Every time you tools play along and facilitate this stuff, you're helping create the problem.

Doesn't matter whether its Office, CS, or something else. If I can't plunk down 200-300$ and get a workable suite, I'm going to stay away.

Time for an army of people with screwdrivers to rove the world and steal all the Prnt Scrn keys?

Several of the CDs I've purchased in the last few years are far from "bit-perfect digital copies". They've all had some form of screwing with like playing games with the song lengths or start time, or have had some sort of bit manipulation that produces errors in the ripped audio.

Buying discs and putting them on my phone is getting difficult enough to motivate me to download files that have already been ripped.

Direct all household surfing through a squid proxy, and put the ad-page url in a deny list?

I wasn't happy to see the movie become one big Ducati commercial. Some bum at Disney made his nut on that deal. (Light cycles? Sell in-movie ad deal to Ducati?) Lame, really lame. Reminds me of the Audi tie-in in I Robot.

Base jumping? Lame.

Well, it was a Disney movie. I guess I should be happy there was no stupid dancing included.

You know the 20 second mp3 loop that plays while the TRON demo loads on the iPhone? The whole soundtrack sounds like that 20 seconds looped for 45 minutes with just filter changes.

And the Daft Punk cameo? Super lame.

I did miss the Ford Econoline from the original movie.

And where were the grid bugs?

It sounded like Jeff was having a hard time hitting his lines for the voice acting. The CGI version of Jeff was very rubberfaced, looked like something out of Crysis. You could replace all the dialog with "shuh shuh shuh" and it would lipsync better with the rubber teeth motion.

The movie was too visually dark for 3d.

The scenes in Tron showing Flynn's with Journey playing, and the general Wendy Carlos soundtrack are both memorable, poignant, and enjoyable.

I'm really hoping that the music in the new film is as effective.

One of them does research and generates patents, one of them pimps ink and Intel hardware, and one of them makes the Zune. Not sure why they tried to include them all in the same article.

Hey guys, if you need to put a device on my car, could you also put a little gas in the tank? This thing doesn't get good mileage as it is.

And make sure to bolt the thing on, cause I tend to hit speed bumps at 45 or so.

I agree with your sentiment, but CRTs do not stay fresh very long. You might not notice much with a 20 year old standard definition TV, but CRTs get blurry pretty fast if they're used much.

From time to time, I'm tempted to round up a few used FW900s; a monitor I could not afford when it first came out. But there is also the weight, power consumption, and the desk space they take up.

Personally, I blame the endless stream of crap Intel video chipsets.

All through 2008 and 2009, people were buying small laptops with nearly useless video chipsets. When the GMA based stuff shows up used, you just want to take a hammer to it.

If you put a high resolution display on those systems, you'll just see how long it takes to update the screen. (When you're doing anything intensive.)

Larger pixel counts require powerful graphics chips. I remember when we had a used Precision M65. Updating all 1680x1050 pixels worked the Quadro FX350M so hard it would overheat.

My main displays are still a pair of 1600x1200 20" LCDs. Finding good dual-DVI video cards, that don't require supplemental power, was no easy task.

And if, like so many IT managers, you're running a pair of DVI capable 20" monitors on analog VGA, you need to hand in your geek card.

Sounds like a great thing to pick up on Craigslist for 75% off, when the early adopters figure out it is boring and doesn't work with Madden.

Back before the dolby board died in my (Sony) AV receiver, there was a setting that used a compressed version of the DVD audio stream.

Made the explosions as quiet as the dialog. I have not seen that feature in any of the software based DVD players, or described any place. I do miss the feature.

Back when we watched analog TV, I bought a little Sima "Volume Stabilizer".

It was basically about fifty cents worth of opamp in a little metal case, with an on-off switch and a two setting range control. (Two amplification ratios.)

I used this on the line level (fixed volume) outputs from the TV, before sending it to an AV/receiver/amp. Being a cheap device, it was susceptible to "pumping", but otherwise worked well.

The volume stabilizer amplified any quiet material, and then the AV amp was set for low volume. Overall, it worked really well.

When the CRT was replaced with a LCD, all the extra gear was re-purposed. These days we just don't watch much broadcast TV.

There was some color in Eden Log. It reminds me a bit of the way color was used in Schindler's List. Or maybe the first part of The Wizard of OZ. Color often has some connection with the visual metaphor.