Try out the comments section before making a judgement.

Slashdot does comments better then 99.99% of the sites out there and while this upgrade may have the same back end the graphical representation of the parent/child/sibling/etc is horrible. It seems that whitespace is the only indication of a parent/child relationship and I can't quickly determine who is responding to what. Following a thread of conversation is gone.

There are some pretty interesting points raised in the case that I think should be addressed. I'm on google's side, the service that google provides me is worth their database about my habits. That's my choice and I knew it going in, even Microsoft advertises that Google does this. But privacy policies, EULAs and such have become stupidly complex. An average user can't be expected to read those tedious documents and I doubt if more then 1% fully read any of the contracts they click to accept. FTFA: "that a reasonable Gmail user who read the Privacy Policies would not have necessarily understood that her emails...". I can see this as a way to require human readable EULAs and privacy policies instead of the pages and pages of legalese that currently exist.

There's also the question of who "owns" the data in an email. If someone sends me an email, do they still own it and am I restricted in how I handle that email according to their wishes? Should they be informed that I'm saving the email on a server or that I've printed out a copy or that I run it through a spam filter? Most engineers would agree that I can do whatever I want to the email as that copy of the data is mine to use as I wish but IP lawyers can argue that I don't have the intellectual property rights to use the data except by whatever rights the owner has granted me.

I'm really hoping that this case can be appealed and finally set some precedence to some of the crazy shenanigans.

What you're complaining about is the inability to find the projects that are interesting to you and I have the same complaint about kickstarter. Several times I've heard about a project that didn't reach it's funding goal I would have loved to have backed but for whatever reason I didn't discover it until it was too late.

Every digital marketplace has this problem to some extent. The good ones seem to have a good recommendation engine like amazon and netflix or they're heavily curated like steam and Xbox Arcade. Then there are places like kickstarter and iOS where they highlight the best 40 or so and let the rest remain obscure.

Discover-ability is a real problem that is only going to get worse as digital markets get more popular and larger. And I'm guessing that any company that can solve that problem will be the next tech service monopoly.

I have hope for Hulu simply because it can fill a niche that is very under-served. Netflix provides a back catalog but rarely has current content. iTunes provides current content but at a premium. Amazon seems to be attempting to copy both Netflix and iTunes. If I want to watch current content without paying a few dollars my only options are Hulu, torrent sites, and broadcast TV/cable.

The sad thing is this particular invasion of privacy would save the most lives. If every self driving car recorded traffic violations of other cars and sent them to the local precinct for verification people would start driving safer real fast.

Running a light: that's a ticket.
Changing lanes without signaling: that's a ticket.
Running a stop sign: that's a ticket.
Cutting someone off: that's a ticket.
Not yielding to a cross walk: that's a ticket.

My issues with the H-1B visa program is that it doesn't fix any of the problems that it tries to address and probably creates new issues.

The basic problem H-1B visa tries to address: "There are not enough mediocre engineers for our current business needs." The H-1B visa brings in some temporary employees to fix the short term shortage. But when the visa expires they go home and the company has to hire a new H-1B employee to replace him (remember there is a shortage of qualified applicants) and probably has increased their need of mediocre engineers during the past few years. There is no incentive for the company to fix the problem but instead to just apply the H-1B bandaid to it.

If the company hiring a H-1B visa holder was forced to train workers that would take over the position then the H-1B visa program would probably be rarely used and only when there was an actual need. Or if the company could only use H-1B visa employees/contractors every 2 years out of 5 so that they knew that they were ineligible for the H-1B bandaid when the current employees leave. Or even make the visa permanent, the visa holder isn't forced to leave the country and is free to find other employers whenever they wish; broader immigration issues this would fix the short term problem by just importing more people.

Here's a simpler one:
"Alice, you're under oath, please list all laws that you have broken." If Alice says "I broke no laws" then if there's evidence of Alice speeding 1 mile over the limit or jaywalking last week then suddenly she has a worse punishment for a minor infraction. Or Alice could confess to all laws that she has broken and getting whatever punishment that she is "owed". It's a catch-22.

Or here's another one:
Police are going door to door asking everyone if they committed X crime. "Hey, Bob here didn't say he didn't do it. That must mean he did it!" Since asking the question of someone's guilt doesn't provide any evidence then the police are forced to actually collect evidence and find the guilty party. This also protects innocent people from being harassed without cause.

The problem isn't the concept of DRM but how DRM has been applied. In general DRM has become so complicated that it's all thorny edge cases with one bug free area that represents the test environment.

The DRM implementation should be so simple that people know when they're crossing the line, think of it as a "No Trespassing" sign. Something that people are aware of but don't intrude upon them or interfere with their business. And if it does happen to interfere then there is a clear path for removing the problem.

People that are willing to pirate material won't be stymied by whatever DRM is applied and the more problems that the DRM introduces the more people will turn to piracy to avoid the DRM issues. Tell the artists to focus on the customers and not the pirates. The better you serve your customers the better they'll treat you, everything else is just noise.

I think you're missing some context, the reason that the booths were light was because the booths are there as an introduction to the company or a quick faq. There were meeting rooms set aside to do real business across the street (in the room that held the expo floor last year) not to mention all the hotel conference room meetings that traditionally happen. Hitting up a big platform owner's booth and striking up a deal is pretty rare, generally your business people call their business people and schedule a meeting away from the noise of the convention and then talk about what ever needs discussing.

And while there was a large advertising, cloud (database & server), and analytics contingent there was also the usual motion capture vendors (real time, facial, etc), middleware (AI, procedural textures, procedural cities, particle editors), content out-sourcers (animations, audio, 2D animation, cut scenes) and a few engines (unity, havok, corona, marmalade, etc). I had to make several passes over the show floor before I felt confident that I hadn't missed anything interesting. It's easy to tune out the booths that were just there to accept resumes or representing schools, the harder part is to notice the booth that just happens to be next to something interesting. Every time I walked by the oculus rift booth my attention was drawn to the video of people playing hawken instead of what ever booth happened to be adjacent to the oculus rift's booth.

And I would rather have no comments than comments that are incorrect or misleading which cause me to become confused.

For a 60fps game there's about 16ms per frame and with current gen consoles about 8ms is lost to API call overhead on the render thread. Of course current gen consoles are years behind and constrain rendering APIs to be called from a single thread but I'd still be very surprised if there was a console that could support a triple A game above 70fps in the next 10 years (for resolutions 720p and above).

You've barely scratched the surface of input to perception lag, here's an answer by Carmack to people questioning another one of his tweets:
http://superuser.com/questions/419070/transatlantic-ping-faster-than-sending-a-pixel-to-the-screen
Of course most engines come from a single threaded game mentality where they'd poll for input, apply input to game state, do some AI, do some animations, calculate physics, then render everything and repeat. Current gen consoles has freed that up some but most engines didn't go above 2 or 3 major threads because it's a difficult problem to re-architect an entire engine while it's being used to make a game at the same time. Sadly the better games gave user input it's own thread and polled input every 15ms or so, queued it up, and then passed it on to the game thread when the game thread asked for it. Input wasn't lost as often but it didn't get to the game any faster.

I own both types of devices (gen 1 kindle and iPad 2) and I vastly prefer my iPad. I realize that I'm comparing old tech to ancient tech but the feature set in the Kindle software on the iPad still beats the newer e-ink kindles. My problems with e-ink is the slow refresh rate and lack of color. With the original kindle I had to learn to press the next page button when I was a couple of lines before the end of the page as by the time I had read those remaining lines then the display would transition. The newer kindles have drastically cut this time down but it is still slower then a tablet's change of page and for myself being a passive observer of changing the page, I find that wait frustrating (when I change the page of an actual book I'm an active participant so the time spent isn't annoying).

I will freely admit that e-readers look gorgeous (though that could simply be nostalgia for actual paper) and the effective battery life is magnitudes above tablets (my iPad's battery is constantly being depleted by other activities like browsing the web, playing games, and other CPU intensive apps).

As an American I don't really understand how the blank media tax is calculated. Is the tax applied based upon the size of the media or is it a flat tax on media regardless of size that is writable?

If the tax is based upon media size does data duplication and redundancy factor in? If I make a mirrored drive could I get a tax rebate because I've cut the effective space of the drives in half? Or if someone comes up with a compression algorithm that increases the effective size of the drive am I liable for more tax because I can store more songs as mp3s then as wav files? Should the cloud host be taxed based upon the advertised storage or based upon the actual storage usage? I can see most cloud storage pass through compression or data deduplication that drastically reduces the on disk size of media but shifts some data to meta data instead. Does it matter if some of that storage isn't inside the country?

The way I see it is that the cloud company probably paid a tax on writable media. And they're in essence providing a mirroring service which effectively reduces the overall unique media storage size. And the amount of data that the cloud company is actually storing is going to be significantly smaller then what I'm being provided. And if the data is being stored outside the country then the tax is effectively being levied on the import/export of the data which could be an interesting legal battle with the current state of trade treaties.

However if the tax is a flat tax regardless of media size then I'd suggest the cloud company roll out a single exabyte drive that is shared between a customer and the customer's closest 7 billion friends (with a decent user permission model of course).

Now is probably the best time that Valve could release a console: get first mover status in North America against MS & Sony and probably Europe as well. But valve is a software company. Their experience with manufacturing, shipping, retailers, etc is limited at best. The boxed copies of Valve games are published by one of the traditional large publishers. I love valve as much as the next fan boy but the massive operational organization that is needed to support a console launch is slightly outside of their reach. Valve could partner with a distribution/manufacturing partner but the people that have experience in the entertainment space and who would be able to accomplish the undertaking is a pretty short list. EA could probably swing it and would scare both MS & Sony as their consoles would lose EA's games but with origin vs steam on the PC side of things I see this as slightly unlikely. I'd love Sega to make a Steam box, but that's simply nostalgia talking. Sony is the most likely partner as steam is already on PS3 (for some definition of steam) and ps3 runs a version of unix, but it would probably be another wedge between Sony & retail stores.

More then likely this is probably valve's experimentation into console space. They'll probably stream line it so that it's trivial to get your home linux machine to output to hdmi at the push of a controller button. Once the home experience is as simple as it can get then they'll make a business case for releasing their own console or not based upon revenue. Look at what valve has done with micro-transactions, free to play games, crowd sourcing, and non-game software: they dip a toe into the water and then once they're confident they move into that space.

Your argument is a few decades late. Instead of having a surrogate mother carry the child to term now a tank "carries" the child to term.