You know, I actually have no problem with these two
* Bean with bacon megarocket paint-job DLC
* Officially licensed NFL team helmets, 1.99 each

If people want to spend money on cosmetic stuff without affecting gameplay, go right ahead. I quite enjoy Dota2/TF/etc. People who care about such things can spend a bunch of money playing dress-up (or make money selling items acquired from drops). Those that do not can play generally unaffected by those that do (I say generally because I have at times had a "WTF is that character" moment early in a game of DOTA when somebody has a character with odd looking accessories.

Well, there's that one desktop for GIMP which previously had only floating windows with no MDI-parent-container interface.

the ability to not run any metro (or whatever it's called) apps whatsoever.

Here here. Performance-wise, I'm fairly happy with Win8. Installing a start-menu replacement helped kill off the fugly tiles. My biggest headache recently was that some comflict between AMD APU+Win8+AVG made the system unbootable (spinning logo on startup forever). It worked fine with another antivirus though, and has been stable since.

Now usability. Getting rid of the tiles is great, but every time I have to hit Windows Update it drops me into that f***ing Metro fullscreen POS. No more tray icon or a window I can shuffle off to another monitor.

Bring back the built-in start menu, but more importantly kill Metro! Possibly, make it optional. It makes 0 sense for a desktop and actually makes the OS less usable.

One of the fun things with a Linux install, it's fairly portable across hardware so long as you're using a generic enough kernel. If you want to install the exact same thing on 5-6 machines you can just do one, get it where you want it, and then clone the drive (or copy the files and reinstall GRUB). Heck, you could have it all on a thumb drive and move between machine with that.

The only place I've really run into issues is sometimes when switching between systems that use an nVidia VS ATI binary driver.

Why would you? You *could* compare to Windows 7/8 *IF* they supported that old hardware, but chances are you'd run into an issue finding drivers for the sound or possibly LAN devices.
So what's the OS that gives you much of the latest goodies *AND* works well on the old hardware? If it's Win7/8 then feel free to install that, but if it's a modern version of Linux you'd be an idiot to install an old version.

It's for all those foul-mouthed homeless people that curse at you when you walk by...

Why would they need it in Skype? They've probably long since identified who is who by correlating the account details, so no need for facial recognition.

I'm voting for a moon-base! I wonder what they'd get for funding if they opened a Kickstarter :-)

Big Corps make campaign contributions. Long-standing Big Corps also have embedded connections to people who can help push decisions in their favor. It doesn't matter if it's a D or an R.

I'm really of two opinions on this. In terms of "hey, an album appeared that I didn't wanted", meh just get rid of it. In terms of "hey, a company whom I am a customer of basically dropped a package on my device for free", well that's not as cool.

So in terms of the current negative publicity, I'd hope that the current backlash makes them and others think twice about doing so in the future. It's like companies that - after I buy a product from them using paypal - have decided to bomb my paypal email address with ads for other shit I don't really want. It's a new form of SPAM, and certainly not something we need. What if it wasn't a big-name artist?
How would people feel if Apple decided that maybe you want "Best of American Gospel Music"? How about if there wasn't a huge backlash, so they signed a deal with a few dozen other bands and decided "hey, let's drop a bunch more stuff in people's accounts, it's *free* so that's OK right?"

Companies like Netflix make "suggestions" based on your history. If Apple wants people to hit a "Suggested for You" section and a "Free/Promotional Music" section where people can browse, that's cool. Jamming it into somebody's library for a marketing promotion is spammy and breaks the lines between "your service" and "my account".

If you installed Google Books when it first came out, then you would have automatically have "bought" (for free) copies of various classic literature items that automatically dropped into your library. The main difference is that these were presumably out-of-copyright books and not being pushed as a marketing stunt, but the end result was rather similar. I wasn't overly offended by it but it seems a result of similar thinking on the behalf of the "store" manager ("oh, we'll just mark these as purchased and free so anyone can get them" without thinking about whether people *wanted* them).

Sounds like the creepers that get nailed in "to catch a predator."
The thing is, there *are* aggressive 13-yr-olds out there. Often that aggression stems from an already messed-up upbringing, but you've suddenly jumped from "do we want to nail people for having pictures" to "do we want to nail people who knowing meet with young minors for illicit relationships".

I don't have any problem with cops posing as 13-yr-olds, and being a social misfit certainly isn't a reason for engaging in such contact.
I *DON'T* see many issues with an older individual befriending a younger person on a truly platonic level. In many ways, lack of adult guidance is probably one of the reason we're seeing many messed-up youth. But when you're meeting people with expectations beyond that (regardless of whether said person is real or fake), then it's bad news.

I remember when I first added "Google Books" to an Android device, it added a bunch of free "classics" (Alice in Wonderland, Huck Finn, etc) to my purchased library.

I raise you Nickelback and give you Brian Adams or Celine Dion (apologies on behalf of Canada for those, BTW).

Imagine the embarrassment if you put your iDevice on speakers and it starts pumping out Celine Dion....

If they're using it for internal use, then no. GPL comes into play with distribution.