I remember doing that on my palm pilot. Can't remember the name of the software, though.

That said, I've had 'always on' Internet since, like, 1998 or something. It's not *that* outlandish an idea in this day and age, though I also think the Internet has taken the vague rumour and ran like mad with it.

On the flip side, remember: Feminists making dick jokes on public twitter to a friend = perfectly fine. Feminists overhearing dick jokes between two friends = get them fired.

I think you misunderstand. I was listing the two 'differences' to point out that they're not nearly worth the complaining the online world gives them. I use windows 8, and the only time I see the Metro interface is when I unlock the screen, or hit the windows key and start typing in a program name.

The differences are: 1: The start button is invisible in win8 (but in the same default place; bottom left corner) 2: The start menu is fullscreen, and incorporates the idea of gadgets from win vista/7. For most users, that's the difference.

When you make $40K/year, have a mortgage payment, maybe a kid or two, car loans, maybe student loans, having to pay anywhere from $70/month or higher for slow broadband is not high on ones priority.

If that's your situation, then I don't think it is too unreasonable to suggest that you shouldn't be considering purchasing a next-gen console - or even a previous-gen console.

To be fair, the original PS3s had PS2 hardware built in. As the revisions went on, they started chopping the physical PS2 parts out.

Count ribs in males, ribs in females. Equal. Done.

I thought that, despite being a lion, Aslan spoke perfectly good English?

Charlize Theron is, in the literal sense, an African American. But I'd never refer to her as such, because, well, 'African American' carries as much preconceived baggage as 'black 'does.

Well there's your problem. if I had to call up my ISP every time I wanted to patch windows I'd be screwed.

Part of the problem also comes from the support model. If you have a problem with Windows or your Dell PC, you don't call your ISP and expect them to resolve it.

Yet in the phone world, if you have a problem with Android or your Samsung hardware you call Verizon/Sprint/etc.

The last two (European) carriers I worked for would have more than happily passed handset customer support to the OEMs but, unsurprisingly, they didn't want to take on the massive expense to do it.

Sorry just seen your reply and not much I can do to help I'm afraid. I know the pain about W7MC being derelict, I was hoping for great things with W8MC and nothing came.

One possible workaround would be to not set the HTPC to sleep when it's idle (since, for me, Remote Potato won't work when it's sleeping) and, instead get it to go to sleep at a fixed time, wake up at a fixed time (using a scheduled task) and then immediately reboot.

In my set-up, I have a task that runs at midnight which checks if nothing is recording and, if not, puts the computer to sleep. I then have a scheduled task that runs at 7am in the morning (so forcing the computer to wake up), waits 10 seconds and (if nothing is recording) reboots. I'm happy to share the scripts with you if you want, but I'm pretty sure you can work it out yourself.

This isn't quite as power efficient as your current set-up but ... the handshake issue will go, you'll have a stable platform (since W7MC seems to need a reboot to run okay) and you'll still have 6 hours (25% of the time) where the box is drawing very low power.

Might be better than nothing?

Came to say this. SC2's single-player had tech trees, units unavailable in multi-player, and clever mission constraints, like the advancing-wall-of-fire mission.

Breaking a cease fire? Absolutely. Breaking an Armistice? No.

Armistice: Agreement to peace, with penalties should you decide to go back to war. I.e. "If you, NK, invade SK, you agree that the UN, can come in and bitchslap you, with tanks."

NK cannot now say 'we pull out of that agreement. Now we get to invade SK, and the UN has to just sit there writing stern letters.'

I'm tired of using Windows Media Center due to bugs and other problems, but since the channels are flagged it is the only option.

I'm reading at +4 and haven't really seen many possible solutions. How about looking at it another way ... what exactly are the "bugs and other problems" you're having?

Maybe we can resolve those so that you can continue to use WMC?

Various versions of NT ran on Alpha, MIPS, PowerPC, and SPARC in the labs. They didn't discontinue those products because they were selling well.