Yes similar but through Valve's service and tied to their existing store. Imagine buying a game and an option to stream it for free even while it's still downloading. Or a subscription service with an a la carte option. Point being something Valve could sell or drive business their way.

If Steam wants to sell devices they should sell an HDMI stick (like a Chromecast) and pack in a controller. Sell it for $80 or so. People could use it to play games streamed over their network, or through the cloud. If they end up selling a PC running a Linux dist with a crappy selection of ported games and costing hundreds of dollars it will not sell as well since it will be competing directly against two consoles and even other PCs which enjoy a full selection of games, not just a handful.

Because humans have a delicious savoury taste.

It's not customary. It's discretionary. Some people do it, some people don't. Most people would have the grace to tip good service with the change from the bill with a few quid extra. Tipping in pubs is virtually non existent although I'm sure there are certain tourist bars which are quite happy to pocket the cash tourists leave for them without correcting them on the point. Same in Ireland. I live not to far away from Killarney which is always full of US tourists. I bet the people serving change their expectations depending on whether they are serving a British/Irish person or one from the US. I doubt the actual service changes in any appreciable way.

The tipping in the UK is a far better model. Restaurants have to pay their staff more and tipping becomes discretionary and merit based. Normally it's okay to slip a few quid on top. For taxis, round the fare up to the next multiple. For bar staff nothing.

In the US if you tip less than 15% you run the risk of comments being passed in front of you. All that friendliness is fake and off-putting. I remember one smiley waitress even asked if me and the wife were from "out of town" and handed us a "it is customary to tip 15% card" to us printed in about 12 languages. So fucking insulting. The absolute nadir of tipping is going to the toilet in some places and having some guy standing there in the toilet waiting to turn the tap on for a tip.

Yes and they're going to run in special one way lanes and have overrides for passengers.

Perhaps you should read what I said. A car has to make good progress as well as be safe. That means dealing with countless situations which are easy for humans to solve and virtually intractable for a computer.

For example, my car is behind a bus. The bus stops to pick up passengers. I can see from the length of queue whether I'll be there for several minutes and determine if its worth pulling out safely into the oncoming lane to pass the bus. Does the self drive car have a special bus queue length algorithm? Is it going to wait forever? Or a minute? Two minutes? Forever? Can it tell a bus from a truck? Can it tell if the bus has even stopped because it is picking up passengers or because it has broken down?

Or perhaps a road is partially flooded. There is a 50m stretch where the road is only passable by one car in each direction by travelling in the centre where the camber is highest. Drivers in each direction take turns according to how many cars there are behind and oncoming. Does the self drive car just plough through the water? Does it even see the water? Or does it nudge to the centre of the road? Does it act like an asshole and just pull out without waiting its turn? How does it know that it's turn is next? How does it signal intent to the other guy and vice versa? What happens if just starts driving when the other guy is half way up? Will it reverse back or just block the increasingly angy other guy?

Or there are two guys standing on either side of a roadworks with Stop/Go signs. Only one direction can pass at a time. Can your car figure out there are roadworks? Can it read that sign? How does it know when it is safe to go?

Or a road has a new road layout. The lanes have moved around. Perhaps a two way street has become a one way street. This is clearly signposted. Can your car read these signs? Will it just dumbly drive up the street the wrong way until someone thinks to update the map?

The answer for all these examples and hundreds of others is that it highly unlikely it will do the right thing. It has to have an override mode and a competent, unimpaired driver to extricate it from these situations. There are plenty of positives about advanced driving modes and even self drive in some situations. But the time when cars will be able to drive themselves outside of very controlled situations with no override is a long way off.

I could make a self drive car which is extremely safe - every time a leaf obscurs a sensor, or a plastic bag blows across the road, or it senses a guy standing on the road waiting for his lift, or the lane is out, or because it's lost GPS and its stuck in a tunnel. I would hit the brakes and stop or slow right down. See? Very safe. But oops, now we have a car which doesn't make good progress and stops for all kinds of dumb reasons.

So yeah Google or whomever could claim their car is really safe. It doesn't make it necessarily practical. At the very least it requires a human to extricate it from situations like those above and many more. The only way you will see a driverless vehicle with no form of controls any time soon is in controlled conditions and even then it will need some kind of override. e.g. I could imagine a transport system which used a dedicated lane in airports to move people between terminals. I can't imagine such a thing working on a public road.

So their car can interpret hand signals of a traffic cop directing traffic at a set of broken lights? That's amazing! Can it also tell the difference between a cop directing traffic and some random crazy guy doing the same?

There are any number of every day scenarios where a self drive car would stop because it had no idea what to do.

There are far too many scenarios on public roads where a self drive car wouldn't know what to do and would require human intervention. At the very least it requires an unimpaired, conscious, qualified human being with their own set of controls who can take over if the need arises or if the car does something dumb.

If these become shuttles or taxis it would have to be in carefully controlled conditions where it is highly unlikely that some event would occur that leaves the vehicle stuck and unable to move. And even there, it's possible that there would have to be a a human sitting in a booth nearby who could override the system if it became stuck.

Your Internet-of-everything lightbulb runs off batteries?

For all the praise Intel gets for supporting open source, their end user support for older graphics chipsets really sucks.

Er what? Of course they had the authority - you as the user authorised them to do it. If you didn't want OtherOS removed, you should have refused to update your firmware when asked.

And yes it's a no brainer. It was a feature that virtually nobody used that posed a major attack threat to their platform and their revenues. Of course they were going to remove it. Anyone put in their position would have done exactly the same. Even console owners (at least the honest ones) should have been glad the hole was closed presuming they like playing good games instead of shovelware.

Nintendo may not have cared but I guarantee you 3rd party publishers did. The DS, 3DS and Wii all turned into a cesspool of shovelware because the money simply wasn't in these systems for publishers to aim any higher. It's not hard to find stories of companies with ambitious games being stung by poor sales. Think of all the good games you *might* have seen on those systems but never got to enjoy simply because the money wasn't there for them to bother.

OtherOS was removed because it was considered a viable attack vector. Someone had broken through the virtualization layer it ran on and there was a fear that from there they might be able to attack the rest of the system. It's not hard to imagine the ultimate problem - someone producing a burnable ISO for the PS3 which booted, rooted it and installed custom firmware.

That's why OtherOS was removed. It may have been put in for other reasons but I suspect it would have lasted longer if not for the imminent threat. I actually used OtherOS (I doubt many people who did the complaining ever did) and it was cool to be able to run Linux but it was a no brainer to Sony to remove it when it put billions of dollars at risk if they didn't.