You're giving them too much credit. Yes, these ideas have been used to great effect in emergency rooms around the world: chilling someone for a few hours, even days in extreme cases can do wonders depending on the situation. Chilling someone for a few months? 18 months? I think I'll pass on that one, at the very least I'll wait a good long time while a few 10s of thousands of others try it first.

If you can afford a decent hotel, you're less likely to balk at $20 wifi. If, on the other hand, you're looking to spend $50 a night for a hotel room, getting cheap entertainment is probably just as much a priority.

This is like complaining that professional food critics have personal relationships with many high profile chefs, it's true but it misses the point. Reviewers who make bad (as in, inaccurate) reviews lose readers, no one wants to waste money on a lemon.

I'm much more concerned about AAA publishers leaning on reviewers for good reviews or outright buying them, as has been shown in the past, than I am concerned about some shadowy conspiracy to... promote games by indie developers who happen to be minorities or women? I guess...?

And finally, in today's world of aggregated reviews, it's incredibly difficult to game the system in the way you are describing. It wouldn't be enough to convince one or two or even a dozen reviewers to give you good review. Even if you managed good pre-release coverage the user reviews would sink you after the fact (see the latest SimCity for an example).

(And finally again, there's no evidence, at all that any of the accusations that started this mess are even true. The only thing known for sure is that she had a relationship months in the past with one person who worked at a website which reviewed her game. Jesus H Christ, can we please just let this die already!?)

Ok, I'll bite. I have a laptop in the living room that can, and occassionally still does get plugged into the TV for multimedia use; yet the chromecaste gets several orders of magnitude more use.

Form factor. I don't need or want another box sitting in front of my TV.
Quiteness. I am well aware that a PC can be silent, but it costs money and effort to accomplish. Less so these days with low power micro boards granted.
Power draw. To get into entertainment of choice is significantly faster with the chromecast unless you leave the PC always on.
Phone vs physical keyboard and mouse. Maybe it's just me but I've never liked using a keyboard/mouse on the couch. With a laptop sure, but even a wireless keyboard is a literal balancing act. Even if you have a nice setup with a remote, I can honestly say I know where my phone is more often than I know where the living room remote is.
Portability. The small advantage of being able to take a show with you when you leave the house, I don't use it much, but my kid sure does. If we need to leave they can pull the show at it's exact current point in playback to the phone in a matter of seconds.

Many of those advantages similarly carry over to consoles and smart TVs, but by far the largest is the user interface. Netflix, Hulu, Youtube... they've all put far, far more effort into their mobile offerings than they have their console and smart TV apps and it shows. It is much faster and easier to find and pick a show with your phone than the laggy, disjointed messes that some of those console apps are. Add in the fact that multiple people can be looking for something to watch at once, including across multiple services and it can make a big difference.

Aw crap, all that and I forgot the obvious one.
Price! You can get 4 of these for less than even a cheap HTPC.

Resistant would probably be a more accurate description than immune, with significant exposure even people with the mutation would still get infected eventually. Originally it was speculated that the mutation could have been selected for during the black death, but I believe that turned out to be largely bogus.

Alternatively, there will always be some number of batteries that are functional but don't meet the stated specs for whatever reason. Producing 10s of thousands of batteries a year, that could easily leave you with several hundred mostly functional batteries that are otherwise worthless to you.

What you're describing is not insomnia, it sounds much more like a circadian rhythm disorder. I'm not just being pedantic, it's important to understand the differences between the two because the treatments can be significantly different. For instance, it's generally not wise with circadian disorders to medicate to sleep, the sleep you get won't be restful because your body is pretty much convinced that 1AM is a good time to be wide awake.

A small dose of melatonin taken at the right time of day (some experimentation is necessary, it could be as early as first thing in the morning) helps some people get their natural melatonin production on the right track. Bright sunlight first thing in the morning can also be effective. Of course, for many there is no effective treatment and you just have to learn how to deal with it best you can.

I'm clumsy, you could argue downright abusive with my phones. I have a toddler who loves to play games and watch movies with it. I used to go through phones every 12 months, minimum, due to damage and destruction.

My 14 month old Note 3 has a single nick on the metal outer frame. It's been dropped at least a couple dozen times including at least a few onto ceramic tile and a few more onto cement. Basically the same thing (both in drops and damage) on the Galaxy Nexus I had before this phone (over 30 months of use). Modern phones are extremely durable. And that's with what was basically the largest glass available for both (at time of purchase anyway).

If SSD's had come first we'd be talking about how HDD's finally broke the 3ms latency barrier or the or the 1 Gb/s barrier. SSDs' aren't about capacity, that's just not what they're for. While it's certainly nice that you can have a usable amount of space for a decent price, 120GB is enough SSD space to see 95% of the benefits for 60% of users. If laptop manufacturers would make 2 bay laptops standard that 60% would jump to 95%.

Probably yes, because "someone" will replace it "soon" and there will be little or no apparent hard done to the medical facilities. Of course, the reality is the harm is substantial, but it isn't readily visible to the perpetrators so it's quite easy for people to rationalize their behavior.

This depends on what you mean by "see". Almost anyone can learn detect if a light source is polarized by looking for a (very very) faint rainbow effect around the focus of where you're looking. Put flat white on an LCD monitor and stare at it for a bit and you'll probably be able to see it yourself if you're looking for it.

Now go out and lift it once per minute for 3 hours and see how you feel.

Your two primary worries are vote selling and voter secrecy, neither of which are guaranteed by mail in ballots. The real concern is wholesale fraud: no paper trail means a "miscount" is undetectable and untraceable. The fact that your municipality is almost certainly using COTS software is actually a plus in this case, even more so if the software is being operated by an outside third party; they're unlikely to have a horse in the race and be tempted to sway the results.

I'd pay most for a phone with a slide out game controller... only one was ever made that I know of and it was about 18 months behind spec-wise (on a gaming device... what were they thinking?) There are some clip on solutions, but it wouldn't be the same as having it built into the phone.

There's enough overlap from one game to another that it doesn't take a fresh 10,000 hours to master the next game that comes along. A surprising amount of the pro level skill is in fact mechanics (as in physically moving quickly and accurately enough to play the game at high level). There are several SC2 professionals that started their careers playing twitch FPS games for example. Within a genre... well there's not that much difference between SC2 and Command and Conquer, let alone Brood War and SC2.

Another aspect: This is probably one of the reasons Blizzard has stretched the SC2 release out over 6 years (that and making a dumptruck full of money). Every few years there's a new expansion which adds new elements but uses the same basic structure. Freshens up the game without forcing high level players to start from scratch.