London is fairly similar to NYC, except that it's always overcast/drizzling and the food sucks. England was also known for having pretty crappy Internet in the past. I don't know if that's improved, although it's actually worse in Palo Alto. As someone who has lived in all 3 places, I would easily pick Silicon Valley... The weather is awesome and there's so many beautiful places to explore just a short car ride away.

Google has a walking/biking path near my house listed as a road, just like every other mapping service. No maps are perfect.

iOS/Apple Maps can do all of that, except for the public transit part.

And I took my old MBP and put an SSD in by unscrewing the only visible screws on the machine to open it and then the screws around the hard drive... Pretty sure it wasn't any more difficult than your upgrade.

They have abandoned PC gaming and it does annoy me, but I can't say it doesn't make good business sense.The thing is that they don't make all that much money on each PC sold. How much is a single license to Windows? About $100? That's it for MS as far as revenue from most PC sales. They make their $100 and they're done. They don't just want their $100. (They've been trying to make Windows a subscription service for a long time.) They want constant streams of money coming in from each customer and that's basically what they've finally obtained with the Xbox. They get paid for every game sold on the Xbox, the get paid just for the ability to write games for the Xbox, they get paid for updates released for games on the Xbox, they get paid a monthly subscription by any players who want to play online, and they get paid for every accessory (HD, controller, headset, etc). It's a much better system for them as far as profits are concerned. They're not limited to $100/4 years. They charge $60/year simply for the ability to play online, use Netflix, etc, they make $10 off every game sold, etc. This adds up quickly, anyone that's really using their Xbox is paying way more than the $100/4 years they used to pay for Windows licenses.

I don't know the specific rules they follow, but no they don't remove the bags before the gate closes. It's similar to when they discover a mechanical problem right before leaving the gate. They close the doors and then everyone gets to sit there for 30-60 minutes while they search for the bags.

Xfire has been owned by MTV for a long time. http://www.xfire.com/cms/xf_acquisition/ I can't think of anyone else that I would consider worse.

No, if anything they should be required not to use technology. As a current Computer Science student; I hate classes that "use" tech. The majority of it seems to be for lazy teachers, not to actually improve the learning process for students. Powerpoint presentations just leads to teachers going too fast and not paying attention to the class in front of them. Computer graded HW and clicker quizzes just turns the students into numbers and never helped me learn anything. I took Calc based Physics at two universities. Cornell, where we had homework/tests/quizzes with paper and pencils, and a professor who wrote everything on the chalkboard. My university, where we had a professor who used powerpoint, clicker quizzes, and HW submitted to and graded by a website. The Cornell class was much better. Technology can be used to improve communication with instant messaging and grades posted online, but the old fashioned ways are still superior for the majority of a professors job.

Anyways it wouldn't require Sony to reenable Linux to be installed. It would only make it legal for someone to figure out how to get past Sony's DRM and install Linux. I think the more important part is figuring out how to break Sony's DRM, not getting an exemption to the DMCA.

The DMCA "Makes it a crime to circumvent anti-piracy measures built into most commercial software". http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/iclp/dmca1.htm Of course it would be pretty much impossible to get caught if you don't give it to someone else and/or tell others how to do it.