Nobody is saying the former is bad and the latter is OK. It's not an either/or situation: both are bad and people are trying to do something about both. In theory, however, it should be easier to do something about the whales than something about the rainforests.

Yes, of course, it's always been an obvious sham.

Yep, I'm being optimistic--I admit it. I don't think they'd be dumb enough to cripple the product by requiring FB integration. By my reading they haven't even done this with Instagram, so why would they do it with a gaming headset? That would be daft. Of course I could well be wrong, but given the absence of any real information as to what's going on it seems premature to write off the whole thing and just assume FB will fuck it all up. Let's see the product first.

Look, I don't like FB either but you're looking at this in a very one-sided way. As the article points out, Instagram and WhatsApp haven't been subsumed into FB in any obvious way following their acquisition. Go to the websites for those services and you won't see evidence of FB. With Instagram, for instance, it appears from the site that FB sharing is optional (I haven't used the App, but the website indicates this). So from past behaviour, FB haven't done an all-out assimilation of everything they've purchased. In addition, FB have contributed plenty to the opensource community. So there are good things there in addition to the crap they've pulled. Finally, they haven't done hardware before and so this very new territory. We know very little about what FB want to do with OR and, frankly, it doesn't look like they know either. It's quite plausible that they will be hands off. No 180 turns needed to envisage such a scenario.

What FB crap? There is no final product: you don't know what it'll be like yet. Probably it'll just have a FB logo and FB will have some pointless (to you or me) services that utilise VR. If you don't have a FB account and aren't interested in that stuff then likely you just skip it, plug the OR into your PC and game away. We don't know that OR will be used to "push" FB. We don't know anything yet.

FB are now so established and enmeshed into other services that they are unlikely to suffer the fate of previous social networks. Nonetheless, it's hard to shake off the thought that users are fickle and FB's popularity may suddenly wane. Perhaps FB see it that way and they want to branch out into something more "solid", like hardware, or perhaps they've just decided that they have the cash and want to do something cool with it. Either way, it seems likely that this will mean a better Oculus arriving sooner. It might have a FB logo on it, and FB might have services for it. But so what? I don't have a FB account and if I bought an Occulus to play games then why would I worry about FB? I get why there's backlash but in reality, when you strip the emotion from it, it's likely a good thing for VR.

However, it will remain illegal to circumvent DRM. So whilst this law is progress, it's not progressing very far.

There are precious few markets in which "anybody" can open a store and compete successfully against the big established players. Go out on the high street and you mostly see franchises and big-name stores. E-books are little different, but I do agree that there seems to be too much collusion between distributors like Amazon and the publishers. Diesel has just gone out of business and Sony are pulling out of e-readers: it's a tough market. Nonetheless, there are e-book distributors out there who aren't Amazon, Apple, or Google. e.g. BAM, ebooks.com, and Kobo. Of course there's also B&N. Plus there's a bunch of smaller outfits, such as Lulu, Smashwords, and Baen, which deal with indie or non-DRM books. So it's not quite true that the little guy is out of e-books. Of course the big 3 or 4 on-line companies are squeezing the little guys, but they're doing this in a range of markets, not just books. We have a general problem in this regard.

Umm... lulu?

You can look through this list, but I do not believe there is a single incident of a large aircraft performing a survivable mid-ocean water landing. It looks like they've always gone in with no survivors.

Two things. It seems unlikely that we'll ever reach the stage that where we can be confident that a large-scale war will never happen again. Countries constantly jostle for power and economies rise and fall, creating instability, power vacuums, and changes in dominance. These are potential triggers for war. Secondly, we don't know that this is "here we go again." Russia may well quit with Crimea. Perhaps it'll push into Eastern Ukraine then quit at that. Perhaps it'll push into all of Ukraine, then quit at that. We don't know what'll happen yet. Right now, nothing too much has happened. Given that most people in Crimea do consider themselves Russian and that Crimea has changed hands constantly over the last few hundred years, it seems quite plausible that that things will end here and the whole exercise just serves to increase Putin's stature back home.

They've narrowed it down a fair bit, but there's a still a huge area of ocean to search and time is ticking. They only have another 15 to 45 days (IIRC) until the black boxes stop transmitting their sonar signal. When the Air France plane crashed into the Atlantic the location of the black boxes was eventually (it took about a year) pinned down to a 3 mile by 3 mile area, but it took yet another year before they were found. So even in that tiny 3x3 mile area it can be very hard to locate something. The current search area must still be thousands of square miles, since it was 2.25 million sq miles before these new satellite results. It's even conceivable the black boxes will never be found.

Then either: A) get a USB battery pack and charge as needed. B) get an older-style phone with longer battery life.

What's the point in complaining that a product doesn't match your specific use-case. It's up to you to choose one that does.

Perhaps you're right, but there are a LOT of DMMs out there with a yellow case. It's not just Sparkfun who're copying Fluke's look.

I read up about this a while ago and I recall that the sort of voltage and current provided by a 9V batter would be sufficient for the technique. I just searched again and found this. They're using about 14V to 18V and 1.5mA. So it looks pretty safe to me.