They heard everyone else was doing it so they wanted to make sure everyone thought it was their idea. Like all the other stuff they come up with (and patent).

Ah, there it is. The penultimate argument you can make. Post-modern racism.

"Look's like you have a broken tail light, sir."

*breaks your tail light*

That's a tazin' right there.

You already have a TV and a PC, you can control it from the PC.

The media services that come with most tv's are TERRIBLE in terms of stability and reliability.

This is cheap enough that it could replace OTA and Cable for even low income households over the course of the next few months.

This is going to be replacing higher priced setups for office presentations everywhere as well, I'm already ordering one to test at the office and if it goes well, everyone that goes to client sites will have their own to carry with them.

Blackthorne got me started on Blizzard, Warcraft: Orcs and Humans got me stuck on Blizzard. Playing Warcraft 2 on Kali.net was the best gaming I ever experienced. I even had my animated gif filled Warcraft 2 strategy guide site published in one of those early internet yellow pages books, which seemed awesome at the time but is hilariously awkward in retrospect.

Battle.net was and still is annoying crap that really is just a way to chain you to them. I have never paid to play WoW and have passed on Diablo 3. Heart of the Swarm was a monumentally terrible story line that only worked to setup essentially the exact same outcome from Warcraft 3 with Chaos. Perhaps Starcraft 3 will be mixing SC and WC universes together. So far, SC is just a lazy reworking of WC with 'surprises' that tend to bewilder any expectations of competence.

Fortunately I'm older now and don't really give a shit, but it's my own children that are going to have to deal with this nonsense now.

99.999% of all mail I receive 'to my door' is junk mail advertisements that the postal service makes 'bulk mail delivery' money on. Either ban advertising by snail mail or charge more to deliver bulk mail ads.

They needed something to watch any video they were sent. VLC does the job.

Visual Studio? Do you even know what TechNet was for? It was not just a cheaper MSDN, it was something that reinforced Microsoft's position with IT pros and provided important access to new and old operating systems and applications. Visual Studio was the least important piece of the pie for many TechNet subscribers.

This decision will hinder adoption of future MS technology and eliminates a revenue source, as there will now be no revenue for the limited time demo based testing environments. Timed demos, aka "Evaluations," just don't cut it and the loss of Technet is the loss of an insanely important resource for IT.

Why not just insert something at the compiler level. Perhaps they have compromised GCC itself or something at a different, less obvious point in the process of development?

Having played a lot of Scorched Earth and ATanks in my time, I can assure you that MIRV nukes are REALLY bad and can easily end up killing your own tank if launched in haste.

Yes. This isn't just a spy camera, this has a cellular device that lets it upload or stream on the fly, this is big brother-esque secret monitoring of the public. I'm sure it was there to watch a particular suspect or event, but in capturing images from a public area, it is also monitoring innocent people and can be used to target people not suspected of a crime for any seemingly anti-social behavior. It is what it is, don't dilute the reality of modern technology. We're fucked in terms of monitoring, just work with/against the system as best you can to survive. I've got a magic machine in my pocket that can tell me just about anything on any subject that I can ask it about 24/7, and broadcast and receive video and audio on the fly. In 1984 it was 'telescreens' along the line of TVs that watched people, in the real world it turns out to be a more subtle, smaller device, your cell phone. (Not to dismiss webcams on laptops, etc.)

I'm don't ascribe to conspiracy nuttery, but I do try view it as matter of factly as possible, this is just simple, easy observation with a hint of logical deduction and inference.

We're in the future now, it's awesome and scary and has the potential for grand leaps of knowledge and human progress or horrendous destruction of civilization.

Cheers.

Name a work that's not based on the work done by others. Name a single one.

Warcraft/Starcraft MMO Cross Over, WoW + Eve Online.

I jest.

Maybe a new Blackthorne? ;)

The music was set free by the mp3 file size combined with dcc fserves on IRC, Napster just jumped on that bandwagon and leeched off the existing system.

Some of us were around before Napster showed up and pretended to be doing something new. You could've implemented Napster as a set of polished mIRC scripts, which is what it essentially was (and wasn't nearly as capable as existing options).

The one thing Napster did was make it quicker for 'anybody' to get music without having to learn anything about the underlying tech or infrastructure. The music had already been set free by the time they showed up, and the number of people in that sharing scene was growing exponentially regardless of Napster. They did such a good job of believing their own bullshit, they managed to get others to believe it, and hit a critical mass and finding music simply became most convenient by using their app. That's why they are remembered. Marketing, PR, and wasting a LOT of investment money, all for the sake of being lazy about downloading music for free.

Gnutella and to a limited extend WASTE did a better job of furthering the spread of music once Napster began to fizzle, as they weren't subject to a single point of control that could be dismantled. These days, even I use Spotify, but it sometimes feels like a step back, as does all this 'cloud' stuff. Storage is so insanely cheap that we don't actually 'need' cloud storage, but like Napster, it all plays to the laziest common denominator.

These days I just go to pfSense and get reliability with feature filled functionality.