Somebody needs to mod this parent up; he's right on the money in pretty much all accounts. I've screwed around with a lot of the HTPC stuff in the past and I have to agree that it's a huge pain in the ass. It appears simple until you start hitting all the crappy corner cases.

Oh yeah, I also agree that the PS3's browser is like Sony's sadistic joke. It teases you with the possibility that something on the internet not designed 20 years *may* actually work.

I don't use Microsoft products. Why in the hell should I pay for the standard idiot who can't help but click on the "super-awesome-porn.exe" attachment in Outlook? This isn't like the medical industry at all. You can't prevent a lot of the things that happen to you healthwise, whereas a computer "infection" is 100% preventable. This is just another case of punishing the intelligent. This is also a classic example of a shitty corporation (Microsoft) trying to redirect their monetary responsibility of making quality software onto the general public. Complete bullshit is what this is.

The maximum amount of time a civil plaintiff has to collect damages is 7 years (shorter if bankruptcy is declared). For government debt, the maximum is 20 years. There is no life indebtedness in the USA.

So how's anarchy working out for you?

Having to deal with multiple video formats means either increased storage requirements or processor requirements. I believe the reason for trying to standardise the supported video formats to a limited selection, is the same one for limiting the number of image formats officially supported by web pages: ensuring the content is viewable everywhere. If the specification said do what you want, we would see half a dozen different formats, browser supporting some of them and the users being caught in the cross-fire.

The day an Ogg endcoder/decoder is made available for things like Adobe Premiere, Final Cut, Quicktime and Windows Media Player, using a BSD style license and also focus on quality for a given bit rate, then we aren't going to see widespread adoption.

While Ogg might be fine, it is not packaged as a solution suitable for commercial products. At the same time the MP4/H264 licensing means it is not suitable for open source. We have clash of cultures and each is wanting to stand in their ivory tower, and not come down to Earth.

Its funny, I would think you all would know theory never equals reality but I guess we will see if humans destroy the world in my life time or the next. Not like it matters anyway human history is nothing in the planetary scheme of things.

We get it, we just don't think it's all that terribly clever, aside from the scam.