Interestingly enough, my insurer asked these:

Do you drink, and how often?
Do you smoke, or use smokeless tobacco products?
When was your last physical?
Do you use intravenous drugs?
Have you ever had dialysis or a blood transfusion?

My answers got me insured in record time. Which was funny. Then again, I only drink socially (and by socially, I mean 3-4 times per year), and smoke.

I did ask them about the workout thing, and other "health discount" stuff, and my agent said they don't use any of that stuff because it's a bunk way for companies to charge people more for the same service.

That depends on your opinion of iOS and iTunes, does it not? :)

Not only that, but arguably China's economy is more capitalist than the one in the United States.

Sure, the State dips its fingers in to keep an eye on what is going on in there, but there's far more useless dos and don'ts in the US system, with not just one government sticking its nose in, but several, from the local level all the way to the federal.

I don't know what to even call the mess in the US anymore, it's not capitalist, socialist, etc. It's something altogether different.

Microsoft tried that with the first gen 360s. The damned things overheated and killed the chipsets (infamous RROD). Rev 2 and later all included fans inside of the case.

Heat sinks on anything more powerful than a "passive" machine won't cut it.

Once again, we have a State making a law that is essentially ignorant of how technology works and the loopholes and evasions around and through any such restrictions as having to tell the State one set of online credentials while having several sets of other credentials the "offenders" actually use, but don't tell them about.

SWTOR for one, people experience this issue with. Dead Space 2 is another example, along with Saint's Row the Third.

Those are just some of the games, but yes, it has to do with this problem.

Average framerates are telling you nothing, because when being monitored, the framerates never drop. There's just stuttering in the rendering of certain objects.

In the case of SWTOR: The animation when people mount/dismount from speeders, certain casting animations and particle effects, shadowed text enabled - all examples of when you will see this happen, and this is with the framerates holding at a steady 60 FPS (V-Synch enabled).

The "Metro" UI pushed out on XBoxLive is not even quite the same as the one in WinRT or Win8. It's been stripped down considerably, and seeing as how the previous recent versions of the software already used tiles (movie browsing, etc), it was not much of a change other than "new shiny".

For instance: There's no hidden ridiculous "charms" or other such nonsense in the XBoxLive version.

And yes, the paradigm change was horrendously wrong. They took two completely separate paradigms, and crunched them together into a mushy slop of a mess, that doesn't work right for either one.

Simple:

Marketing and accounting take over the company. It's really that simple. The real innovators and engineers are pushed way out of the loop and the greedy fuckers take their places, and we have plenty evidence of that just by looking at Microsoft and HP, let alone Nokia, etc.

I was greatly hampered by it.

I use a multi-monitor setup, using multiple graphics cards, with multiple windows open at a time, as well as a VM or two, or three, or four.

This is impossible to do under Windows 8. The OS simply refuses this configuration. This was on Win8 "Pro".

I won't even get into the hot mess that was that stupid "Metro/Modern" UI shoving it's unwanted face in at the most inopportune moments.

I can even live without the Start button, but it's not worth the trade-off when I have two user interface paradigms fighting each other tooth and nail for attention, when all I want to do is open a new application in a new window and place it on monitor three.

I WILL grant Win8 this: It is faster and consumes fewer resources for the OS than Win7.

This being said, I still reverted to Win7, and will take another look at upgrading when Windows 10 or 11 rolls around.

Sounds to me like two things you could have done to remedy this problem.

The discovered and known-to-work fixes:

1) "Overclock" the CPU of the router. They were quite capable of having the CPUs clocked up to 250 Mhz with passive cooling. With active cooling, some users had 300 Mhz or higher. One enterprising individual had his clocked to 500 Mhz with watercooling.

2) Change your ip-conntrack settings. The default settings were too low, even for non-torrent/slow connection use. I think you needed to update the number to track at minimum 2400, but the higher the connection speed, the more you needed. The optimal for fast lines was 4096 maximum ports, 600s TCP timeout, 120s UDP timeout. http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Router_Slowdown has a good explanation of this.

Will these new versions still have that frame-buffer relay delay that causes micro-stuttering in pretty much any game? Certain nVidia models also had this issue, but the entire 7xxx line from AMD has it.

And yes, there's nothing end-users can do to fix it. It was either a driver issue (no shock there), or a hardware issue. I am thinking the latter.

There's a reason AMD pushed Newegg and other retailers to dump their entire current gen 7xxx series by using the carrot of 2 free games with purchase...

It's interesting to note, that a seismology student at a university in Chile finally had enough nonsense from false information over Twitter, etc about earthquakes, that he directly wired a big batch of seismographs to directly post their results via Twitter. The last I knew, they had over 1 million followers, and this particular student has been getting big thank yous from residents of the country.

I agree. The "rounded corner" patent is absolutely ridiculous. There is only so many ways to make a rectangular device/shape. What they are doing, is patenting a line that has a curvature. Like you say, what's next, some asshat will patent an unadulterated triangle or circle?

I would argue that the patent should be thrown out for the simple reason that there are essentially only four ways to make a rectangular shape. Two longer straight or slightly curved sides, featuring: rounded corners, straight-line corners (forms a direct point, like a triangle), dual-cornered (looks like 1/4th of a hexagon), and tri-cornered (looks like a partial octagon).

I take it you have never lived south of the Mason-Dixon Line, east of the Rockies, or west of the Mississippi. The religious yahoos A) get their people elected and then proceed directly to B) legislate their version of morality on everyone else. For instance, there are laws on the books in some places, where it is illegal for a business to be open on a Sunday, it is strictly enforced, and this is in America.

The BoA websites are under general DDoS/hacking attempts 24/7. I would assume this probably also applies to many other banks, government agencies, Hollywood agencies, and so forth.

Not shocking at all that their web services would seem to be spotty, when they are under constant attack.