This is great news. It's frustrating to look at the lineup of Android handsets and see all the different ways the various OEMs have taken a good platform and ruined it. It's even more frustrating when you find the magical Phone That Doesn't Suck and ask yourself if/when it's going to get OS updates. Android is a mess and Google needs to take back some control.

And I share their worry, because I don't believe Microsoft's store can be as good as Steam (especially wrt the sales), but nothing Microsoft is doing is inherently bad. It's competition, plain and simple. If Steam can't exist alongside the Windows Store then it's quite simply not good enough. And I'm saying that as a person who loves Steam (and thinks Gabe is overreacting like a god damn child and should just focus on making a good product).

I must have some weird Chinese knock-off version of Windows 8, it seems to run Steam exactly as well as Windows 7.

Have you actually tried using Windows 8? It's still very easy to navigate the new UI with a keyboard and mouse. They've adapted a lot of old hotkeys/shortcuts to Metro and added a few new ones. After about 15 minutes I felt nearly as productive as I normally am in Windows 7.

The wall is for things you want to share AND for things people want to share with you. That shouldn't be a complicated concept to grasp.

Actually, that doesn't make any sense at all. We're talking about sharing something with a specific person; why would I post it on my wall and then tag them in it? Why not just put it on THEIR wall because I want THEM to see it? The "Facebook way" is the better way, obviously. Google+ will accept that eventually, much like how a lot of their features were originally different from Facebook for no reason other than to be not Facebook.

Thanks for being explicitly clear about what you mean. People are continually comparing Windows 8 to Vista in completely insane ways, but this is one example I can agree with. It feels like Microsoft are rushing a lot of what they do these days. I mean, shit, I owned a Zune, I currently own a Windows Phone, and I love both. I think Metro is a great UI and has huge potential on tablets (I tried the beta on my desktop, and while it's surprisingly decent with a mouse/keyboard, I'm still not optimistic). But they really need to make sure it gets the appropriate level of polish before they put it out to market. I'll just sum it up this way: they can't expect to deal with the tablet or desktop market the same way they've dealt with the Windows Phone 7 to 8 transition and expect to have any level of success.

I'm starting to think I should just not have an account anywhere. That's hyperbole, of course, but there's a new hack every week and I don't have a good enough memory to use completely unique passwords for every account.

The idea of a specific drug being a "gateway" to others is incredibly misleading. Alcohol and weed are the obvious places to start because they're the easiest to obtain. You're going to get to harder drugs eventually if you're that type of person, but no one is just going to start at heroin.