I also compulsively read through slashdot, gizmodo, arstechnica (damn can you kill some serious time with ars!), and torrentfreak instead of paying attention in class during the 11th grade.

Since I am going to go into the law profession, I better keep all my wall posts on record. Heaven's forbid if I keep a wall post from when I was 17 about how I am happy obama got elected or a forum debate when I was 15 about Bush.

I just clicked on bimetallism and ended up going on a wikipedia Link Click-a-thon for a good 30 minutes and ended up reading about the "Nixon Shock", "Revenue act of 1917", "Treasury Security", and "West Germany".

Wikipedia just isn't good for people with ADD because you can sit there clicking links all day.

This is a really old arstechnica article. Wasn't this article from last week?

Arstechnica is a great site, although they do tend to get carried away with their stories. I really read arstechnica when I'm in a boring class and need to pass time because their articles are so ridiculously long.

Most businesses in which need to run a signal a long distance need to use a Cat5 to Component system. My family owns three businesses and they all use a system in which cat5 is ran to all three of our TVs and converted to component right before reaching the TV.

As much as HDMI is great it simply is not as good as component for running an HD signal over a long distance. Component is much better with cat5 because it is split into 3 cords. That way you Cat5 can easily handle the signal. However Cat5 is insufficient for carrying the entire signal if your using HDMI.

The AACS should not have the authority to break so many people's installations. We certainly can't afford to take out our nearly one thousand dollar system of splitters and converters and I'm sure many businesses can't either.

When will game companies figure out that no amount of DRM is uncrackable. Why didn't they just go with Steam's simply DRM, especially since they were already selling the game on steam. I am a self-proclaimed pirate and even I buy games occasionally off Steam when they don't have DRM and they are actually innovative. I downloaded Mass Effect 2, played it a bit and then said screw it. I uninstalled the pirated copy and bought it on Steam. Same thing for bioshock, I had a copy for my xbox 360 already burnt and I ended up buying it off Steam.

As much as Steam isn't perfect, at least I can play games offline and I don't have to put a CD in. I have a decent sager gaming laptop so I played Mass Effect 2 mostly on my laptop when I had no internet at all, and I also did the same for bioshock 2. If they had this kind of DRM there would have been no way I would have bought it although I could have tethered on my WinMo phone but it kills the battery on my phone and why in the heck should I have to do that for a damn single player game.

Ubisoft is being ridiculous....really...they put out an old ass game for the PC and cripple it with terrible DRM. It is more than a year old, piracy is the least they should be worrying for such an old game.

When will companies learn that the PC is still king and avoiding it just because it doesn't have the same protection as consoles is ridiculous. I mean its actually easier to play pirated games on the Xbox 360 for me. No no-cd cracks, I can play online, no waiting for someone to crack it, and no trouble with updates. I can even go to blockbuster and copy a game from them. Basically there is absolutely no difference between the experience of playing a pirated game and authentic game. Then again the experience is actually better for playing pirated game vs the authentic one if your playing AC2.

Maybe if Ubisoft put out games for the PC when they were actually released and didn't treat their customers like crap, people would actually buy their games. I mean EA already learned their lesson that harsh DRM isn't the way to go after the outrage people had for the DRM on bioshock and mass effect.

I do plenty of piracy, not because I don't want to pay but moreso because I don't want to play big record labels. I always buy artist's T-Shirts so that I can give money directly to artists. I would gladly put $10 a month into this and "Flattr" a couple of my favorite artists and websites.

I mean...anything to stick it to the record labels. I don't want to give my money to terrorists.

Thats all fine and dandy but in the American system this is a good deal and you can't argue that. But if you compare the American system to the European system even this would seem like a rip off because the cellular pricing in Europe is so good that even T-Mobile's $20 off per month for non-contract phone doesn't sound like all that good of a deal.

But since we aren't talking about Europe...you still have to give google/t-mobile for giving a pretty good deal that will hopefully be countered by other cell phone companies. Now if only I wasn't half-way through a contract with ATT and I could get a decent Android phone instead of having to settle for a windows mobile phone with ATT. But then again I'm on a family plan so I'm kind of stuck with ATT since the rest of my family travels abroad frequently.

And having an unlocked T-Mobile phone is meaningless...because T-Mobile phones can only use T-Mobile's 3G...although that still means you can travel abroad and use voice/SMS (I think).

Microsoft not wanting to support a competitor to its core product, particularly a competitor that is kicking their ass in the server market...how surprising.

The super bowl ads this year were horrible. I remember like 2 years ago the Super Bowl ads were these insane ads in which were hilarious and had great actors in them. This year they weren't much better than normal ads.

The Google ad however really stood out. Heck it even made me feel emotional.

I welcome our new Google overlords!

His family should be honored that a company as big as google decided to make a reference to one of their father/grandfather's books in the name of their flagship product. I mean this is ridiculous that the copyright machine representing the family would be trying to do this.

So what, now every time someone makes references to a character in a novel they can be sued.

Thirty Seconds to Mars has a song called Stranger In a Strange Land and I haven't seen the Heinlein foundation get upset over them using a trademarked (its the book's actual title) phrase.

Cmon, what these Sci-Fi writers really wanted was to make a lasting impression on the world and the foundations representing their estates should be more interested in that rather than just trying to make money on every little reference made.

I'm all for security but now this all nonsensical. Instead of actually making actual changes they just impose extremely annoying rules that have no actual security improvement. What does it matter whether or not it is the last hour...can't the terrorist just set off a bomb...I dunno before the last hour. I don't understand what the actual point of this rule is.

So if I want to pee, read a book, put something away, or so much as even flinch I'm gonna be threatened with an arrest. Simply inconveniencing people isn't gonna make security any better...

Backup your laptop before traveling overseas...you never know if customs might shoot it.

Youtube is most certainly an ISP. An ISP is any company that hosts content without having any sort of publishing arm or creating content themselves.

As much as I absolutely love Stranger in a Strange land I think I would go on a murderous rampage if some hollywood director made a crappy movie about it.