When you are being chased by the cops in Grand Theft Auto V the light bar on your controller blinks red and blue. This both illuminates a dark room for an immersive gaming experience and wastes batteries. I like this idea, it implements the ambiance in a smarter way.

Games like Rocksmith have poorer latency on the PS4 through HDMI than Optical. Every millisecond counts in music.

Do you do so when he invades Latvia? Or do you wait until he goes into Poland? Or even wait until he crosses the German border?

Ah, salami tactics. I always figured watching Yes, Prime Minister was equivalent to a political science degree.

Install VirtualBox and remember what Meat Loaf sang, "Two out of three ain't bad."

ReactOS offers a LiveCD and a regular Windows bootable install disk version,; either way it won't take you longer than 5 minutes to get to a usable desktop.

Magazines and blogs hype latest phone models. Consumers read them, feel like they haverefined taste because of their expert knowledge of consumer products which other consumers don't understand. This is all fed into by salespeople who get perks for learning all the talking points used to sell the phone and become "qualified". Then they count-down the days to release and when it comes out they give their expert review, opining on whether it delivered, etc.

Actually, that's how basically every fandom works. In the consumer age, everyone who gets hyped for something is a fanboy.

Do you think John Deere offered them an option to buy the tractors at full price, free of licensing limitations? The parallels here to computers and cell-phones are uncanny. The incentive created by John Deere (in this hypothetical argument) with this business model they're using assumes that IP-law (a high-level abstraction) will somehow overcome the concept of property ownership (basically a function of ego, extremely low-level function of human nature).

I've really no pity whatsoever for companies who lose money thinking they can stop people from feeling entitled to own the tools which become natural extensions of their bodies. I don't care how many lawyers and lobbyists corporations buy to try and actualize their fictional, unreal business models. When DRM bites the dust and everyone is a tinkerer we will look back and laugh at the fantasies pointy-haired-bosses thought could be viable and sustainable.

Fred Trump started his entrepreneurial enterprise building kit garages for people just as cars were getting popular. Saved enough money to buy some property and start building homes for lower-class folks. Donald Trump's childhood was all about the discipline of hard work and knowing what average people could and would buy and spend money on. His move to Manhattan and ambitious pivot to selling things to rich people was born from understanding human nature from the modest beginnings of his immigrant parents.

If you're going to be pessimistic about Trump, there are plenty of good reasons to be so. Him being out of touch with people isn't one, though. Donald Trump might not be the best abstract thinker, but he has a strong intuitive grasp of people rich and poor. I get the sense that his presidency will involve his giant face yapping while six men behind the curtain (a la Cheney) do all the thinking. And we will see better who will be under whose thumb.

I've wondered about intercepting the signal going to the LCD, but as a last resort your method should work good. You'd think subtlety on the highlights and shadows would be lost, but with the correct calibration and a decent modern sensor maybe the image could be captured raw and processed to DID-comparable quality. Or recorded in multiple passes with different light settings and likewise merged.

All the digital protections now going in to 4K could likewise lead to 'mere' HD rips of that content.

Well yeah, we here were all reading about splitters in the AT&T data trunks a decade ago. Been "clearing browser cookies" since the 90s. Warned that the web-browser was a becoming a return to the dumb-client/mainframe model which robs freedom from the user since forever.

But paranoid narratives like that are never picked up by the media on account of anything less than massive public interest and fanfare like Assange has provided and copious hard-evidence as Snowden provided. The burden of proof for what is basically a conspiracy theory to take get attention in the popular media is necessarily high. We need more whistle-blowers to continue to reach and exceed that burden of proof for those of us who weren't shocked to continue to inform those who are.

These arguments have already been battled out months ago. There was an "I Stand with CBS/Paramount" movement on facebook, run from TrekBBS which was in perpetual flamewar with the pro-Axanar people. The biggest issue was the tone Axanar was taking with Paramount, which lead to all the long-term fan-film fans to worry about one rogue production bringing down the ban-hammer on everyone.

Axanar was explicitly marketing itself as more than just a fan film, but rather a professional-quality production. Which is something which is usually, you know, licensed? Star Trek was being used as a way to crowd-fund the creation of a movie-studio that the crew would use to later make original works. Original works, one assumes, with names which could not have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars on a crowd-funding site like Star Trek did.

Most fan films are grateful to CBS for allowing them to exist, not resentful. CBS definitely has strong (relatively speaking) connections to the existing fan film industry. Enterprise borrowed Sulu's pop-out helm scanner for their mirror-universe episode. So this whole affair has been an ugly mark on what's been a very nice thing until now.

Obviously two gender-dysphoric persons of opposite sexes and $20 million between them can just swap. The procedure might have a higher chance of success if they were siblings! Okay we entered the twilight zone a while ago, how do we get out?

Yeah. "feel like" doesn't cut it for free software users, but I understand how a user would feel liberated just by switching to any operating system that doesn't come bundled with trial crapware from the vendor and require six 3rd-party security/repair apps each with a redundant, proprietary update mechanism that bugs you every other boot-up. On linux, the "feeling" of owning your own computer can tip too far the other way and feel too much like a responsibility or burden that stops you from getting work done, because you are messing with your OS to try and get it to work properly. Apple has certainly struck a good balance.

They've already beat you too it. ;)

My suspicions precisely. It's weird how, on the desktop, it's the web browser that spies on me. Yet on mobile, the web browser is one of the few apps I trust.

Yes, just like with ODF multiple implementations of a standards specification like Wayland are essential for compliance testing. KWin has always been a very customizable, modular window manager, and so the scope of it's massive low-level re-write into a Wayland compositor/client without feature-loss is quite daunting. But the KDE developers are using this opportunity to finally fix lots of legacy problems, such as the inherent insecurity of the desktop screen-lockers due to X11. It's going to take months before KWin is production ready, but the benefits of doing it all the right-way now will pay off in the long run.