Do you not remember that case of the people who "invented wifi" in patent form? They went around suing small businesses using wifi. They did an interview where they were asked "have you gone after any home users?" to which they replied "not at this point".

No one is safe from the reach of their filth. It's just that suing home users probably isn't profitable. I would be curious though as to what would happen if you acquired an obvious patent and tried to sue a politician with it

When I was on unemployment, the state of Oklahoma's unemployment website thing actively prevents you from using anything but IE 7 and below. (IE8 didn't work, IE9 was still in beta at the time). The way I solved it was using a user agent switcher with Firefox. Everything worked as expected afterwards.

I believe in the Doctor Who theory. Obviously he got a few chunks of meteorites, brought them to the Egyptians for some crucial purpose, and left them. I mean really, how else do you think they found so many?

It's so stupid that they say "works in any browser" as well, assuming that everyone is either using a mobile browser or has flash player.

And... still no support for machines without Flash player. HTML5 video is quite stable and drastically more performant. Why are you not using it?

Personally I like both models when done completely seperately, but what Microsoft is doing here is taking worst of both worlds.

As someone else said, Steam is nice and convenient. They have more aggressive pricing, immediate downloads(that can go faster than 500Kbyte/s, unlike Xbox Live), and no need for annoying disks that you'll eventually end up losing

Microsoft appears to be combining the physical aspect with the virtual aspect. Sure, being able to sell your game is nice, but if you take that ability away you damn well better keep me content with your service in other ways. Steam does that, Xbox doesn't.

I already see the trolls coming to say "So what if Microsoft does it, Steam's been doing it for years". Well, look at Steam's prices and sales. I saw a game that came out a few months ago for $20 on Steam in a sale. The best "sale" of new-ish games on the Xbox (online) market is a $60 game being sold at $50. Steam's prices are competitive, Microsoft's isn't.

In fact, if they are making used game activations fixed at ~$35, this is basically price fixing. Here's to hope that some publishers will see that they can offer new copies for $35 or $40, instead of the typical $60. If they allowed distribution across the internet, this would *completely* destroy the used games market, which I wouldn't say is a super terrible thing if the pricing will be fixed. This would lead to a chain reaction of the used game market fighting to have non-fixed prices.

Yep. This. I'm originally from Oklahoma, but living in Ohio. It seems like when all my friends from Oklahoma are complaining about the weather, I'll have that same weather the next day. This proved extremely true this winter, like 90% of the times it rained/snowed there, it'd rain/snow here a day later. It's proving less true though now in Spring though. The thing that really throws me off is here bands of rain seem to not quite move west to east. In Oklahoma though, it moves almost perfect west to east in almost all cases.

weather is hard.

Let's look back at what made Lotus Notes GREAT. Lotus Sucks use to show some of the best examples. Apparently the website is offline now though. Here is a wayback archive though http://web.archive.org/web/20080531232948/http://lotusnotessucks.4t.com/lnEx01.html

Here's a better idea that wouldn't make as many people angry. Keep long yellows and remove the redlight detection. Instead, just have a camera. It takes pictures of every plate. Each hour it plays a lottery between the plates. Whoever's plate gets pulled out gets the $138 ticket.

Sounds a bit ridiculous, but the politicians would still be getting their kick backs from the manufacturers of the lottery system, the state would still be getting income without all the bad publicity of raising taxes, and drivers would be happy not crashing into the person that slams on their brakes to stop at the light the instant it turns yellow. It's a win for everyone

That is all.

I actually saw my first auto-play HTML5 video/audio ad a few weeks ago on my Linux machine(without flash). Even advertisers are starting to understand that Flash is dead, sadly.

Rather you like it or not, this may be where we are going. With the advent of ad blockers and general desensitization to ads by the constant bombardment of horrible ones, ads aren't all that profitable anymore... unless they're extremely well targeted, which is an issue by itself.

That being said, assuming that it's only mining when I'm actively engaged in the application(to not waste excessive amounts of electricity), I'd approve of this as a replacement to ads. The only downside in comparison to ads is using more power(ie, less battery life in mobile).

Also, this is assuming we have smart and pleasant miners that don't peg CPU/GPU to 100% and cause my computer to crawl, but rather target 80% or less resource utilization. And, of course, not mining in the background. Only mining when I'm actively engaging with the application.

is that Intel provides very nice open source drivers for their integrated GPUs

Space is scary and dangerous. I do wonder how fast this projectile was probably going though? I'd assume the hull is pretty thick, but how fast would a projectile have to go to cut through it?