If it's government-protected currency, it's government-regulated currency. Bitcoin owners have been crowing for a while that Bitcoin's raison d'etre was to be independent of governments, and I'd say that I'm pretty comfortable with the JP government going "you don't want to play in the financial industry sandbox? You don't get to come in when your sandbox is wet."

We're an iPhone-free house, and while my wife has my old iPad, neither of uses it.

We've had a Roku here, but we ended up standardizing on the ATV as our preferred streaming platform. Its ease of use and interface, for us, were superior to the Roku. We also consume a bunch of iTunes rental movies, which obviously aren't available via Roku. While the Roku lets you rent movies from other sources, those other sources (e.g. Amazon) didn't have the selection we wanted.

This significantly changes the situation, I think, and makes it much more palatable -- you either opt in to the protections of VAC (and its attendant privacy breaches) or you opt out, but you can still play. I can live with that.

(I feel like I'm violating some sort of implicit slashdot rule by not flaming you for disagreeing with me; apologies).

-roy

This isn't quite the same as that old "well, just don't use it" canard.

Valve was engaging in a set of behaviors which you considered acceptable, and so "purchased" (more on why "purchased" is in quotes in a second) some games from them.

They've changed their behavior. Let's say you don't want to do business with them anymore. You could, of course, stop using Steam ... and lose access to all your games, which you probably thought you "purchased" in some sort of "I can use it for the rest of my life" sense, but actually just got a license to use for as long as they feel like it. This is different from a "service" where the expectation is that the benefit you're getting from them is recurring on some sort of cycle.

Someone will, doubtlessly, point out that you can put the Steam client into offline mode. To which I'll say that you can't do it indefinitely. To which they'll say "but Valve says you should be able to do that," to which I'll point to http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/11... which basically says "Valve says they want to make offline mode work 'forever', but they're not there yet."

It doesn't really matter, IMHO, that the scope of what they did here was relatively minor. The issue is that Valve, much like Sony, feels like they can trawl through your computer in areas that have nothing to do with playing the game. Today it was minor because it makes sense to start small; but if they feel comfortable trawling your DNS history -- and Newell clearly says that he has no problem with this practice -- what else do they feel comfortable doing?

That probably came across somewhat cranky, but is entirely accurate.

I'm an engineering manager. Until a year ago, I was an engineer. I'm a decent engineer, though prone to quick-and-dirty hacks sometimes to solve problems rather than good long-term design. I got promoted to managing an infrastructure software engineering group (after the engineers in that group gave me the thumbs up) and in my first one-on-one meeting with each of my engineers I asked them "so what would you like me to be doing around here?"

And you know ... yes. It turns out that if meetings need to be attended, and we have a choice between a world-class engineer attending them and a manager attending them and then passing back whatever relevant information engineers want to know, my engineers seem to prefer that I attend those meetings (sometimes. Sometimes they just call their own meetings if they think they need to).

Generally, I consider my job to be "the stuff we need to do the engineers don't want to do" (e.g. recruiting). And I get paid less than about half my engineers (and I think my salary's a little below median for my group). Which is fair -- their impact on the organization is higher than mine.

Holy cow, I got FP, and didn't even say something like "frist p0st!".

Doing it wrong, as usual ...

I'm ... really sure that Darwin did not listen to David Sedaris' audiobooks while categorizing species. Working out why this is so is left up to the student as an exercise.

http://www.nature.com/scitable...

Turns out that telling women that STEM is just one of those things that men are better at tends to dissuade women from getting into STEM.

So the next time you're thinking of casually throwing around the whole "Oh, men are just better/more interested in this" argument ...

Remember you're part of the problem.

Just as an FYI because you may appreciate knowing, it's actually "hear hear." See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

So ... you care a lot?

Because otherwise you probably couldn't care less.

Some very smart people are known for not being very good at standardized tests.

And a whole lot of dumb people.

At that kind of distance, is it really even worth mentioning? If I'm 100 nanometers away from something, I don't say "I'm 100nm away from X," I say "I'm right next to X." Why don't they just disembark now?

I'm not Norwegian, but ...

My income is relevant to society and my interaction with the state for a very specific and narrow purpose -- taxation. So obviously, for taxation purposes, the state should know how much I make. That does not mean, however, that every person in the state should know what I make; I have a general bias toward personal privacy (and state transparency), and I question why, say, my neighbors should know how much I make. I certainly have no interest in knowing how much they make.

As for criminals: Generally speaking, people who make more money have more money, and have more expensive stuff. So if you're going to target a house for burglary, and you have two houses with approximately the same countermeasures, would you not target the house with the higher income? You could argue that if I have a higher income I should have more countermeasures, but this is probably one of those cases where security by obscurity (not flashing money) is at least one of the useful security measures you could use -- and advertising your salary sort of makes that irrelevant.

Except that Netflix stays the hell away from stack ranking because it's mind-bogglingly stupid.

If we believe we (yes, "we." I work at Netflix) try to hire only top performers, it would actually make perfect sense that your whole team is doing great. There's no reason to artificially say that someone is doing poorly.

(Netflix reviews, BTW, are non-anonymous; anyone can review you; there's no requirement that anyone review anyone; and there's no scoring, just one text box for feedback. They're also separated by about four months from salary decisions because reviews are not meant to be related to salary)

FWIW, that's specific to the particular client you're using. It doesn't happen for me on AppleTV, for example.