You are conflating 'understandable' with similar but different terms like 'reasonable' and 'rational'. Their superstitions and fears are understandable, but they are not based on reason.

They did a report on Too Many Games, which was really about bad store UIs. Steam is the 'least bad' of the biggies, but that's not saying much.

What frustrates and upsets me is that before Snowden, I would have looked at this as a fluff piece about technology, with some mild nagging doubts about how it could be misused.

Now I see them as NSA whitewashing propaganda, with mild nagging doubts that maybe the original poster had no agenda and it really is a tech fluff article.

I thought that we had too much Lithium to match the prediction, that observed amounts exceeded predicted ratios.

I choose to remain optimistic that it does NOT happen all the time because they do not look at the contents of your email all the time. In other words, someone was diagnosing an algorithm (say, how to choose advertisements using the content of attached images), the images triggered the offensive filter, engineer took a look, and reported it.

Perhaps I am naive, but I simply think that Google does not do this frequently because I don't think they look at email frequently, or scan for naughty pics on purpose. As a sysadmin, I generally don't give a fuck what's in my user's email. I doubt they do either, except to advertise to it.

The three laws of robotics is not very practical (as evidenced by Asimov himself; his fiction is essentially a long list of all the ways the laws fail). In fact, ethics classes themselves are complex enough that it's difficult to imagine any simple, cogent way to summarize ethical decision making into a sound bite. But do you believe it is possible at all to codify into the behavior of future complex systems? Personally, if we ever do get strong AI in my lifetime, I'm betting it'll be as screwed up and erratically ethical as we are.

Works for you as well, if you can hire an attorney to talk to a judge and convince the judge to grant a court order to... nevermind, your phrasing is shorter and means the same thing.

Google Cardboard, like the Oculus Rift, zooms in on the screen making some pixels very large. Perhaps this QHD resolution will look nicer than average when used as a Rift replacement? (note: I'm well aware that it will not actually be a good rift replacement, just that it's abnormally high pixel density could make a difference in extremely specific circumstances.)

I'd like to moderate the story as flamebait.

If small sellers have an alternative to the abysmal conflict resolution Paypal offers, this can only be a good thing. Amazon does Customer Service well... I think they can certainly improve upon Paypal in that respect. Competition may drive Paypal to improve.

This is not a compass. This measures the atoms passing through lines of magnetic flux. The magnetic flux lines are remarkably uniform when you are not within range of a competing magnet; I suspect that is just as true underwater. It's like measuring your distance from the center of a record by counting the track grooves you have scratched over. It does mean it's more accurate at east-west than it is at north-south.

But still pointless, useless, and self-destructive. The letter is bad enough that if he denied writing it, I would believe that it was a character assassination attempt. The guy didn't deserve prison, but he's still an idiot.

Cloud hosting removes the need to hire employees to cover certain duties. Backups Virtualization Database Admin etc Cloud makes sense for small companies who cannot afford enough expertise to adequately handle these issues. A cloud service (in theory) will have more (and more competent) people handling these areas than a small business can muster. But large companies? If you have over 1000 employees, you probably should not be cloud hosting your trade secrets, customer data, and core business value.

To be fair, cars are also held to higher and higher standards of safety every year. If they could legally build a 1960's car today, it could be sold for under $5000 new... but they can't. The car would fail hundreds of safety and emissions regulations.

Not saying that protected monopoly status doesn't contribute, but it's not the largest factor.