I'm wondering if Google just killed Roku with Chromecast.

Actually, that's what makes good leaders. Good leaders are able to get a group to do what they want.

Or just unplug the kinect part.

Huh? There are thousands of companies that make money manufacturing and selling things. Why do you assume that their only path to profit is via apps and advertising? Toyota, Vizio, Samsung, Ikea, Asus, etc. seem to be doing pretty well selling things.

Valve has always said that if they were to go out of business, or shutdown their Steam service, they would release patches to all the games to make them playable without requiring Steam.

Damn I just bought an XFX 7850 last week. Performance seems good (though there was I blue screen when I first installed it, but I hadn't installed any drivers yet and it's been stable since), should I expect to be replacing it in a few months?

I don't know what media your listening to / reading. Investigative journalism is alive and well, even if the topics don't make national news. You say you're too young to notice Nixon, but there have been a few other major journalist / news initiated investigations since then. Gary Webb's "Dark Alliance" investigation linking the CIA to the drug trafficking, as well as the earlier investigation into Iran / Contra 10 years earlier. More recently, the uncovering of the NYPD spying on Mosques and Muslim groups in NY. Check out the Center or Investigative Reporting (http://cironline.org/) for more examples.

A believe Valve has an item in their EULA / contract that if they even shut down they will release / unlock / dedrm all purchased content.

RFID is not GPS tracking, this isn't an issue about privacy. There's no new information being giving out. It's a technical improvement over standard photo ID badges. It's a school, they should have student IDs, for a number of reasons (security being just one).

I actually have multiple ID badges that I where for work, depending on location. ID badges are for security as well.

And do you consider this to be a good or a bad thing? I can only think that's it's a very good thing, let the machines do the boring work and let the people do what the machines can't. Automation and reducing the effort required to perform some action is always a good thing (short term, I'm not talking about developing a 100% dependence on automation and losing the ability to perform those actions without the machinery (ala Homer declaration upon seeing an iron lung machine, "and here I am like a chump breathing all by myself")).

Every episode had a different rendition of the song.

Huh? For a rectangular shape, area per diagonal is the same no matter what the ratio.

If starting an install from scratch with no legacy software, I'd probably go with homebrew. But it's a real pain if you've already got a bunch of stuff installed and configured on your machine from over the years. It does not play well with other systems (e.g., fink or macports), but then again, none of them really do. I'll give it a shot on my next build.

Also, the system is not tied to the Kindle. It needs to be able to push content to iPhones / iPads, Android devices, Blackberries, Windows and Apple PCs over a global 3g network. Hell, the global 3G network is going to cost more than 16M over the life of the contract. According to Amazons 3g coverage maps, they've got the North America, most of Europe covered (except for Belarus), India, Japan, Australia, and a few spots in South America, the Middle East, China, and SE asia.