The content cartels are free make cold judgements of whether to provide services at all in some areas, even if they are shooting themselves in their feet. The blocks on IP addresses work surprisingly well (few false positive blockings), and are a technological manifestation of the terms of use or contract. People using VPNs are breaching those rules (and maybe copyright, but it's not clear with streaming). It seems contradictory that many people defend using VPNs yet are against torrenting.

I agree that hybrid storage is great, but it can "easily" be done in software (there's a couple of projects for Linux, like bcache, as well as ZFS, and there's an Intel driver in Windows). Then you can pick the size of the SSD and HDD at will, and optionally make a RAIDs of the HDDs and SSDs to mitigate against the increased failure probability.

When multiple drives aren't an option, in laptops, the problem with hybrids is that you lose out on the non-performance advantages of SSD: low power usage and durability. The controllers could improve on this, by shutting down the hard drive and doing more writeback caching, but current hybrids lose on these points. (my laptop has a 256GB SSD, which I find about a factor 2 too small. I can't sync my /home there so everything on it becomes temporary and a syncing chore. Still I wouldn't change it for a bigger hybrid of the current generation, even if there was space for one, due to the decreased mobility).

How is this an advantage?

s/robberies/burglaries/

Assume for a moment that it's harmful if the data, including IP addresses, timestamps, unique IDs, etc, gets shared with the world. The data was previously inaccessible due to technology, now it's only limited by the policies of the holding company. Some people don't trust those policies (or the comany's security) as much as they did the old model.

So is it harmful? The timestamp / IP combos place you at a given place (most likely home) for a period of time. There are dozens of other companies with the same data, so unless you're being super cautious, it's not worthwhile to worry about Steam especially. If such data were searchable online though, one could have some problems with robberies and with lying about ones whereabouts. The fact that they count "playing a game", not just being on steam, doesn't help with accuracy -- some people just leave their game open while doing other things. The chat histories are similar to what any other chat company does.

Steam *could* do some nefarious things with the gaming-specific data. For example, they could sell it to employers and others who may be interested. The information isn't enough to ruin a life though, and if they use it for anything more evil than advertising they would lose all consumer trust

By the way, I assumed they were using trolling in the new, incorrect sense of being a mean asshole (in the chat, etc). Not really clear from the article what they actually mean by trolling

Works both ways. In games like LoL players really need each other. It's 5v5 PvP, frequently with random people. That can mean a lot of more and less justified grief between the teammates. However, if it wasn't as easy for a player to screw it up for the team, maybe it wouldn't be as fun...

Good idea, but I hope they keep all existing systems in place, and make it optional. Graphics drivers are massively complex, and are probably a significant source of oops. If displaying a QR code means that the kernel needs to interact more with the drivers, and (oh god i hope not) change the resolution to display a QR code, then I expect more fail. People can take photos of the crash messages in 80x25 character consoles anyway, so let's not destroy that.

Using different users is a nice solution, which I use to run the browser. You can also start the applications using kdesu or gnome-sudo; then you don't need to add a pam configuration. Just a heads up to the parent, I can't find a damn way to get sound from the applications after adding pulseaudio. (Every time I need to watch a video with sound I have to copy the URL into a browser running as my own user. I've got the browser user to use a dummy sink, so it just doesn't play sound, doesn't crash or anything, and it's not actually that bad.. ) I would possibly use SELinux if it would work with my ZFS

Can't add much, but the systems are called AppArmor and SELinux. Just wanted to note that this may indeed be a great opportunity for the security focused. You have to choose a distro that supports the system you like best. There are GUIs for configuring them, but they aren't very mature I think.

CDs are the best way to get the best sound quality for a reasonable price. They are useless physical objects so i only keep the rips. Good that it's legal now ! (I'm no longer in the UK, but wasn't caught ;)

The gains from not compressing are probably negated by the disk I/O latency caused by not being able to cache the gigabytes of audio content or the memory usage due to keeping it in RAM.

[I'm all for lossles audio, but they could at least have done FLAC and saved half the space]

Sorry to be pedantic, but why would you give only the number of vertical lines (1280)? Since 2276x1280 is such an unusual resolution (I can only assume 16:9 when using the ???p notation), it would be clearer to give the number of pixels in both directions. Another piece of info missing is the DPI, without which one can't relate "pt" to pixels. [at least we know it's a progressive scan monitor, thank god you don't have to code on an interlaced display]

Oh yeah? Then I'm going to start my own country, with blackjack and hookers, and nobody can do anything about it. In fact, forget about the country.

This could actually work, just replace "decryption" with "IR". Make the bus completely dark in the visible spectrum and make everyone wear IR goggles. There is the problem of photo flashes, in that case the bus could have light detectors, and when a flash is detected, saturate the bus with strong IR like suggested above, while decreasing the sensitivity of the googles. Another alternative is to use materials which have specular reflections in the visible range around the bus, so the flash saturates the camera itself. What do I get for solving it? ("no goggles" wasn't part of the requirements;)