HTTP is the world's most popular protocol and it's bloated and slow to parse.

I am pretty sure that the fear of "terrorists" turning off the lights at a stadium is a good reason to throw away my personal freedoms!

Telegrams are still available in Brazil. You can only send them through the Internet though - phone was discontinued a few years ago, telegraphs were discontinued a few decades ago.

Their only remaining use is as a legal document. With telegrams you can certify that you notified someone of X on date Y, or at least that you tried to. If you receive a telegram you are probably being sued by someone and the telegram is the "last resort" communication that is often required by law or at least recommended to show you made a good faith effort to settle things before going to court.

Prior to email it was common to use telegrams to congratulate distant relatives on their birthday, since you could schedule delivery to the exact day.

I think you are being completely naive if you think games will actually, really, be improved by this, or that this will be used at all. Internet bandwidth sucks, and the only thing that could conceivably be aided by remote processing (IA) isn't really relevant hard enough to demand this kind of remote processing. It's not like the enemies in Call of Duty are super-smart, they are just scripted and shoot the player at a 70% chance to hit in a loop when idle.

There are two aspects to what Microsoft has been announcing:

1) They want people to accept that somehow always-on gaming is necessary, which we know isn't
2) They can discourage people to make direct hardware comparisons between the Xbox One, the PS4 and PCs.

And pretty much nothing else.

and whatever Joss Whedon wants to do

And that is bad how?

I started using Linux in 1994 on my computer as a teenager. I got my first job doing tech support for a now-defunct dot-com commercial Linux distribution. As I was totally incompetent at talking to clients and stuff, they moved me to R&D. The bar was really low back then - my interview consisted pretty much of "Can you install Linux? Cool, can you start tomorrow?". The salary was low but who cares. I had what I would later find out to be the experience of a lifetime as I went to work with some amazing, amazing people who mostly got hired by Red Hat and Canonical when the company folded.

I made the mistake of opening a small business instead with a bad partner where I worked mostly for major ISPs. It destroyed my life and my health.

I needed a break from that, so I found a promising start-up, sent my resume and they hired me on the basis of both my Linux experience and my experience running high-volume systems. I think I have a pretty good spider sense for detecting scalability issues and I love debugging complex problems.

You really, really shouldn't describe yourself as a "Linux professional". Back when I started, that title existed but now, Linux knowledge is too widespread to be meaningful. Try working at places that use the cloud extensively and you will always be close to a bunch of (virtual) Linux boxes that will need your skills.

(And what's funny is, my degree was in Literature, and I keep thinking about a master's in Philosophy. I'm a humanities person.)

I don't think 10% of the country is working on iOS app development.

As ackowledged in TFA.

Considering I use my laptop mostly to access web services, the cost of the laptop itself is more important than anything in it. So Prey is better in my case than whole disk encryption.

Who knows, maybe Marc Andressen was right. A ton of infrastructure has been built to support his vision since then. Maybe the time is now.

If you were to actually read about the whole ordeal, you would understand that the program these people are complaining about (called The Books We Really Read) was about bestsellers, not literary fiction. Think James Patterson, Nora Roberts and company. "Literature", meaning serious fiction that is meant to be artistically challenging, was not a part of the program.

I was recently interviewed, and rejected, to work at Google.

I had two one-hour interviews on the phone. Then they flew me to a Google office, where I had a very long interview day.

They did not ask me which was the 27th bit in an IP packet. They did not ask me to crack a RSA-encrypted message using a pair of rocks. Most of everything you ever heard about them is just false, or at least no longer true.

On the contrary, they were interested in computer science fundamentals that make absolute sense in their case. If you are working at Google I bet that knowing the difference between a O(n^2) algorithm and a O(log n) algorithm is often a matter of life and death.

I left the interviews thinking I did really poor. The next day I reviewed the whole interview process in my mind and realized I had made some serious serious blunders that maybe could have been avoided if I wasn't so tired (I live in Brazil, interview in Australia, check how long it takes to get there and how many timezones away that is...) and I could have have solved problems faster than I did (maybe I was even in a worse mood than usual with all the jetlag - it's really hard to judge). I wouldn't have hired myself considering how I did, I thought, and they thought the same. I can hardly complain. Nerd pride hurt, but it's 100% my fault not theirs.

Throughout all this, from the moment a recruiter contacted me until the final rejection, they were professional and fun. There's a bunch of great, smart people there. Do not be put off by what people say about their interview process. I thought it was really solid and yes, that comes form a person who was rejected.

Still beats giving American citizenship to nazis who otherwise should have been hung in Nuremberg like you people did.

Valve has been releasing one awesome game after another for the last 12 years. Clearly something is wrong! Valve get your act together!