Just because you can hook into a service doesn't mean it will be available later, or available under the same terms and conditions. Better to be able to control your own destiny.

They should be giving us a discount for paying online, it's much easier for them to process.

XBMC is some really great software, I'm glad support has lasted this long. It's what I use on my TV PC, it's easy to setup, and does exactly what it's supposed to do. It's got some great plugins that allow live streaming from various sources, supports any format I've thrown at it, it's a DLNA server, supports various network protocols for indexing and streaming, supports many remote control devices, it's available for all major OSes and works great on all platforms. I'm extremely happy with it.

Child's Play seems to be a good one, they help kids with severe problems suffer less and recover faster.

You end up looking like a leathery smoker by the time you're 30, and if you use hair products you'll have thinning hair. Don't even tie your hair back or do cornrows/braids unless you want a receding hairline. Nothing wrong with the natural look anyway, girl or guy. Also, depending on your type of skin, lotions on your face may aggravate it and give you rashes or pimples, facial skin is especially sensitive. Just letting your skin's natural oils have a chance and only washing your face lightly with cold water is probably best. Btw if you're suffering from pimples then that's probably a good thing to try instead of all those products that just dry out your face.

Why spend all that money? Why will taxpayers want to put their cash towards a grossly mismanaged and costly project that will erroneously fuck over tons of people with no benefit whatsoever? This is really a pie in the sky idea that will never fly.

The PSP had a unique disc format, but games could be ripped to and played from the memory card. XBox 360 games can be ripped to and played from the hard drive. PS3 games as well. How would HD-DVD help with this?

I do the exact same thing as well because I am fed up with ads. They are incredibly annoying and ruin any experience they are in. Product placement also puts me off.

If the data has redundancy across multiple providers (not just mirrors based on the same software platform and managed under one vendor), then I tend to trust the cloud to make authentic free/libre source code available, but I expect the author to have a backup, and I would keep one myself if I was the author. Aside from this, such as public domain audio, video, text, images, and non-libre but gratis binaries/source, no. Takedowns, and other such methods, as well as internal disputes, threaten the availability of this data, and if a managed provider is asked to take it down, it will become scarce or not available. I make local copies and back them up whenever possible. If it's not managed by me, it can't be guaranteed to be available to me.

I thought that was the purpose of the start menu... and desktop icons... and the system tray... and the quick launch bar... and desktop widgets...

Actually it's thanks to Napster that I started buying CDs, before that I was listening to what my friends had and ripping the music I really liked. My friends' albums were fine, but now I could find stuff that suited my unique preferences and tastes without pretense. Radio only provided generic songs that were catchy but got old fast and had no real staying power. Napster was a way to easily listen to stuff neither my friends nor the radio could offer, but was even more suited to me. And I wanted more. So I would buy the full CDs of the artists I liked, their singles w/obscure b-sides, etc, I liked them so much I wanted to support them and collect their catalogs. I would never have found Quasi without Napster.

They hate the IT department because the users/management don't understand why they can't perform magic, because that's how they understand computers, it's a magic box. The term "Computer Wizard" stems from that kind of logic.

Why use these when you can just simulate them? Designing/training the AI would much more interesting than seeing if it can be carried out by this particular design.

Exactly.

Those are all qualified as out of the ordinary. Anything in excess (on either side of the scale, whether it is too much or not enough) is a problem. Of course maintenance must be performed, but I guess some data centers have a strange idea of best practices, or they do not follow them.

I hear more lies out of peoples' mouths which can be contested as he-said-she-said than in emails which can be cited and referenced in the future.