Hide empty drives can be pretty annoying when you are ripping a few discs in a row (pretty much the only time I use my DVD drive) as it keeps moving the selected folders each time you pop the drive. Obviously your suggestion is valid, just that as with many things in windows, it is a double edged sword, lol. Kind of like auto-hide taskbar...works great *most* of the time, but not all of the time. Gets stuck open often enough that I have a shortcut that kills and restarts explorer.

There is a price threshold, at least for me. Right now HDD's cost say 5-6 cents per GB. Once Flash starts to hit the 3-4 cents per GB level (assuming HDD have gone below 1 cent/GB), it starts to make up for itself for many applications because of the performance/reliability factor. Right now I have say 200 'videos' per drive on a single 1.5TB drive (2TB just recently became more cost effective if you wait for the $99.99 sales at newegg). However, if that drive goes, it will tend to go in a catastrophic way, and I would lose all or a large portion of that drive. The hope/expectation is that a Flash drive sitting around without moving parts, would be much less likely to have a catastrophic failure like that. More likely for Flash is you would lose a single file or two. When you realize it might take two to three months to recover a completely lost HDD (redownload the 'videos'), at a reasonable download rate, it makes a lot more sense to make that switch as soon as you can.

A naive analysis of my Comcast Business Class service: $59.99 per month, bandwidth usage 1 TB, but lets say 1TB. A naive analysis already values a GB at 5-6 cents per GB just on ISP costs alone. You could say knock this down to 2-3 cents if you assume that even if you stopped downloading, you would need to spend $30 a month for decent internet if you didn't want good bandwidth.

Plus the labor involved in organizing your 'video' downloads, etc. might run into 4-10 hours per drive.

Once that threshold is met, and the perceived reliability of SSD versus extra cost becomes negligible in the overall cost, a lot of people will be jumping on SSDs, which should ultimately drive the costs even lower.

Unfortunately the name is "Tree Style Tab" not "Tabs" which is probably a BIG reason why more people don't use it.

When you do a search on addons.mozilla.org for "tabs" it isn't anywhere near the top.

And this is why you still can't find a decent trackball controller ala the Reflex:
http://gizmodo.com/175126/bodielobus-ps2-controller-with-trackball

Sony/MS won't release one because they know it would destroy joystick users, and no one else can make one because of patents (is my guess).

For those of us with RSS, etc., we would pay pretty much anything to get one of these. My 'one of these days' projects is to build one.

I think the 21st point was say at waist level :P

It isn't a requirement that they provide the HD versions, just *a* version. In many cases they will encrypt the HD version of the channel but leave the SD version clear.

You seem to be missing the point that people don't want it to be trivial to save the h264 file to disk and then redistribute it. If someone in the right zone can just download the link to the file, those that feel they need DRM/content control won't be using it. Heck, even Youtube makes it non-trivial(to most users) to download the actual FLV to preserve it, even without Youtube using DRM on that particular file.

Not saying that is good or bad, just pointing out why your argument about IP doesn't address the desire for a 'secure' client.

A lot of it comes down to resources. In general, it is just quicker to develop using the Adobe stuff and get a product out the door. Most people forget that Actionscript 3 is javascript essentially. If you ignore typing (disable the warnings), you can pretty much copy pure js code directly over.

MXML is obviously somewhat different than HTML, but in my mind at least, it is more rational, since it wasn't designed by committee. Like you set something hidden, you just do 'visible="false"'. You don't have to mess with the style in the same way. And I LOVE bind variables in a scripting language. Having the runtime handle all of the updating for you automatically is such a time saver. Using visible="{xmlUser.lastResult.user}" to show hide UI elements if the user is logged in, etc.

When HTML5 has some cool unified dev tools (man, debugging in Flex Builder is so much nicer than say Firebug to me), 95% market penetration, and the 3rd party libraries have shaken out (like jQuery has to some extent),
and you don't have to test your shit on every single browser just to make sure it didn't break, and the performance starts nearing Flash some more...and all of that can happen while Flash/Actionscript stands still and doesn't add any new features...then I will be on board with HTML5 as the Flash killer :P

* There are the occasional browser incompatibilities in Flash that drive me batshit: Having a problem where some, not all, Firefox installs only on OSX have mouse coordinate issues when dragging. And overall if Macromedia (and now Adobe) has done a better job on OSX/Linux support there would be a lot less bitching.

Yea thats why I always use IE or Safari for debugging, depending on my OS. I hate having my browser hung when I need to look up a bug online, etc.

IE has its own problems though with Flash debugging. You have to remember to always close the pp from the browser window and not terminate it with Flex Builder, or it orphans the process because of the whole ieuser.exe sandboxing thing.

It is 'spooky' correlation at a distance, not action. An analogy: Say you have two balls, red and blue. You have someone put them into black boxes (hidden from you) and give one to you and one to someone else. That other person takes theirs home. When you open your box, and 'take the measurement' and observe you have the blue ball, you 'instantaneously' know that the other person has the red one.

The quantum complication is that while the red and blue balls are in a definite state the entire time due to the infeasibility of isolating a macro-sized object like a ball from all other atoms and photons, the entangled particles are not in a definite state, depending on your interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.

There are 3 major interpretations of quantum mechanics, and this has different implications for each. In the Copenhagen interpretation, the measurement causes the quantum wave function to 'collapse' into a particular state. This is generally where the term spooky comes from, since that came out of the Bohr/Einstein discussions. In the non-local hidden variables interpretation, then some hidden variable that acts non-locally causes actual definite particles to travel through the quantum wave probabilities (ie. the particles where never in an indeterminant state). In the Many Worlds interpretation, the universe enters into a superposition of both basis states (|you observing red, ball is red> and |you observing blue, ball is blue>, you are simply part of the quantum interactions), 'branching' so to speak, but that doesn't affect the fact that in each branch observing red means you know the other is blue and vice versa.

Someone else mentioned Bell's Theorem. Bell's theorem only rules out local hidden variables, not non-local hidden variables. since it is one of the major interpretations in quantum mechanics that is still viable, though those non-local effects can be considered spooky.

Just finished The Teaching Company's QM video series, so blame them :P

I think the point Loconut was making is that ReCaptcha does not 'further' machine OCR (ie. it doesn't improve the recognition algorithms used by the OCR software), instead using humans used to 'OCR' words that otherwise aren't legible.

Sorry to double post just remembered the other reason why Windows Media Center volume issues are such a pain:

When you have WMC in the foreground playing audio, no other audio on the system works...You can't hear email dings, IM's or Skype ringing.

(I assume you are trolling, but I will play).

No, not really. An app that makes sounds is by definition an audio player. The question isn't or shouldn't be 'if Apple wanted', but what the user wants.

I think the whole attitude that somehow the desire for volume control in a particular application is somehow wrong or inelegant is the real problem. I got the same attitude when I asked for uTorrent to make the font it uses for the grid configurable (to make it larger). 'Just use the OS font setting.' Except that doesn't work. I am using RDP to see my machine that runs uTorrent, and adjusting DPI is not one of the options when you are RDPing. Perhaps RDP should allow for the DPI setting (maybe it does in some non-obvious place), but my point is there may be very valid reasons why you would want to adjust something without having to use some global setting. They got all pissy when I listed the 15 apps I was running on my machine at the time and all but one of them allowed separate configuration of the font.

I would bet though, that in this case what the user really wants is the ability to control Flash volume from within Safari, primarily, since this is presumably where most of the audio comes from (or QuickTime possibly). It may not technically be possible because of that, but it probably is.

I also think that holding up 'Windows' (not Shoe Puppet, but other posters in this thread) as that model is a real problem, since they actively defeat their own technology when it comes to HDCP and Windows Media Center. Specifically, you can't do things like adjust the volume using the system volume in Windows Media Center if you are using SPDIF outputs. You are required to use you amp's volume control, because adjusting the volume in the OS would require decrypting the audio stream or some horseshit. You also aren't allowed to do things like have volume come out of SPDIF and analog jacks at the same time. All of which was previously possible in XP before HDCP.

Yea I saw that this morning and had already replied on that post.

More bad PR, fine. I think it is a lack of imagination to think that it took some exceptional set of circumstances for this to happen inadvertently or without malice/nefarious intent, or that any promise not to do it again will be non-absolute.

It is also possible they intended to do this all along and record all of our unencrypted data for marketing purposes. I am the optimist.

Exactly.

Yes I am content to argue that 'is' means 'is', to rebut your failed attempts to show that my analogies are wrong. That's apparently what this conversation has devolved to.

I have already indicated that it was bad karma and probably not good for business and PR. I think it would have been wrong for them to use the data for anything intentionally. We could of course argue the definition of wrong...

Correct. Asked and answered, but I will try again. It is plausible 'standard best practices' development techniques were applied in the development of the original code, which had the purpose or, as a developmental aid, effect of logging the packet data present on the network adapter when scanning for Wifi Access Points. (It is likely these were not Google developers at all at this stage, as they were likely using OSS tools like airodump-ng.) It is plausible that subsequent developer, either did not realize that the 3rd party code had this logging effect, or as a developer did not realize that logging the data in this particular scenario would be a privacy issue, since they were probably NAL, and developers as a rule try and avoid involving lawyers in their day to day work.

By your definition, any bug or inadvertent behavior in any application ever is due to incompetence. Then fine, I will admit that Google is 'incompetent' by that definition, since it would encompass 'the entire human race'. It would be interesting to see how that logic would apply to something like neural network/chaotic systems programming...wait, no it wouldn't.

So you agree then...