I actually held your opinion about Uber ("I don't get it, what's wrong with normal taxis?") until recently. But so far all my Uber experiences have been stellar: friendly drivers, clean cars, quick and safe driving, plus getting a very exact estimate of when your Uber car will show up at your door. Meanwhile, my last couple experiences with taxis have been atrocious. The most recent one was in a foul-smelling cab with no air conditioning, whose driver took us 15 minutes out of the way because he didn't know the roads, and even was driving in the wrong lane AGAINST TRAFFIC at one point.

So, I now definitely think Uber's valuation is correct, because I'd pay just about anything to avoid another taxi experience.

I can see no downside to a hypothetical scenario where every user has Adblock installed, such that every advertising company needs to go through Adblock's acceptable ads program to be seen.

If the ads conform to what's "acceptable", then all ads seen are non-intrusive and free from malware, which is a win for users.
If Adblock raises the price of being allowed on the list in an extortion-racket type scheme, then fewer advertisements are seen overall, which is again a win for users.
If Adblock gets greedy or gets lax with its policing, and begins to allow bad ads through, people will dump it for the next generation of ad-blocker and we're back to the situation we have now.

Is that still true in Nvidia's case? I originally bought an Nvidia card because of the supposed Linux-friendliness, but it's been giving me trouble. Meanwhile, I'm hearing about how AMD has opened up a lot more and is making good strides with its Linux drivers.

Yes... and we've certainly never been misled by "game engine footage" before.
*cough*Killzone*cough*
*cough*Watchdogs*cough*

Your heuristics idea would create too many false positives, where each false positive represents a paying customer who is now pissed at being treated like a bot. It also would likely allow many false negatives, requiring the spammers to merely tweak their system to fool the heuristic, meaning the problem would not be solved either. So now you have paying customers being treated as spambots while still being spammed by actual spambots. That's a bad combination right there.

Meanwhile, placing restrictions on accounts who have never bought even $5 worth of stuff will raise the barrier of entry above what most spammers can afford, and if it inconveniences a few legit people? Well, if they haven't bought anything, they can't really be called paying customers, so they're not the gamers Valve is interested in courting anyway.

Honest mistakes happen, but copyright violation is copyright violation. Ubiquiti needs to put things right ASAP, and thank their lucky stars that the copyright they violated was owned by a bunch of copyleft hippies and not a big lawsuit-happy corporation.

These are exactly the same sort of arguments the auto manufacturers trotted out back when they were trying to prevent people from repairing or modifying cars without having it done by the dealer. The arguments were bullshit then, and they haven't gotten any better since.

That's a strange motto for Nintendo to have. Between copyright shenanigans like this, their abusive partner program on YouTube, and their infamous treatment of third-party developers, a better slogan might be "We Make Games, Fuck You".

I haven't gone back to SSDs on my desktop since I tried one from OCZ. The damn thing would work fine for a bit, but then randomly freeze my entire computer until I powered it off.

Congrats, you just took an axe and destroyed a multimillion dollar satellite. Clearly the backers of the GPS system will now see the light and shut the project down forever ... ... or maybe they'll just build another satellite and make the average taxpayer pay an extra dollar.
Seriously, jackass, you don't "bring the public's attention to the government's attempt to control the world through modern technology" through actions that make you look like a frothing-at-the-mouth luddite.

For all his talk of doing what's right instead of what's convenient, the actual right way to bring his concerns about the government and the military to the public's eye would have been to find like-minded people, form a group, start some grassroots activism and some protests to get exposure, and work towards getting his issues on a ballot. But, no, that would be too slow and inconvienient, so he decided to go the easy route of instant gratification by smashing some satellites.

OK, these guys are probably far smarter than I'll ever be, but... the universe clearly isn't staying at a finite size, and playing the universe's expansion in reverse would imply that it started at a single point. How do they account for this? I even went as far as to read the article, but it wasn't mentioned.

Are they saying that the universe fluctuates between a not-quite-a-singularity tiny point of density and a not-quite-eternally-infinite empty void, or that it simply was a not-quite-a-singularity tiny point of density for an infinite time before it expanded?

Haven't you heard? Frames are the solution to every technical problem that you will have in the future. After all, frames securely mediate, by design. Secure multi-mediation is the future of all webbing.

Wanting to see Sony burn is a perfectly legitimate goal, but threatening the safety of average employees and their families is several steps over the line.

Because it's absolutely ridiculous that I have to install a third-party driver to get a major OS to recognize a filesystem that has existed for ages? Microsoft has finally caved in and acknowledged that Linux exists. Why not support its filesystems, at least as ready-only?

Honestly, you'd think they'd want to make it easy to move data from Linux to Windows, but right now it's only easy going the opposite direction.

This is a good step forward, but when is Windows going to have native support for ext2 or ext3 filesystems? They've only been around for about 20 years now.