On the subject of intrusive government applications, I wonder if it would make prisons more or less humane. No revolts, no issues with control, no angst. Just hook people off of the thing for about three hours a day for feeding and exercising. Can someone sleep while uncounscious like that? (it sounds like a dumb question)

Probably facial recognition on every image that's uploaded to Google+ (which I believe is done by default on new Androids - I don't know beause I don't use Google+), just like Facebook does.

Kind of. Heat dissipation starts being a bigger problem, and thermally limit slock speed. Look at overclocking sandy bridge vs ivy bridge chips.

Easy enough. Take a car X driven by a driver Y. One driver can drive one car, so X = Y. If you make the car 50% smaller, then you'll have 2X = Y. If each car has a top speed of V, then the same driver Y can achieve 2V by driving those two smaller cars at once.

AFAIK, you can't see the source for Google apps like Play Store, Maps etc, tough. Maybe not even for the launcher. I don't know what's part of AOSP and what's a Google add-on, these days. My point being that, for reaping the benefits of being able to see the source code, you must be able to see it all. Unless you have root access and can manage permissions on a per-app basis directly via the base, open OS. That's not Android's case, though - at least not by default.

Mod parent "+1 Wait, what?"

Now why would that be? You're probably inferring that the anonymous posting has no value or hasn't been worked on. But an anonymous posting can be as valuable as music. If you take Slashdot's own sort of news, that's pretty interesting. It amounts to a curated collection of news with commentary, and journalism can be argued to be more socially valuable than music in our current information society. Also, if we're talking about any kind of anonymous posting, yes, it can have value. Including literary value. If Pynchon decided to post Gravity's Rainbow online, would its value as art be diminished? I think I get what you're trying to say, but the way you chose to differentiate data is too arbitrary.

Plus, you seem to be overlooking that fact that "large groups of people agreeing with you" can be made of "individual acts of defiance", and that major economic shifts in point of view take time. We're not going to snap out of the economics of scarcity overnight, but the very existence of Creative Commons is a sign that the opinion you seem to be arguing against is quite widespread. I don't really know if it's on the rise, though I'd wager it is.

Trade secrets were a more charming concept. You could see what a competitor was achieving. So you could look into their product and reverse engineer their results - often coming up with a completely different solution. It was based on effort and merit. Whoever implemented it first had a head start, and if it was simple enough to copy quickly, then your invention wasn't so revolutionary anyway.

Yeah, that's still pretty fucked up, dude. The major difference in the level of craziness between Mormonism and Scientology isn't quantitative, but qualitative. Mormonism descends from a different brand of crazy, one we are used to. And really, the 1800s were a little late for believing a 15-year-old saying he heard God and is now a prophet. The correct response to that sort of stunt is to either slap him silly for lying badly or properly educating him about the effects of recreational drugs after they wear off.

Sorry if this came out a little blunt. Do consider, though, that a scientologist would be equally offended to be compared to a mormon.

The Moto G is actually a quad-core. I have a Nexus 4, but I envy Moto G owners mostly because the phone is undistinguishably speedy, its battery lasts longer and it's unbelievably cheaper. Lenovo would be crazy not to continue the trend, because what Moto needs now is market and mind share. They attempted to make good phones with good margins (I'm thinking of the RAZRs) and they were doing way, way worse than with the Moto G/E.

And what Google did with Moto was so simple it's laughable. Just remove the cruft (stop wasting resources with kevlar backs or MotoBlur), simplify and optimize the software and you can actually surpass the competition while using cheaper components. They could sell the Moto G for $300 and it would still be a good value if you compared it with the competition. LG's G2 Mini is pretty much the same phone, but priced at $400.

Look, I don't care much about ideological debates, but could we stop with the nonsensical wording? How exactly does one "consume" DRM? You can perhaps take advantage of, support, view content which makes use of DRM. That's all fine. But please don't "consume" DRM. You can't, not anymore than you can "consume" highways or the history of Somalia.

On a minor note, I should also point out that being against Mozilla implementing DRM support on Firefox does not "take away your freedom" to view content which makes use of DRM. Unless you're forced by someone or something to use solely Firefox for viewing all your movies or something like that, in which case you should probably reconsider the focus of your digital freedom fighting.

It's an acceptable tradeoff for me. Though I have loathed it since its inception, I have warmed up to Steam over the years, mostly because the huge discounts offered through sales have resulted in a vast library of games that the Steam client organizes pretty neatly for me. It also does away with any sort of installation hassle. I do not miss having to hunt one or more patches on a publisher's site to apply to my 1.0 version. I also don't miss physical media being subject to damage, having to search for a CD or no-CD patches or paying more than U$5 for a game.

It's not that I actively like Steam DRM, it's that, in light of the benefits it provides and in how is doesn't affect my usage pattern, I don't mind it. It's only when compared to activation limits, mandatory connection for single player and other aberrations that is shines in a benign light.

Yeah, just remeber Mass Effect was just as bad with its cookie-cutting, but since combat was fun and characters were interesting (compare and contrast: Garrus and Wrex versus Anders and... Fenris), it ended up being a good game. DA2 was so easy and repetitive it was painful. It's not what ruined it for me, though. At least not solely. Terrible dialogue, limited control over the poor plot and needless and jarring redesign (the Qunari and Flemeth, for instance) all contributed to a slightly below mediocre experience.

Some people like to keep their interests neatly divided.

Personally, when I open my music player, I want to see only songs, not videos or what have you. And I want to see them divided by folders, not by artist, by album, genre or whatever. Folders are way easier to organize - at least for those of us that kept a fairly organized selection from the start. So my (admittedly retro) software bundle of choice is Dolphin > Totem. Extremely simple and with a fairly clean interface, just the way I want it. I think I'm in a small niche, though.

I wholeheartedly agree. Also, McGovern puts the -Mc in Govern, so he's probably the man for the job.