't think that is your case.