It's funny you mention Square-Enix and Tomb Raider specifically (or perhaps you mentioned them for this reason), because many gamers are completely aware of how unreal their sales expectations are: http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/04/09/square-enix-reveals-sales-expectations-for-tomb-raider

Square-Enix has revealed exactly how many copies of Tomb Raider, Sleeping Dogs and Hitman it expected to sell, after announcing that they all failed to hit targets last month.

Astonishingly, the publisher hoped to sell between 5 and 6 million copies of Tomb Raider in its first month, which would have placed it amongst some of the fastest-selling games ever. It managed 3.6 million, which by most standards is an extremely impressive launch.

So even in the face of amazing sales, they're "disappointed". I think that unrealistic expectations from all sides are what will kill much of the market--not all of it, I don't see another Crash coming up like we had in '85, but there will be an internal revolution in the gaming market in the next few years.

From what I've read, Google is the only one claiming to have tried to fight these before the reveal. Everyone else is playing damage control.

How nice that, after these revelations, suddenly all of these companies are coming forward with data and vows to fight or announcing requests to reveal information, etc. Where were these Brave Defenders of Consumers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HCitizens before Snowden?

(Of course, without the public knowledge it would be a lot easier for the government to silence businesses or influential people who did try to fight this stuff, but something tells me that all of this is about trying to re-establish consumer trust and loyalty, and is shit-all about trying to protect our Fourth Amendment rights.)

I switched to NetVibes, too, and so far I like it. What I especially like is having distinct "pages" that can have distinct feed categories, making it easy for me to set up a "work" page (/., Ars, Hack a Day, etc.), a "home" page, and an, uh, "other" page. At work I just keep the work page open, and if that runs out and I'm bored I can switch to "home" to read some webcomics or gaming feeds.

I have a few complaints, the primary one being that you can't sort ASC which I liked to do so I can easily read the oldest news first, but nothing that would turn me away from it. (I also really like their grid layout, useful for things like checking deals on NewEgg and just seeing a quick thumbnail to know if the product may interest me or not.)

To other readers, if you visit their site, you'll see a lot about "company" this and "metrics" that. Don't be fooled--while they have a subscription model for data analysis or something, the free version is perfectly fine for just RSS feeds. (They have a few extra widgets outside of feeds, but nothing I find useful.)

I had heard a lot about Feedly, but having to install an extension for an online RSS reader rubs me the wrong way.

I don't believe the Libertarian party would do any better (and would make some things worse,) nor do I agree with all of its ideas. However, since they do seem to have the largest third party support, I go with them when I can't find a candidate I actually like in an attempt to send a message to the major parties.

You know, I (and everyone else) should be outraged at what is not only an invasion of privacy (citizens or not), but also a use of taxpayer money.

And, yet, all I can do is sigh. PRISM, Verizon, NSA, TSA, IRS, HLS, I just find it all overwhelming and disheartening. Sure, I could e-mail/call/mail my congressman or representative, but the cynicism I've gained over this past decade of political bullshit just tells me that my Congressman is already well aware of whatever is happening and is quite happy with the situation, no matter their party. (I see lots of scrutiny from the GOP, but not a single bill from the "we've voted to repeal Obamacare 37 times" House trying to rein in the President's actions or the actions of the various 3-letter organizations.) I'll do research every time I go to vote but I know that I'm in the minority that does so, while the voting population at large will blindly follow that D or R regardless of the candidates' viability, platforms, or intelligence, so it all seems for naught. I encourage my relatives to vote third party, but none of them heed my pleas to actually research who they vote for. (I have no circle of friends in which to do the same.) For all the abuse and impropriety of this, I just can't see a way to affect change.

I'm not even mad about this, though I should be. I'm just depressed. Circus and bread, indeed.

(Actually, if I adjust my tin-foil hat slightly, I wonder if all of this isn't coming out at the same time to be just that: overwhelming, numbing the average American, so that they just give up and don't raise hell about it.)

The link in the summary is /. masturbation, so here's the Reuters article that it links to, no extra ad impressions needed. (wtf is "Slashdot Cloud"?)

I give it five years, max, until we see at least one unit like this in every Home Depot. It's unlikely to accept user-created models, but it would have an immense database of odds and ends that are hard to maintain an inventory of because they take up so much space and sell so little. Even better would be going to Home Depot's (for instance) site, ordering something printed, paying for it, and they'll hold it until the next time you go there so you're not having to wait at the machine for it to print.

Could even have two separate styles: the "consumer-facing" model that has a nice container and touchpad for selecting the product, and the "industrial" model that is more bare bones and is used in the back for online orders or in-house stuff.

The linked article is far more about the internal 'robot' and very little about the beer fridge. While perhaps the intent of the /. post, I was far more interested in how the beer fridge could have caused such an issue. Thankfully, TFA has a link to another, far more interesting, FA:

Telstra engineers say any electric spark of a large enough magnitude can generate radio frequency noise that is wide enough to create blackouts on the 850mHz spectrum that carries our mobile voice calls and internet data.

Engineers said the motor in the beer fridge was causing the interference.

It includes an image of said fridge, which looks like something from the 50s/60s (maybe? I don't know, I still have people yelling at me to get off their lawns.) More modern models probably have much better, efficient motors that don't cause this kind of issue.

Mr Halley said Telstra was increasing its black-spot detectors as Australians flocked to smartphones, and the rapid expansion of services revealed some very odd "ghosts in the machine". [...] These included faulty automatic teller machines, lights and illegal phone and TV antenna boosters.

No mention of the resolution, but I assume it involved unplugging the fridge. (I wouldn't be surprised if he paid more in electricity for that thing per year than just buying a new, medium-sized fridge.)

I'm looking forward to the best car analogy that anyone can come up with on this topic.

It's like you Hulk out, and pick up a car, and throw it into the ocean. ...What? It's not my fault you don't understand the analogy.

this cause is something only a tool would do

This is Gawker we're talking about.

The difference, though, is that games are fundamentally different from the type of works that Congress had in mind when they wrote those rules.

"They couldn't have known" is an extremely dangerous (and wrong!) line of thinking. It's the same way people are trying to gut the first, fourth, and fifth amendments with statements like "the Founding Fathers couldn't have known about the Internet, so it doesn't count" and the second with "how could they possible conceive handguns and rifles when they wrote it?"

And for most games, no, you don't have a large number of options, especially popular ones like Call of Duty.

A book review can summarize the entire plot, because doing so doesn't substitute for the experience of reading the book.

But if they read the entire book to you in video, it wouldn't be covered by Fair Use, even though they're recording the video with your their equipment and using their own voice to read the words. LPs don't summarize (again, to my knowledge), so there's no comparison.

While a Let's Play might not cover 100% of the game, they cover the vast majority (so like someone reading a book over a video, and going "this part is boring so we'll skip ahead a few pages"). The fact that you aren't personally playing it doesn't change the fact that they're still using Nintendo's copyright, which is on the characters, settings, and story within the game as well as the game itself. Whether we are inputting the commands or reacting to it ourselves, or even getting enjoyment from watching the game, is a moot point. If someone were playing live in front of a sufficiently large audience, you can be sure that permission to broadcast the gameplay to the crowd was obtained at some point, in the same way that is done for movies.

I don't disagree that the experience is different between watching someone else play and playing it yourself. However, legally, that does not matter at all. Put another way, if someone streamed a theatrical release for free over the internet, but it was upside down and briefly played vuvuzelas at random intervals, we'd have a very different experience than seeing it in theaters, but it would still be copyright infringement because it is transmitting the vast portion of the movie.

(Again, IANAL, so this is all to the best of my understanding.)

The amount of footage isn't really relevant here.

It's completely relevant here. U.S. Copyright Office - Fair Use:

Section 107 contains a list of the various purposes for which the reproduction of a particular work may be considered fair, such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Section 107 also sets out four factors to be considered in determining whether or not a particular use is fair.

1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes
2. The nature of the copyrighted work
3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work

(Emphasis Mine) It doesn't matter that it's video of someone playing instead of someone playing live. "The experience" doesn't matter; copyright is on the contents of the game, not on the enjoyment someone gets from said game.

Sounds like ya'll have a far more sane copyright system than we do here in the States. Down here, the allowed use of copyrighted works without permission is based on "fair use". Here's a quick overview of how the law looks at it, but that's like taking a scoop of water out of an ocean; "fair use" is a very complicated topic, and the variety of factors are often argued and fought tooth and nail, both in and out of courtroom.