And also don't forget:

No person [...] shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation

Which means - and has been tested in court - that not only are we within our rights to secure in our papers, etc. with encryption but We-The-People also cannot be legally compelled to give up the password to said encryption.

"Beyond the law," Director Comey? We are provably /within/ the law. It is your organization which is pushing the limits of legality, not the citizens it is nominally there to serve.

As important as the rendering engine may be, the major hold-up on making worlds "photorealistic" is that it takes a lot of work on the part of the artists and level designers to create those worlds. While the video harped on how current-generation engines have lots of repeating textures and models, voxel-based engines aren't going to magically solve that problem. Be they polygon- or voxel-based, the worlds will still have to be put together by artists. Even with voxels, the level designers will still reuse trees, boulders, cars and various other assets because it is too expensive (in time, if not money) to create unique items all the time, especially since the reward is so minimal. Game-design - often requiring three or four years of work with hundreds of artists and modelers - is already expensive enough; adding more polygons or voxels will just add to the time and cost.

The next major graphics revolution will not be from some new engine that produces images through voxels, polygons or ray-casting; it will be with the development of ever-more sophisticated procedural engines which take the workload off the artists, allowing them to create ever more varied and detailed worlds without requiring all the extra effort (and expense). Procedural engines are in their infancy, but in time they can be "trained" to create ever more sophisticated locales without requiring hundreds of man-years of work. Instead, those artists will instead be tasked to add unique flourishes to the generic algorithmically created worlds.

So I look at TFV and say, "well that's nice for specially built static images" (although honestly, I didn't find the rendered scenes all that convincing, especially when compared to some high-end polygon-based engines) but in the end it isn't going to make that much more of a difference since they are trying to solve the wrong problem facing the industry.

If robots do all the work and leave everybody but the 1% out of a job who is going to buy all those things the robots are making? And if nobody buys the goods, how do the wealthy stay wealthy? And if the only people who can buy anything can pay millions of dollars, won't that pretty much insure that inflation raises prices to the point where the 1%'s billions are practically worthless?

You can't have a cornocopia economy /and/ have economic stratification.They work against one another.

Mind you, the transitionary periods between the two are a real bitch.

Do Android phones automatically update to the latest version? iPhones do not, as far as I am aware, and require the user to manually initiate the download and installation of the newest iOS firmware; this - of course - requires the user to be logged in already, at which point the data is accessible anyway.

In other words, it sounds like this proposed vulnerability involves you being on the other side of the airlock hatchway already.

More importantly, you can also disable "simple passwords" in IOS and use a longer and more complex alpha-numeric password. These passcodes can be up to 37 characters long, utilizing any of 77 different characters (upper & lowercase, numbers and some punctuation).

If you are really worried about the security of your data, you should enable complex passcodes. The default 4-number PIN is really there more to stop curious friends from getting onto your device than preventing a determined hacker (or law-enforcement officer) from getting access.

On the flip side you can't even receive windows patches without a Microsoft account on windows 8.

While I can't speak for Windows 8.0, you do not need a Microsoft account for Windows 8.1. You will still be able to receive all patches without issue without ever creating a Live/Hotmail/whatever Microsoft account. Plus, you really should be on 8.1 anyway; it is a free update and as 8.0 is end-of-life as far as Microsoft is concerned, you won't be getting anymore patches for that version anyway.

True, you do require a Microsoft account for many other features of Windows 8x, such as the Store, but that is to be expected as they expect the apps to be tied to a particular account (even the free ones, which is annoying). The functionality of other apps will vary; for instance, the OneDrive app (ne Skydrive) will not work unless you log-on with a Microsoft account but others work just as if you were on Windows7.

However, WindowsUpdate works fine even if you never log-on with anything but your local account.

I think Microsoft's attempt to tie its Windows OS to its online services is a terrible idea and probably should run them afoul of another monopoly investigation, but at least this one area Microsoft didn't screw up.

Overall the video game industry is dying

The industry isn't dying; it's just facing many of the same problems that the movie industry faced in the late '60s through the early '80s.

During the so-called "New Hollywood" period, there was a shift as many commonly-loved genres (westerns, musicals, big epics) started to fall out of favor, with a resultant loss of profitability. The big studios started floundering, especially as the increasingly lost control of the theaters. The independent auteurs took up the slack, and now-famous names like Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg and Lucas made their debuts. Giant epics fell from grace and smaller (and cheaper) movies became more popular. New technologies - often created by the independents, who didn't have the cash to do things the old - and expensive - way, brought new options to moviemakers. Old genres were reinvented and new ones created, reinvigorating the industry, leading to the era of summer blockbusters. Meanwhile, the old studios had to open themselves up to buy-outs from outside investors, and take on new lessons about proper corporate governance.

It is easy to see parallels with the game industry of today. Customers no longer find the popular genres of yesterday quite as fulfilling as they did a few years back and the big developers seem to be having trouble offering new options. Fortunately, the "indie" game developer is reinvigorating the market, and these days there seems to be more excitement about the indie games than big-name titles like Destiny or Call of Duty XXIV. The publishers are also struggling as their traditional means of distribution is changing from retail sales to digital. The indies are also proving it is no longer necessary to spend $100 million on a game, utilizing new technologies like procedural generation to create worlds as grand as those made expensively by hand.

The game industry is not dying, it is just in transition. And like the Hollywood Renaissance of the '80s, I hope the game industry will rebound to bring us bigger and better experiences in the next decade.

Even if VR really was the awesome teaching tool that the CEO claims it to be, it still doesn't solve the real issue: teaching teachers to use them. And I'm not talking about the basic "dur, how I turn on?" technical issues but helping teachers understand how to use these new tools in their curriculum. What tasks is VR appropriate for (and for which tasks it isn't). When and how do you use VR to help students learn? Seeing as how films and TV are still of dubious use in the classroom, I suspect that by the time teachers would actually learn how to appropriately use VR in the classroom, it will be a long-forgotten fad everywhere else.

Mind, this is no complaint about the teachers or their abilities, who are usually hard-working, well-intentioned and struggling under often contradictory rules and goals. Rather, I take issue with the idea that you can just toss technology at the problem without first understanding how it can help in education (and do a better job than existing tools) and then magically expect educators to understand this new miracle tech. One of the great problems facing US education is that our teachers are not continually be taught and re-taught themselves. For most educators, once they graduate, that's it; they aren't required to update their skill sets throughout the rest of their careers (unlike, say, doctors or lawyers who have to attend continuing-education courses). If we expect our technology to assist the teachers in doing their jobs, we need to make sure the teachers themselves know how to best make use of it.

I'm just wondering how long before the anti-science crowd (or the news media, in order to drum-up readership) starts presenting this as some sort of dire threat, like they did with the CERN Large Hadron Collider. That had to be stopped because it might create black holes that would eat up the entire Earth.

How will this new development be presented? "It's focusing all the cosmic rays bouncing off the moon down to the Earth; it could boil us alive!"

Whatever they come up with, I hope they work quickly though; my terror levels are starting to drop. Any lower and I might start thinking again.

It's optional today. It'll be mandatory tomorrow.

Get the consumers used to the idea of being tracked and lead them in the direction you want to go with a carrot in the form of a tiny financial incentive (make up for the lost revenue by increasing insurance rates in general so these "savings" are swallowed up by higher average costs).

Then once you have enough people subscribed to the tracking, start making the tracking a part of any plan for /new/ users (possibly with an option to stop being tracked after a few years, with a substantial rate hike of course). After all, the insurance company has no idea if you are a good driver or not so it is only in their best interest for them to gather as much information on you as they can. After all, the company is taking a big risk by offering you insurance, you understand.

Later, force tracking on any existing users who don't already have it. Stop offering any discounts for its use; if the consumer wants insurance, they better prepare to have their every move tracked.

Meanwhile, make sure to use all this collected information for the company's maximum financial benefit. Sift it for every possible marketing use. Sell it to other companies. Deny coverage because it incriminates the user without checking to see if it is actually accurate. That sort of thing.

This is the way it always works, creeping slowly ahead to the detriment of the customer. The only way to stop this sort of thing is to squash it before it gets started.

Regardless of how quickly the money keeps rolling in, I'm sure that this defeat will allow Verizon to hike their rates to make up the "deficit".

That this sort of thing is allowed as "opt-out" is ridiculous anyway. Obviously this data has value to Verizon; they should be bargaining with its customers for its use. "Want to save $5.00 per year on your cell-phone bill? Click here to let us market your personal information." That they can essentially just take it from people without recompense unless they happen to object (via an unlikely to be read clause in some fine print at the bottom of a bill) seems a lot like a robber being allowed to take a person's TV unless he actually complains while the theft is taking place. "Um, excuse me, I was watching that..."

If the FCC really wants to appear to be standing up to the telecom industry, they ought to just tell them to make this sort of thing opt-in.

This stuff looks interesting. I can't wait until they fold it into Palemoon.

Because coolness of the technology aside, everything else about Firefox is increasingly pissing me off.

While they have been true to their word about no DRM, I've always wondered if GOG games (and now movies) have some sort of digital watermark embedded in them so they can track any piracy of their sales back to the source. While this wouldn't be a foolproof method, it probably would catch the more common sort of file-sharing. It doesn't really seem to have any drawbacks for the customer either. If such a watermark does exist, it might make the major studios more willing to consider GOG as a distribution partner.

Microsoft's rush to introduce a new OS every other year or so is a terrible strategy. While I understand the desire to bury the Windows 8 name, that is the only advantage and I'm not sure it is enough to counterbalance the disadvantages.

Microsoft seems to think they need to release a new OS to stay competitive. The thing is, people (with the exception of techies) do not BUY operating systems. They take what is on their computer, be it Windows98 or Windows8. Generally, people do not care about operating systems. Their care that their applications will run, and that their workflow will not be disrupted by a new GUI. Neither of these can be assured if Microsoft keeps pumping out new versions of their OS every few years.

Microsoft has a mistaken belief that they need to reinvent themselves every few years, that it is the chrome that sells their product. They are wrong. It is the 20+ years of backwards compatibility that maintains their dominance on the desktop. Their current strategy is directly threatening their core strength. It may not bring them yearly growth, but when you already have 90% control of the desktop, there really isn't that much to grow into anymore.

Of course, the market /is/ changing. Desktops are no longer the sole computing devices in use by the general public; tablets and smartphones are directly threatening that hegemony. Frequent changes to the core software of the desktop, however, is not going to revitalize the desktop market, however; it will only fragment and weaken it. If sales are declining, it is not because the OS is at fault but because people are buying fewer new computers overall. Microsoft should branch out into new markets with WinRT and WinPhone, sure, but do not do so by cannibalizing their main market.

Microsoft needs to focus on its core strength and not rush new versions to market in vain hopes of recapturing the glory days of the early 2000s. Incremental upgrades, not complete reinventions are the name of the game. Neither end-users nor businesses are clamoring for a Windows 9. Upgrade Windows8 to a usable state (e.g., kill Metro) and then keep it up to date with further upgrades throughout its lifetime. If they keep selling that for ten years they will do fine. Only release a new version of the OS when it is actually necessitated by the technology, not by marketing.

Microsoft, give us a Windows8SE, then live off the OEM sales for five or ten years. Take the time to create a new, stable and well-tested version of Windows instead of rushing into the next Vista or Metro. The users will appreciate having a platform that is not subject to upheaval every other year.

More important than whether a huge corporate site like Google or Netflix can get onto the fast lane(who can afford it as a cost of doing business) is whether smaller users and vendors have that opportunity. If access to the fast lane is only possible by paying large sums of money, then it effectively locks out "the little man" who cannot afford those rates. This effectively changes the Internet from a platform where anybody can put up a site dedicated to his hobby and - if it proves popular - hit it big (sort of like Google started out) to something curated by large corporations, like the rest of the media world. The Internet's great strength is that it gives everybody a voice - and a chance at the brass ring, if that's what they want - and not just those allowed to speak by the media conglomerates.

Without Net Neutrality, the internet would look like CableTV does today: a bunch of channels (websites) run by large corporations, all trending to a common denominatior, with a narrow channel dedicated to "public access" that nobody visits.