I think you're spot on. You should be able to subscribe to the posts of a person which have a certain hashtag. And now it would be really simple and convenient since Google implemented autohashtagging of posts in G+ some time ago

I'd like to see this succeed too but I'm not counting on it. For starters, it's going to be really difficult to make the blocks with the connectors to connect to other blocks and everything and that the result is not an ugly, bulky phone. Make no mistake, looks are important in the smartphone market. In addition, don't count either on having a microSD holder module: Motorola is now part of Google and the big G is pushing hard for the cloud and against microSD cards. To sum up, an interesting idea that I'd like to see realized but I'm not optimistic about it.

As far as I remember Jeri Ellsworth didn't quite fit in Valve's culture, so that might be a factor. She made a video about it when she was let go. I might be on her Youtube channel

Well, the original Galaxy Ace is a pretty bad phone. Samsung cut too many corners in that one. The original premise still stands, though. No, the 150€ (we're talking off-contract prices) Android phone is not as good as an iPhone, but 300-400€ Android phones are.
What's more, the 200€ -current, 2013- Android phones are not as powerful as the latest iPhone but can really do the same things albeit a little slower.

Well, I'd say he's ok. IMO it's still to early to write C++11 code for any real products. It's not only the matter of the tools (that's the easy part) but the fact that most C++ aren't going to be familiar with those changes and new ways of doing things yet.

Of course there's a lot of horrible comments, but that's a given on any site and there's not much you can do about it. In addition, moderation is no silver bullet and can both easily miss good comments and bury good ones because they don't coincide with the majority opinion. My point still stands: There're some great comments and opinions here.

It's obvious that comments are what make some websites attractive. This is one of them.
In Slashdot I usually find very interesting what other people think about the news. Sometimes, there're some jewels: Comments about people who really know what the news is about and offer their perspective. I same those comments as bookmarks. I wonder why there's not a "favorite" option to save them.

I'd be happy to pay for their services (search/gmail/drive...) if that guaranteed me that they don't store any info about me and that doesn't feed AdSense, and I get no ads. Just put a reasonable price on it and I bet many people would pay

And that's why is so important that a company has strong competitors. If they don't, they have fewer incentives to be ethical.
I love Android, but Google needs strong competitors so that they make it good for consumers and not only good for themselves.

Actually the Youtube scare was Microsoft's fault. Google wouldn't build a Youtube app for Windows Phone citing low marketshare so Microsoft built their own but it didn't show ads so it violated the terms of service. That's why Google forced them to remove it.

which didn't have the Metro UI.

It actually makes a lot of sense to share the underlying code, more so now that the mobile phones and consoles have a lot of power.
But, I don't think it makes sense in the UI department: Please MS, for the love of the flying spaghetti monster, give each of the devices an appopiate interface for its use cases. You like copying Apple, don't you? They didn't put the iOS UI on OS X. Copy them on that!

+1 I guess the popularity thing is due to Eclipse having much better commercial support. I mean, it has official plugins (developed or sanctioned by the maker of the technology in question) for almost every framework you can think of whereas Netbeans has much fewer official plugins.
Anyway, I like Netbeans much better than Eclipse. It has fewer options and that might make it less flexible but seems to be more focused on getting things working fast and with little effort. It's much more intuitive (IMHO) than Eclipse. In Eclipse everything seems to require lots of configuration.
Interestingly, on the Gnome/KDE dichotomy, I stand on KDE's side which is more complex and configurable (i.e. more similar to Eclipse).