The bug they exploited was in Webkit, so I assume it also exists in Chrome too (and thus in Safari and Chrome on all platforms they run on) but I'm not sure exactly whether another vulnerability was also used in the OS X version, since it launched calculator and wrote a file to the hard drive.
I found it interesting that in the first exploit for IE8 on Win7 (someone linked to the article up above somewhere...) the exploit followed the same path, malicious web page -> calculator -> writing file. Anyone with more knowledge have an idea why in both cases calc/calculator were used?
Mythbusters are never wrong! In point of fact though they may not have used this particular display and I believe they were testing cell phones and not wifi.
That, and the article specifically states that they were testing with equipment operating well out of the normal operating range for consumer devices (presumably significantly higher power output).
i therefore desire some insane mofo to try to build an airplane out of concrete
Concrete boats do sound sort of strange at first pass, but if you think about it, concrete is quite a bit less dense than, say, steel - and we've been making boats of of steel for a long time. At the same time, you don't really see very many boats made out of concrete (despite the relative inexpensiveness of concrete) because concrete just isn't a very good material for boats - very low tensile strength, bulky, etc.
I'm sure one could make a plane out of concrete, it just wouldn't be practical. In college we had a very competitive concrete boat (concrete canoe?) team. While these were made with "concrete", it wasn't your normal cement and aggregate mix - it was cement, low-density fillers (sort of like tiny ping-pong balls), high-strength oriented fibers, etc. Expensive (for concrete), lightweight, relatively strong, and when coated with a polymer film (plastic) made a very fast boat. I'm sure you could use the same material to make an aircraft fuselage (and probably at least parts of wings), but it just wouldn't offer any advantages over other materials that are lighter and stronger, and it would offer significant disadvantages (still relatively weak tensile strength being a biggie for an aircraft I would imagine).
Nah, the Jedi/republic really weren't all that good. Say, +1 on the goodness/badness scale. Palpatine's Empire was clearly super-evil (who but a really evil person would outfit their troops in shiny white armor?), say -1000 on the scale. For balance, you have to integrate the goodness/badness over the length of the reign to get the GoodTimes points. It is these GoodTimes points that The ForceTM tries to balance. The Old Repoblic lasted for what, a thousand years? So they get 1000 GoodTimes points. The Evil Empire, on the other hand, reigned for something like 20 years, giving -20000 GoodTimes points. Clearly things were way out of whack, so The ForceTM allowed itself to be a little over-obvious in restoring the balance - helping the establishment of the New Republic, which is Pretty Good, say around 50 on the scale, so it will take another 380 years before balance is really restored and it starts tipping the other way again.
One of the great things about universities - if you want a random scientific article you can often go online and download it, as opposed to coughing up $30
So true.
Yes. I was very sad when my university finally got around to disabling my access to their proxy that let me read all the journal articles (took something like five years after I left before it stopped working). It really is amazing to me how much journals charge for individual articles. Unfortunately most public libraries don't seem to have subscriptions to many journals, so only those of us lucky enough to be connected to a university or have a really wealthy employer are able to actually read research articles first-hand. Fortunately for me my wife is still doing research at the university, so I can just use her login when I really feel the need - although the university keeps threatening to disable off-campus access, so even that might be running out.
What does jamming GPSes have to do with mobile phone conversations? A GPS being use by someone else is not going to bother you, so jamming it really is just being a dick.
From what I've read, it is becoming more common for luxury cars (and other expensive vehicles) to come with GPS-based tracking devices that broadcast their location. Thieves are using the GPS jammers to interfere with these devices - much quicker and easier than hunting for the device and trying to disable it prior to driving away.
I really can't think of a single legitimate reason to have a GPS jamming device.
The decades of high-speed train engineering has involved reducing drag wherever possible. Infact some future concepts are looking at running maglev trains through vacuum tubes as the only possible way to reduce drag further and close the gap between train and aircraft fuel efficiency.
So no, I can't see a single benefit this gas-guzzling rocket-propelled coffin will have for Bullet trains.
Umm, trains are already far more efficient than aircraft... just not at high speeds (which is what I assume you meant - all that dense air trains have to deal with is a huge impediment to high speed efficiency). A quick search suggests that the German ICE trains consume 70-120 MJ/km in operation, while something like the A380 fully loaded uses 3,000 to 4,000 gph at cruise, which translates to approximately (33 MJ/liter * 3.8 liters/gallon = 125.4 MJ/Gallon -> 376200 to 501600 MJ/hour; at 945 km/h that gives...) 398 to 530 MJ/km. Of course the ICE train is only cruising at ~200 km/h on average compared to 945, (and I'm not sure about passenger capacity - I believe on the order of ~500 passengers per trainset) but still - more (energy) efficient.
Watson's answer was correct - he just didn't phrase it the way they want. Human contestants get hit with that rather frequently on Jeopardy for forgetting to say "What / Who / Where is....?". Hell, he actually had more correct answers than he buzzed in because he's programmed to not buzz in if he's not above a certain confidence level for the answer (I forget what it was in the video....under 90% and he wouldn't buzz in, I believe).
His answer was not correct. "Leg" is not an anatomical anomaly. "Missing a leg" is. The (wrong) answer shows that Watson was basically just doing a search looking for nouns associated with the terms in the clue. It came up with the right body part based on the key words, but because it didn't actually understand what the question was it gave an incomplete, wrong answer.
If someone does a Google search, they may, just possibly, find out the truth about something.
Like what happened to that poor girl in 1990?
No, no, no. What Glen Beck allegedly may have done to that poor girl back in 1990. See, you have to associate the name with the alleged event for this to work right.
No reason we can't do what China does, demand a technology transfer agreement where we buy the first x number of trains from you, you help us build a factory, and after that we build them for ourselves. No reason except a lack of political will, that is. As soon as the Europeans or Japanese complained we would likely cave in an instant. Hell, maybe we should go team with the Chinese - they can't complain too much if we make the same agreement with them that they made with Siemens, can they (aside from the fact that they probably aren't so desperate and short-sighted as to actually go through with it)?
I had a DOC that was crashing my Word 2007 and I got it opened with...LibreOffice.
MS Word's doc-parser has been flaky for <drumroll>...decades</drumroll>.
Both I at my office (environmental modeling) and my wife (corporate legal) have had abiword and Openffice save the day many times when MSWord declared documents to be corrupt. Frankly, the opensource doc-parser library is much more robust than the one from Redmond. Do you know how much fun it is to be 8 hours from an NSF grant-deadline and have MSWord declare your proposal corrupt when yoo go to do the final printing? Abiword saved us that time -- way back in 1996! (and the situation hasn't improved much since.)
Lol, had a similar experience with OpenOffice. Well, almost. I was putting some finishing touches on a grant application in OO, hit save one last time before PDFing and electronic submission... and OO crashed. Re-started it, and it tried to do it's automatic file recovery - and crashed again in the middle of this. Completely killed the document - which, uncharacteristically, I had only been working on on my laptop and didn't have a backup copy (yikes!). The file was toast, couldn't open it in anything - OO had actually overwritten it with junk, and the abortive recovery attempt apparently killed the working backup. Fortunately it wasn't a huge proposal, so I managed to re-write it in the ~6 hours before the deadline (stuck with OO for the re-write and everything went fine - I haven't had a problem before or since). Happy to say it got finished on time, it was probably actually better than the original document, and my grant got funded. I've never actually had Word kill a document to the point where it wouldn't recover automatically.
The ribbon serves ONE purpose: to differentiate Office from OpenOffice/LibreOffice by patents alone, because it it was largely equivalent in features.
Bull. If you approach it with even a slightly open mind (difficult, I know, what with it coming from evil Microsoft) the benefits are immediately apparent. Tools are organized in a far more logical manner than the old system, grouped by task so it is very easy to find what you want. It succeeds in making the powerful tools that actually justify a full-fledged office app over something like wordpad (or whatever your text editor of choice might be; I don't think vi runs on Windows) visible to the user.
I really don't understand the complaints about the app button. Although it probably could have been executed better, once you see it you know what is there. I actually think it makes a lot of sense with the ribbon interface. On the ribbon, you've got all of the options and tools for creating a document. In Word, you've got tabs for layout, formatting, etc. All the stuff you use when working in the document, organized by task. The App button basically gives you the file handling options, sort of a meta-menu - Save, print, etc. - the things that you do with the document, but that are not really part of creating or editing the document (okay, that may be too much; it is basically the File menu, which for unknown reasons they decided needed to be obfuscated). Once you know it is there, which requires all of being shown once (I know, pretty extensive training) it is pretty much indistinguishable from a File menu.
Of course, I switched jobs and now I'm back to using Office 2003, so no ribbon for me. I do miss it, and think it is a better solution than the menu system (although not enough better for me to buy a new version of Office for home just to get it - I'm using whichever version of OO was the last one before Oracle took over, and may switch to Libre if there are any actual improvements).
FTFA: "When the Mongol hordes invaded Asia, the Middle East, and Europe they left behind a massive body count, depopulating many regions. With less people, large swathes of cultivated fields eventually returned to forests, absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. "
Oh? Not awards for Hitler today? But 11 to 17 million less people means less fields needed and more forests, right? Surely with entire towns wiped out they returned to nature and helped the environment, right?
No, because Hitler only picked out specific members of towns for execution, generally just slightly reducing the population of lots of places but not really impacting overall land use (also, he introduced us to the Autobahn, and just look at what that has resulted in). Genghis was much more of a progressive, killing everyone equally, resulting in large swathes of uninhabited land where resisting cities used to be. Stalin gets negative points because while he did kill lots of people, he also re-populated a whole bunch of the areas that Ghengis had gone to the trouble of de-populating in the first place.
Well, according to one estimate the world population in 1200 AD was about 400 million, so 40 million represents about 10% of the world's population. Assuming they otherwise would have reproduced at the same rate as other people in the world, we could say that there would be about 10% more people living today without the Mongol invasion (super simplistic, whatever). So, current population would be about 7.6 billion instead of 6.9 billion. Assuming pollution scales directly with population (it probably doesn't), this means that Genghis Khan's actions back in the 13th century are currently saving approximately 3 billion tons of CO2 emissions per year (based on a total of ~30 billion tons from ye olde random website, no idea about the accuracy of the number).
Totally true (within an order of magnitude or two, anyway), but really pretty meaningless. Nobody is suggesting we should execute people in order to reduce emissions, but at the same time you can't really argue against the fact that killing off 10% of the planet's population would significantly reduce emissions (especially if you choose the correct 10%, but I'm pretty sure McDonalds et al have that covered). If you kill off 100% of the population, there would be absolutely no anthropogenic global warming (beyond what is already in motion). Genghis and the rest of the Mongols were just more successful at making a statistically significant dent in world population than anyone before or since (that I know of), so his "accomplishments" in that respect offer the most interesting (meaning most significant results) case study.
The problem is you're wrong. AT&T spent billions on network upgrades last year.
Yeah, they painted over literally millions of old SBC logos, ensuring a maximized branding experience for their end users. These things don't happen by themselves.
That may be true, but if they were making a profit it was a tiny one. A good friend of mine works at Turbine, and things were very tight and not looking good for a long time. It sounds like they were very close to shutting down entirely when Warner Bros. bought them last year and brought a nice infusion of cash, which allowed them to try the free-to-play model that seems to be working out well (also allowed them to hire some new people and pay the bonuses and raises they had been going without for years).
I bought a PS3 instead. That lets me play games, watch DVDs, and use netflix and hulu plus streaming. Also, with MediaLink for my Mac (I know there's a free app, but it never worked right for me) I can stream bootleg video over my home wifi network.
My only problem w/ the PS3 for DVDs (or really any standard-def content) is that I am one of the (apparently) very few with a 4:3 HD CRT. It is capable of 1080i in a 16:9 region. Sadly, when playing SD content the PS3 just outputs to a 4:3 subset of this 16:9 area, and for some reason the TV doesn't let me zoom on the HDMI input to fill the screen. Fortunately nearly all of my DVD collection is anamorphic widescreen, but 4:3 content looks really dumb (back when I had Dish HD this wasn't a problem; unlike Sony, they managed to have it properly scale on the TV depending on whether I was watching 4:3 SD content or 16:9 HD content). So, I've still got a DVD player hooked up for SD videos.
I know, off-topic, but sometimes you just need to complain. It wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that the TV is made by Sony also, so you'd think it would play well with the PS3. Recently the TV seems to have had a stroke (best way I can describe it - the 16:9 picture kind of sags down on one side regardless of input) so I might talk the wife into springing for a new TV.
Slashdot Mirror
...to find the caps with the codes was to tilt the bottle. .
Totally, completely, 100% off topic, but... this reminded me that when I looked at a map of Tripoli the other day I noticed this:
Pepsi-Cola Road.
I've been hoping to hear something about anti-government protesters on Pepsi-Cola Road ever since.
Just like, you know... stolen Microsoft Points. Or something.
The bug they exploited was in Webkit, so I assume it also exists in Chrome too (and thus in Safari and Chrome on all platforms they run on) but I'm not sure exactly whether another vulnerability was also used in the OS X version, since it launched calculator and wrote a file to the hard drive.
I found it interesting that in the first exploit for IE8 on Win7 (someone linked to the article up above somewhere...) the exploit followed the same path, malicious web page -> calculator -> writing file. Anyone with more knowledge have an idea why in both cases calc/calculator were used?
Mythbusters are never wrong! In point of fact though they may not have used this particular display and I believe they were testing cell phones and not wifi.
That, and the article specifically states that they were testing with equipment operating well out of the normal operating range for consumer devices (presumably significantly higher power output).
i made a dumb joke, but heck, if they can build boats out of concrete
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_ship
i therefore desire some insane mofo to try to build an airplane out of concrete
Concrete boats do sound sort of strange at first pass, but if you think about it, concrete is quite a bit less dense than, say, steel - and we've been making boats of of steel for a long time. At the same time, you don't really see very many boats made out of concrete (despite the relative inexpensiveness of concrete) because concrete just isn't a very good material for boats - very low tensile strength, bulky, etc.
I'm sure one could make a plane out of concrete, it just wouldn't be practical. In college we had a very competitive concrete boat (concrete canoe?) team. While these were made with "concrete", it wasn't your normal cement and aggregate mix - it was cement, low-density fillers (sort of like tiny ping-pong balls), high-strength oriented fibers, etc. Expensive (for concrete), lightweight, relatively strong, and when coated with a polymer film (plastic) made a very fast boat. I'm sure you could use the same material to make an aircraft fuselage (and probably at least parts of wings), but it just wouldn't offer any advantages over other materials that are lighter and stronger, and it would offer significant disadvantages (still relatively weak tensile strength being a biggie for an aircraft I would imagine).
Nah, the Jedi/republic really weren't all that good. Say, +1 on the goodness/badness scale. Palpatine's Empire was clearly super-evil (who but a really evil person would outfit their troops in shiny white armor?), say -1000 on the scale. For balance, you have to integrate the goodness/badness over the length of the reign to get the GoodTimes points. It is these GoodTimes points that The ForceTM tries to balance. The Old Repoblic lasted for what, a thousand years? So they get 1000 GoodTimes points. The Evil Empire, on the other hand, reigned for something like 20 years, giving -20000 GoodTimes points. Clearly things were way out of whack, so The ForceTM allowed itself to be a little over-obvious in restoring the balance - helping the establishment of the New Republic, which is Pretty Good, say around 50 on the scale, so it will take another 380 years before balance is really restored and it starts tipping the other way again.
One of the great things about universities - if you want a random scientific article you can often go online and download it, as opposed to coughing up $30
So true.
Yes. I was very sad when my university finally got around to disabling my access to their proxy that let me read all the journal articles (took something like five years after I left before it stopped working). It really is amazing to me how much journals charge for individual articles. Unfortunately most public libraries don't seem to have subscriptions to many journals, so only those of us lucky enough to be connected to a university or have a really wealthy employer are able to actually read research articles first-hand. Fortunately for me my wife is still doing research at the university, so I can just use her login when I really feel the need - although the university keeps threatening to disable off-campus access, so even that might be running out.
What does jamming GPSes have to do with mobile phone conversations? A GPS being use by someone else is not going to bother you, so jamming it really is just being a dick.
From what I've read, it is becoming more common for luxury cars (and other expensive vehicles) to come with GPS-based tracking devices that broadcast their location. Thieves are using the GPS jammers to interfere with these devices - much quicker and easier than hunting for the device and trying to disable it prior to driving away.
I really can't think of a single legitimate reason to have a GPS jamming device.
The decades of high-speed train engineering has involved reducing drag wherever possible. Infact some future concepts are looking at running maglev trains through vacuum tubes as the only possible way to reduce drag further and close the gap between train and aircraft fuel efficiency.
So no, I can't see a single benefit this gas-guzzling rocket-propelled coffin will have for Bullet trains.
Umm, trains are already far more efficient than aircraft... just not at high speeds (which is what I assume you meant - all that dense air trains have to deal with is a huge impediment to high speed efficiency). A quick search suggests that the German ICE trains consume 70-120 MJ/km in operation, while something like the A380 fully loaded uses 3,000 to 4,000 gph at cruise, which translates to approximately (33 MJ/liter * 3.8 liters/gallon = 125.4 MJ/Gallon -> 376200 to 501600 MJ/hour; at 945 km/h that gives...) 398 to 530 MJ/km. Of course the ICE train is only cruising at ~200 km/h on average compared to 945, (and I'm not sure about passenger capacity - I believe on the order of ~500 passengers per trainset) but still - more (energy) efficient.
Watson's answer was correct - he just didn't phrase it the way they want. Human contestants get hit with that rather frequently on Jeopardy for forgetting to say "What / Who / Where is....?". Hell, he actually had more correct answers than he buzzed in because he's programmed to not buzz in if he's not above a certain confidence level for the answer (I forget what it was in the video....under 90% and he wouldn't buzz in, I believe).
His answer was not correct. "Leg" is not an anatomical anomaly. "Missing a leg" is. The (wrong) answer shows that Watson was basically just doing a search looking for nouns associated with the terms in the clue. It came up with the right body part based on the key words, but because it didn't actually understand what the question was it gave an incomplete, wrong answer.
If someone does a Google search, they may, just possibly, find out the truth about something.
Like what happened to that poor girl in 1990?
No, no, no. What Glen Beck allegedly may have done to that poor girl back in 1990. See, you have to associate the name with the alleged event for this to work right.
unlike journalism in the US and well known US propaganda, wikileaks actually validates information before they put it up.
I know this because they told me so.
No reason we can't do what China does, demand a technology transfer agreement where we buy the first x number of trains from you, you help us build a factory, and after that we build them for ourselves. No reason except a lack of political will, that is. As soon as the Europeans or Japanese complained we would likely cave in an instant. Hell, maybe we should go team with the Chinese - they can't complain too much if we make the same agreement with them that they made with Siemens, can they (aside from the fact that they probably aren't so desperate and short-sighted as to actually go through with it)?
Please, don't let the Japanese hear about this...
(although Rule 34 suggests it is far too late)
The first thing this brings to mind is, how do you keep people from stealing them and holding them for ransom now that you've made them so portable?
I recommend placing them at the tops of tall towers, perhaps with barbed wire enclosing the base.
So the Internet is now a series of cubes?
Only the wireless one. Naturally they charge more if you want yours with tubes.
Good thing Slashdot is still up and running!
Unless... it was replaced with an impostor with some bad design decisions!
So the bad news is that slashdot got hacked. The good news is that they fixed Idle.
Nope, I can still see it.
I wouldn't trust that probe near my planet. Looks like it was built by the kind of people that would steal your atmosphere.
On the plus side, I'm pretty sure I know the combo to their luggage.
MS Word's doc-parser has been flaky for <drumroll>...decades</drumroll>.
Both I at my office (environmental modeling) and my wife (corporate
legal) have had abiword and Openffice save the day many times when MSWord declared documents to be corrupt. Frankly, the opensource doc-parser library is much more robust than the one from Redmond. Do you know how much fun it is to be 8 hours from an NSF grant-deadline and have MSWord declare your proposal corrupt
when yoo go to do the final printing? Abiword saved us that time -- way back in 1996! (and the situation hasn't improved much since.)
Lol, had a similar experience with OpenOffice. Well, almost. I was putting some finishing touches on a grant application in OO, hit save one last time before PDFing and electronic submission... and OO crashed. Re-started it, and it tried to do it's automatic file recovery - and crashed again in the middle of this. Completely killed the document - which, uncharacteristically, I had only been working on on my laptop and didn't have a backup copy (yikes!). The file was toast, couldn't open it in anything - OO had actually overwritten it with junk, and the abortive recovery attempt apparently killed the working backup. Fortunately it wasn't a huge proposal, so I managed to re-write it in the ~6 hours before the deadline (stuck with OO for the re-write and everything went fine - I haven't had a problem before or since). Happy to say it got finished on time, it was probably actually better than the original document, and my grant got funded. I've never actually had Word kill a document to the point where it wouldn't recover automatically.
The ribbon serves ONE purpose: to differentiate Office from OpenOffice/LibreOffice by patents alone, because it it was largely equivalent in features.
Bull. If you approach it with even a slightly open mind (difficult, I know, what with it coming from evil Microsoft) the benefits are immediately apparent. Tools are organized in a far more logical manner than the old system, grouped by task so it is very easy to find what you want. It succeeds in making the powerful tools that actually justify a full-fledged office app over something like wordpad (or whatever your text editor of choice might be; I don't think vi runs on Windows) visible to the user.
I really don't understand the complaints about the app button. Although it probably could have been executed better, once you see it you know what is there. I actually think it makes a lot of sense with the ribbon interface. On the ribbon, you've got all of the options and tools for creating a document. In Word, you've got tabs for layout, formatting, etc. All the stuff you use when working in the document, organized by task. The App button basically gives you the file handling options, sort of a meta-menu - Save, print, etc. - the things that you do with the document, but that are not really part of creating or editing the document (okay, that may be too much; it is basically the File menu, which for unknown reasons they decided needed to be obfuscated). Once you know it is there, which requires all of being shown once (I know, pretty extensive training) it is pretty much indistinguishable from a File menu.
Of course, I switched jobs and now I'm back to using Office 2003, so no ribbon for me. I do miss it, and think it is a better solution than the menu system (although not enough better for me to buy a new version of Office for home just to get it - I'm using whichever version of OO was the last one before Oracle took over, and may switch to Libre if there are any actual improvements).
FTFA:
"When the Mongol hordes invaded Asia, the Middle East, and Europe they left behind a massive body count, depopulating many regions. With less people, large swathes of cultivated fields eventually returned to forests, absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. "
Article on how Hitler was History's Second Greenest Conqueror for killing 11+ million people in 3... 2... 1...
Oh? Not awards for Hitler today? But 11 to 17 million less people means less fields needed and more forests, right? Surely with entire towns wiped out they returned to nature and helped the environment, right?
No, because Hitler only picked out specific members of towns for execution, generally just slightly reducing the population of lots of places but not really impacting overall land use (also, he introduced us to the Autobahn, and just look at what that has resulted in). Genghis was much more of a progressive, killing everyone equally, resulting in large swathes of uninhabited land where resisting cities used to be. Stalin gets negative points because while he did kill lots of people, he also re-populated a whole bunch of the areas that Ghengis had gone to the trouble of de-populating in the first place.
Well, according to one estimate the world population in 1200 AD was about 400 million, so 40 million represents about 10% of the world's population. Assuming they otherwise would have reproduced at the same rate as other people in the world, we could say that there would be about 10% more people living today without the Mongol invasion (super simplistic, whatever). So, current population would be about 7.6 billion instead of 6.9 billion. Assuming pollution scales directly with population (it probably doesn't), this means that Genghis Khan's actions back in the 13th century are currently saving approximately 3 billion tons of CO2 emissions per year (based on a total of ~30 billion tons from ye olde random website, no idea about the accuracy of the number).
Totally true (within an order of magnitude or two, anyway), but really pretty meaningless. Nobody is suggesting we should execute people in order to reduce emissions, but at the same time you can't really argue against the fact that killing off 10% of the planet's population would significantly reduce emissions (especially if you choose the correct 10%, but I'm pretty sure McDonalds et al have that covered). If you kill off 100% of the population, there would be absolutely no anthropogenic global warming (beyond what is already in motion). Genghis and the rest of the Mongols were just more successful at making a statistically significant dent in world population than anyone before or since (that I know of), so his "accomplishments" in that respect offer the most interesting (meaning most significant results) case study.
FTA: "Watson spoke in a stilted computerized voice–and was almost never wrong."
I'm still hoping they'll sneak a Scottish accent in there at the last minute. And maybe a joke about a mallard.
The problem is you're wrong. AT&T spent billions on network upgrades last year.
Yeah, they painted over literally millions of old SBC logos, ensuring a maximized branding experience for their end users.
These things don't happen by themselves.
It was never unprofitable.
That may be true, but if they were making a profit it was a tiny one. A good friend of mine works at Turbine, and things were very tight and not looking good for a long time. It sounds like they were very close to shutting down entirely when Warner Bros. bought them last year and brought a nice infusion of cash, which allowed them to try the free-to-play model that seems to be working out well (also allowed them to hire some new people and pay the bonuses and raises they had been going without for years).
I bought a PS3 instead. That lets me play games, watch DVDs, and use netflix and hulu plus streaming. Also, with MediaLink for my Mac (I know there's a free app, but it never worked right for me) I can stream bootleg video over my home wifi network.
My only problem w/ the PS3 for DVDs (or really any standard-def content) is that I am one of the (apparently) very few with a 4:3 HD CRT. It is capable of 1080i in a 16:9 region. Sadly, when playing SD content the PS3 just outputs to a 4:3 subset of this 16:9 area, and for some reason the TV doesn't let me zoom on the HDMI input to fill the screen. Fortunately nearly all of my DVD collection is anamorphic widescreen, but 4:3 content looks really dumb (back when I had Dish HD this wasn't a problem; unlike Sony, they managed to have it properly scale on the TV depending on whether I was watching 4:3 SD content or 16:9 HD content). So, I've still got a DVD player hooked up for SD videos.
I know, off-topic, but sometimes you just need to complain. It wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that the TV is made by Sony also, so you'd think it would play well with the PS3. Recently the TV seems to have had a stroke (best way I can describe it - the 16:9 picture kind of sags down on one side regardless of input) so I might talk the wife into springing for a new TV.