I think there's an important place for deniers

No. There is an important place for constructive criticism, critical questioning, and further study. Deniers do none of this, they just state that Global Climate Change is not real because
A) it was cooler this summer than last (or, when shown raw numbers saying they're wrong, it "felt" cooler)
B) personal greed (because changing the A/C from 68 to 69 (or, heaven forbid, 70!) or walking to the mailbox instead of driving, are horrible ideas); or,
C) my pastor said so.
If someone took in and understood the evidence supporting man-made Global Climate Change and was able to produce empirical data that countered the evidence or showed an opposite trend, then they're a critic or an opposing scientist. But these are not the kind of people we are dealing with.

They don't care about keeping the scientific community "honest", they care about shutting it up.

I think there is another gaming depression looming similar to the great Atari game depression of the early 80's.

While I agree that the amount of shovelware on consoles and clones on mobile platforms seems greater than ever (as a %), I don't think we're going to hit the over-saturation that caused the Game Crash of '83.

A big part of this is that gaming is far more decentralized these days. Back then you had a handful of consoles and limited computers. These days we're down to only three major consoles and two handhelds at any given time but now we have two (well, three if you want to include BB or WP) mobile operating systems as well as the PC and Mac (and Linux.) If consumer confidence (the lack of which was a major contributor to the '83 crash) falters it will likely be only on one platform (like the Xbone and/or Wii U) or with one company (such as EA). The number of indie developers now vs. then will also mean that, even should most major devs fall, games will still be made a-plenty.

Instead, I think we'll see the introduction of more curated systems for the mobile platforms. Apple seems to be giving gaming a more prominent place in their walled garden with the next version of iOS, which will likely include something that focuses on "best of the best" for presenting games up front (with all games, including the million "jump" clones, available if you dig a bit deeper). Android is much more decentralized, so each major carrier might bring up their own curated list, but I don't know how important gaming is to any of them beyond Angry Birds and Cut The Rope. Valve is in a great position here with Steam, but so far their mobile Steam app is only for working with your PC account on the go and doesn't seem to offer any Android games at all.

Ironically, it seems that the Big Three are trying to open their systems more to enticing indie games to be released on them. Mobile gaming (that is, phones, not the 3DS or Vita) is a far more casual crowd will put down just as quickly as they pick up, and so the massive amounts of shovelware just means that good games will get less visibility. This is what will cause a loss in developer confidence and lead to the curated gaming services. I also foresee a "renaissance" in the gaming development world: right now most studios are make or break on a single game, to something more streamlined and in line with movie/TV studios. Yes, it means the trend of sequelitis will increase, and we'll see lots of companies like Zynga, but it will also mean more stability for the industry as a whole, which will hopefully lead to more "A" titles (which are a bit cheaper, but still fun for a run through or two) instead of every developer trying to hit the coveted "AAA" title.

The likes of EA will drown in their own, self-dug pit of shit, but sadly they'll pull many good devs down with them before this happens.

In my experience, as an American, there are two mottoes for this country: The spoken and the unspoken.

The spoken: In God We Trust
The unspoken: Fuck You, I Got Mine

Don't forget about the following verses, where Lot's daughters have him drink wine and, once he's properly drunk, they draw graffiti on his face.

I'm reminded of my Calc II class back in college: The professor, while perhaps highly intelligent, was also quite scatterbrained. We had the curriculum at the beginning of class, including what problems we were to do for each section. After the first week I learned that I should disregard the lecture completely, as the professor would often forget where he was in a problem and take a few moments to get back on track or go through a long problem, get to the end, go "Huh, that's not the right answer", and then a student would point out that a + in a very early step should be a -; he'd go "Aha!", erase half the chalkboard, and I'd see most of the students furiously scribbling out or erasing notes they were taking. I just sat in the back of the room and read through the book and did problems at my own (faster) pace.

or they were completely out of touch with what consumers actually wanted and missed the mark completely

I'm going with this one, especially with the Xbone. They thought that their dominance in the desktop market combined with their popularity in console gaming meant that gamers would eat up whatever shit they put out so that they could have supreme control.

But gamers are not business users, and they raised high hell over it. Now Microsoft is backpedaling on their so-called "features" so fast they'll win the Tour de France. I think part of this is that, except for exclusives like Halo, the 360 doesn't have the kind of vendor lock-in that the Windows desktop does, meaning that Microsoft could take a major hit on sales of anything gaming-related if they don't bow to pressure, unlike their Windows unit (which has the same pressure, but Microsoft doesn't seem to realize this yet.) Increasingly, gaming studios are focusing on multi-platform releases (except for Nintendo!) in order to increase their earnings (or at least decrease their loss on games that cost more than most movies to make,) which dwindles that exclusivity even further.

after all it turned out when the wall fell and access to the actual records came out the STASI were "only" watching 10% of the population but that was enough to keep them in line,why? Because everybody thought they were the 1 in 10 and thus thought everything they did was being recorded and this constant scrutiny kept them in line.

Country-wide Panopticon, bordering on global.

The police may, acting in good faith

No. Full stop. You must never assume that the police are acting in good faith, especially now when they are increasingly avoiding transparency and may be getting information from secret connections. Yes, that's just the DEA.

For now.

As far as we know.

While I agree that college athletes should get paid when products use their likeness (their main "salary" is a free ride at the college, from my understanding,) and that EA in general is an evil company, I believe the EFF's stance here is proper on a broader scale (I haven't RTFA; this is Slashdot, after all.) What if the person in question was, I don't know, a film actor?

Granted, EA's likeness is far, far more specific, and the team at Naughty Dog did change Ellie's likeness away from Ellen Page and closer to that of Ellie's voice actress before release, but a lot of the same general ideas are at use here. While I believe that everyone should have control over the use of their own likeness and person, there does have to be a limit or any two-bit actor (assuming we limit it to "public figures") could start suing companies because the main character in Modern Shooter 8 sounds like them and uses their catch phrase "Whoop-de-nany." From the summary, EA's use may overstep that boundary, but the EFF may still have the right idea here.

Aye, but once it got going the PS3 was able to do some heavy numbers. Part of that is because even with a slow start, it had hardware more-or-less on spec with the 360, so mutli-platform games were easy enough to bring over once it had a good base, not to mention HD collections of games after the fact.

The Wii U has no such future potential. No matter how many units it sells, the power and capabilities will always be far less than the Xbone and PS4, so devs not only have to worry about a small install base but would also have to go through the trouble of stripping out many "next gen" elements (mainly graphical, but perhaps some advanced AI or mob count, too) to make it play nice on the Wii U, which gamers don't want at all.[1] Furthermore, the attach rate on the original Wii was the worst for third parties out of all three consoles last gen at a bit over half of the overall attach rate, versus >75% on each of the other two (Source; however, it's from Nov 2008, and I'm having an incredibly hard time finding more recent numbers; Nintendo's own site shows a similar attach rate, though, so I doubt the overall ratio changed much for them).

So, with a small install base, underpowered hardware, and a far smaller third party attach rate than its competitors, what is the point in smaller third parties putting anything on the Wii U? And without third party games, why would anyone buy a Wii U unless they were big fans of Nintendo's first party properties, few of which have been announced in any concrete way? So Nintendo has thrust itself into a catch 22 that I doubt it will get out of this generation. With luck they'll have a repeat of the Gamecube; otherwise it's the N64 all over again.

[1] Dead Rising: Chop Till' You Drop for the Wii is an excellent example of what happens when this is attempted.

Being able to host competitive multiplayer on actual separate screens is a new development in console gaming.

Not entirely. The Ultimate List: Cube Connection - Get more out of your Game Boy Advance by linking it to the GameCube. (February 26, 2004)

With specially written software, game developers can make the Game Boy Advance and GameCube talk to each other. Some games require a specific GBA game inserted and booted in the handheld, while others utilize the GBA's ability to store programs into its internal memory. Using the GBA's 256K of system RAM, programmers can create miniature programs and games that can be executed on the handheld without the need for a cartridge in the slot.

But you're right, it hasn't been done on a scale where it's HD graphics and a standard part of the system. Too bad Nintendo isn't really doing it, either (5th Mar 2013):

So far, Wii U games only use a single GamePad, and only one GamePad is supplied with the console with no option to by a second one separately at retail - presumably due to the expense of a controller containing a touch screen and its many other innards (Note: multiplayer games are achieved using Wii U Pro Controllers and/or Wii Remotes). Because of this, Miyamoto plays down the viability of dual-GamePad support being a system that's fully utilised any time soon.

"In the future, perhaps when we get closer to something that, an environment where everybody or a large majority of people would have two GamePads, that might be a time where we look at how we can leverage a system of that nature."

This is, in my opinion, one of the Wii U's largest faults: giving a potentially amazing input device, and then limiting it to one. And even if they were to start supporting multi-Gamepad games, "multiple" in this case means "two". No grand four-player RPG adventure, where they take turns controlling movement in the larger area and have their own screens for battle, not to mention giving each player conversation response options and the majority wins. No massive 2-on-2 Pokemon tournament where the GamePads are used to check stats, use items, and give commands.

Asymmetric gameplay may have a lot of potential, but so far it hasn't been in big ways (the asymmetric gameplay in NSMBU is akin to using the second controller in Mario Galaxy as an assist, so even that isn't anything new.) Nintendo did pretty much everything wrong with this console, so this isn't surprising.

There is benefit to such tracking of vehicles, but done in an anonymous fashion. (Of course, as we know from the Netflix prediction data, you can't just give something random numbers and call it a day.)

Sending simple data to a mile marker (as an example) that says simply "I am an X pound, Y wheeled vehicle" would, I think, be extremely useful in prioritizing which roads get priority in maintenance and when the best time of the day (or night) would be good to do that. Set it up such that a marker sends out a ping signal with a UID and the car responds with the above information only once every A minutes and you remove dupes without giving the car a UID, so the markers get useful data while the drivers' identities remain private.

Of course, that's why it would never be adopted by an existing government. The problem lies in having something that is useful AND altruistic. That's why I agree that reading license plates is bad.

Honestly, I'd love to see Congress do something stupid like this and the rest of the world to call their bluff, or better just ignore us outright. Yeah, they'd hurt a bit as the flow of money from our country was cut off, but as they pick up trade with each other and just ignore the U.S. they'll recover and continue. (Not sure how plausible this is as I don't know what, if anything, the U.S. is the sole exporter of, and a quick Google doesn't help.)

Really, as an American citizen, I'd love to see the world stick it to my country to make a number of my fellow citizens wake the hell up, because it doesn't seem any inside actions will do that. Unfortunately, the Congresscritters and other high political figures will tout it as the world being jealous of America, American Exceptionalism, or some other crap and the media will parrot it (because that's all they can do now) and no one will wake up until we take the full tilt into $BAD_FORM_OF_GOVERNMENT, at which point it will be too late.

Slashdot will never fix their unicode issues. Or their lack of editors who edit. Or their sensationalist and, sometimes, completely wrong summaries. All of that costs time/money and, if they even still cared about value over money while owned by GeekNet, they certainly don't now that they're owned by Dice.

IMHO, Slashdot is dead as a proper "nerd news" site, and has been for some time. Unfortunately, I've yet to find a site (nerd or otherwise) that has the same comment moderation system (which is still the best one, in my opinion, though not without its flaws) and a large, informative/funny/insightful community. Slashdot still enjoys popularity thanks to its community, which is always more worthwhile than the summaries, which almost seems like a catch-22 setup. At least, it's the only reason I'm still here.

Perhaps it would be worthwhile for the comments for this story to be hijacked and used to suggest good alternatives to /.?

NBC actually cut Zimmerman's 911 call to make it seem like he was making racist remarks - I am fully expecting ZImmerman to sue NBC, and settle for something in 7 figures.

He tried to back in December, but it was stayed pending the outcome of the criminal trial. And, now that the verdict is in, he will resume the suit.

After how NBC (and the media at large) handled this whole thing, I hope they get drug through the dirt over this. Guilty or not, they twisted and convoluted the whole scenario--as you mentioned--all in the name of ratings. The media doesn't care about news or reporting anymore (did they ever?), it's all about ad sales and ratings. Their general fear-mongering and giving opinion as fact is a part of the problem with discussing political issues in America, IMO. Damn them all to hell.