It would have seemed sane to only tax ***coins when cashed out or exchanged for a good.

An analogy I heard for the current IRS guidance is that it's like taxing furniture makers for the full price of a couch (minus material + labor costs) when they combine wood, cloth, and padding. Furthermore they must calculate the price based on the current sale price of the couch in furniture stores.

If you're looking for other online glasses providers (and want to avoid the Luxotica cartel) there's a few alternatives that I've seen come up on previous discussions:

Zenni Optical
glassesshop ?
goggles4you
cheapglassess123
Warby Parker
Classic Specs

We bought 3 pairs from Zenni Optical for just at ~$100 ($110 I think?) and we've been *very* pleased. This after paying $250 - $300 per pair year after year at the local places. Seriously, the glasses online are so cheap it's worth it even just to have a throwaway (for going to the beach, theme parks, etc) or a backup pair.

On the PC, Sonic and All Stars Racing Transformed is a great example of this. The game runs smooth on modest hardware on single player or local split screen multi-player. It even supports 4k resolutions (though I have not tested this myself yet).

If the game uses lower detail meshes and textures when it goes split screen, it hasn't been noticeable.

As part of the Linux community, I'll have to disagree. This also came up the last time Steam on Linux was discussed . As was concluded there, each distro can implement their own package that installs steam and any missing dependencies necessary to get it to work. Alternatively, the user can devote a small partition to Steam OS and switch out when they're done working for the day and want to game instead. In fact, the user can install SteamOS and separately install the steam client in their main distro and have them both share the same game install folder and only boot into SteamOS when a game isn't working as well as expected in their favored distro.

That said the developer can just choose to support SteamOS and leave it at that. As a *bonus* the game should work in other Linux distros.

I think there's more value than an extra sale here.

Valve is offering game developers a single target in Steam OS.

Right now a game developer has to contend with: Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, 32bit or 64 bit, various versions of Direct X (different versions of windows are limited to certain Direct X versions). Bug in the OS causing you grief? Submit a request to Microsoft and hope it gets fixed (hah!) or code around it. Getting customers to upgrade to the latest windows is not always feasible due to the cost.

SteamOS will offer one version. Which version do you support? The latest one. 64 bit or 32 bit? SteamOS is only 64 bit. Bug in the OS affecting your program? You can look up the code, fix it, and submit the patch to Valve. Did you find a fix or setting that'll improve everyone's Steam OS experience? Submit it!

As cool as that would be, Gabe also said this in the same AMA:

Definitely replay it from the beginning. The dialog you've missed is pretty awesome and sets up one of the important characters in the game.

I think the better analogy is the post office.

You pay shipping to receive packages (to the post office). You also pay for the content of those packages (to whoever you bought the item(s) from).

Now more and more people start ordering stuff from Amazon. The local post office realizes that their mail trucks are filling up and they're unable to pick up all the packages they need. Some of the packages get left behind, some get crammed into the truck (and end up damaged), some make it through.

  They also notice that a third of all packages have Amazon logos.

Does the post office:

A) Use the extra money it has been receiving from postage fees to upgrade it's fleet, buy more trucks, hire more drivers, etc.

B) Pick up on Amazon's generous offer to have some items already stocked, packaged, and automatically labeled next to the Post office so that commonly ordered items can be transferred locally instead of going through the USPS's now heavily taxed fleet?

C) Extort money from Amazon in exchange for their customers receiving their packages in a timely and undamaged fashion (which their customers are already paying for).

Now you can say the main difference is that the post office is charging per package vs selling a service to its customers where they can receive a certain amount of mail (say in pounds) per day. Either way though a service is being promised, paid for, but not fully delivered.

And now to add self interest:

What if you got an ad flyer from your local post office with "Now you can order movies and books from the USPS!" while at the same time movies and books that you are paying shipping to receive from Amazon are getting delayed, crushed, or lost.

Look at it this way:

* Netflix has over 30 Million subscribers .

* According to the US Census data, 75% of US households have internet.

* 115 Million Households in the US

Some math:

115 Million households * .75 = 86.2 Million households with internet.
31 million Netflix Subscribers / 86.2 Million Internet users = 36% of households with internet in the US use Netflix. Yes, over a third.

Now add the fact that cable companies are losing cable TV customers in the hundreds of thousands *each quarter* and you can see how more and more people are depending on Netflix (and other services) to fill their video entertainment needs. The name for the trend is cord-cutting .

So based on that I would surmise that a substandard Netflix experience would be a dealbreaker for 1/3rd of all internet customers and a larger proportion of *high speed* internet customers (since people who don't need to stream video opt for the cheaper services).

This is like buying a computer case from Newegg, paying for 3 day UPS shipping, then the UPS driver that shows up to Newegg and demands a tip to pickup the package because it's too big and heavy and without the tip the package could take much longer to arrive.

The shipper shouldn't get to charge twice for a shipment. Likewise ISPs shouldn't be allowed to sell data delivery to its customers then try to also extract fees from the data providers.

I opened the link scrolled through it, only to get all excited that my card (the R9 290) was trouncing everything else in one of the charts!

Then I realized I was looking at the temperature charts....

Yes! As a convenience we could require users to login via google+ !

I was referring to the cost of Cobra. I was referring to him not being able to bend far enough to take the huuuuuge price you have to pay to keep your insurance via Cobra (most of which I understand it the employer portion which is no longer being payed).

Due to a pre-existing condition, he couldn't bend over far enough.

There's still potential for the Ouya 1.0, the Tegra 3 chip it uses has been demonstrated (by nVidia) to be perfectly capable of game streaming.

So if steam machines pick up, with proper support, the Ouya 1.0s could easily become the streaming machines of choice.