Yes, indeed, if a well written letter can create a response of ..

But it can't and doesn't. So there's that.

Lastly, can I be the first to point out that Popular science has very little to do with science and hasn't in well over 50 years? They are to Science what the Enquirer is to hard news sites. ... which makes people that care about Popular Science's move sound even more out of touch. People making a big deal out of this mystify me.

You are "dumb". You have nothing to say about the line of work I'm in. I am also "dumb". I have nothing to add about the line of work you're in. I don't see you as being in an ivory tower, I'm just the one who knows that I've nothing of value to add to your industry/science/line of work. Unless we work in the same fields, or related fields, in which case, I have plenty of other means of being exposed to your work, and addressing and debating any problems I may have with it. Scientists are not in ivory towers, and they don't think they're in one. All that said, there's a reason why they have offices and aren't doing work on whiteboards on the corner of the street.

If you really think a town hall meeting is a productive forum to work on highly specialized fields of domain knowledge, I'm not really sure what to say to that.

Since the vast majority of scientific advances don't necessarily originate from one place, person, or time but often many at once, I find the idea that we're relying on lightening to strike in a comment board in order to achieve some important scientific advance rather naive and laughable.

Why would you infer that it's storing the entire page? It's easy enough for the browser to remember what fields had what data in them, load the page, and restore any form data.

Knowing GL/DirectX is pretty meaningless in games unless you're looking to be hired as a graphics programmer. Even more interesting these days is that as more of the gaming experience moves online, we're seeing fairly traditional skillsets such as DBA or server side programming become much more in demand. It all depends on what you want to do *on* a game development team. Knowing graphics programming doesn't guarantee you a job anymore than being demonstrably skilled in any other facet of game programming. In fact, going in and thinking that just because you can write a hobby game front to back yourself is far less interesting to employers than being able to demonstrate an interest in a specific area.

I work for one of the top 5 developers on console games, as a programmer. Are there crunch times? Yes. Do you get comp time? Yes. I'm going to be taking 35 days vacation this fall. The work itself is vastly more interesting and personally rewarding (to me) than working on business intelligence software, which is probably where I'd be otherwise.

You get what you put into it, and you also get what you put up with. I don't recommend that anybody sacrifice their quality of life simply to be in games, and certainly some studios are worse than others, but in making games for 9 years, if you can put up with a some crunch every year or two, it can be a really fun job. Just put up resistance if you're being treated unfairly (80 hour work weeks? Never.) .. once you get some experience, you can move around. The entire industry is a game of musical chairs, so you should be able to find something at your 'pressure' level. Some people will put up with those insane for the privilege of working on a GTA title, but there is plenty of middle ground.

And as somebody else pointed out above, just because you like playing games (or even making them for yourself) doesn't necessarily mean you'll like making them in the AAA game space. I just wrapped up a title where the credits take about 40 minutes to watch, so there are lots of considerations in terms of how much time you're willing to put in, how much individual credit you're looking for, etc.

Wish this had made the real news. We know this sort of thing happens, but airline industries are highly effective at having this never reach public discussion.

So... "fun gimmick, or a serious commentary on an increasingly surveillance based society?"

Really?

How about both. Are having a sense of humor and making a serious comment mutually opposed? Slashdot deserves better.

Not 100% sure this is WebKit-free. On MacOSX there's still a reference to webkit in the UserAgent string as: "AppleWebKit" anyway.

Add on to that the inability of the average Japanese person to say 'No' to someone, even family. The Japanese (and many Asian cultures in general) place a very high importance upon maintaining face.

We're talking about people who move to a new town when family members are convicted of minor crimes so they can 'start over'. Major crimes... whew. That's only one of the reasons suicide is so damn common in Japan and SK.

The idea of kicking your adult child out of the house for his own damn good is HORRIFYING for most families that have to deal with this.

The idea of being KNOWN as the family who kicked your adult child out of the house for his own damn good is even worse.

I realize you're cherry picking the NASA buy, but I'm pretty sure Google is acting on self interests alone. Even if you choose to believe that NASA picked up the phone one day, and a bunch of politicians on the other line said, "Hey NASA, buy this thing from Canada, cause that would be awesome!" I bet that kind of simplistic worldview makes their scientists and mathematicians feel awesome.

I guess D-Wave's Google Ads campaign (Buy a 10 million dollar computer! Click here!) wasn't getting good sell through rates, huh?

The government is spying on our codebase! It's so cute.

More importantly, why should you be on the defensive? Isn't it good to know both things? Is it somehow a binary choice between wanting to know about the two issues? Snowden is the messenger, not the message, and you probably have a higher likelihood of impacting domestic policy than raising awareness to the 'scandal' that is foreign governments trying to disrupt or influence local politics. Especially since it doesn't take any tinfoil whatsoever to discuss USA's storied history of doing the same. This strawman of somebody who thinks that China would never stoop to what the USA stoops to all the time is pretty hilarious. This is what governments do, the world over. The idea that the USA isn't doing this, or wouldn't do it in the future is downright silly given the history of unilateral foreign interference by all world super powers.