Furthermore, the launch slate of games for Nintendo is terrible again, as usual, and this year there will be like 3 Wii U titles or something? And the next Zelda release is yet another port/remake?

It seems like the next generation MS and Sony consoles essentially run high-end commodity PC x86(-64) hardware with Blu-Ray drives and huge gobs of system and video memory (8GB combined GDDR5 in the case of PS4). No more Cell, powerpc, whatever have you and horrible graphics memory limitations (like 256MB, wtf).

So yeah, porting for those and PC will be relatively painless while the Wii U is stuck with Xbox 360 launch specs.

Nintendo has missed the boat.

We don't LIKE the patent system, but we like abusers of the system even less. Hate the players AND hate the game.

That sounds like what's happening now. Except your software vendors are not interested in making the distinction.

And there are free/cheap certificate providers out there that are generally accepted by most major software packages and OSes. I use one such for my home needs: StartSSL.

Just because you, personally, are not interested in a solution to the problem of authentication in the computer security field doesn't mean SSL certificates shouldn't make a stab at attempting to solve it. Access control (encryption) isn't really much use without the other.

They sure did a good job of this in 2000, I wonder why they're not in the mainstream yet?

From your post I just got a bingo on this score card:

http://www.xkcd.com/1122/

Having to die first would probably be a deal breaker.

Hard-coding a 4x scaler into an operating system is not particularly innovative.

Also those non-phone devices you will be purchasing at un-subsidized prices. Wonderful.

Because historically boycotts don't do shit on their own. And what you suggest is less than a boycott. We're dealing with and in global forces that are many millions times more powerful than you or I and have so many fingers in so many pies that boycotts are completely beneath notice, even if you can get one started. We have a representative government to represent us. If they're no longer representing the interests of Americans as a whole then yes, we blame them and change them. Unfortunately, changing them is apparently not going to happen either.

ClamWin? ClamWin recently false-positived on userinit.exe in the system32 directory. The vetting on this program isn't nearly solid enough for it to be recommended for use on a windows machine, free/Free or not.

The only place I use ClamAV in is passing over emails on my linux machine.

If somebody's going to try to "pop" a cell tower they're certainly not going to care if step 1 of the process was legal or not.

I'm sure it's occurred to more than a few of us that citing "duplication of functionality" is a gigantic fucking can of worms.

And Apple opened it.

I work IT for a college that used to push out McAfee Enterprise to all desktop machines. We
switched our license/subscriptions/contract and pushed out Sophos right now.

McAfee would randomly mysteriously break and be completely unable to update its scanning engine or dat files, and out of THOUSANDS of desktop machines we'd have a bunch of them with definitions from months or years ago. Which ones? Hell if we knew!

Out of this latest Conficker crap imagine our surprise that McAfee simply didn't recognize the USB variant! We verified that Sophos in fact detected Conficker and immediately pushed Sophos to all of the computer labs and instructor stations.

And I still gotta remember back to the silly password-"protected" FTP of NAI/McAfee software.

So basically, McAfee is truly incompetent and I'm glad to see it gone on our computers.