If all cars were computerdriven none would ever break the speed-limit. This would take away the incentive to do speed checking at all.

The laws of physics won't change, the average response-time of a car will. A human driver needs about 100ms to respond. But people are not always attentive so the traffic system is designed with 300-500ms response times in mind. Suppose that a computer-driver can guarantee to respond within 1ms. It could go through the curve much closer to the optimum than any human can achieve. Obviously there will always be limits, but computers can get us much closer to them.

But where would they move to? Irelad is considered a tax-paradise. The only reason for having headquarters over there is the low tax-rate. If they move they will have to increase prices even further.

There is a significant number of games on Steam that have an official Linux version. Obviously that's only a fraction of the total, but it's a lot more than just the Source-games. Having all these games available through a single interface and through a single payment-processor might be enough to reach a critical mass.

Whatever way you look at it, the days of Wintel as the only platform that matters are over. It will be the most important platform for years to come, but it will end at some point. Any company that is tightly coupled to Windows should at least consider a future without it. Having a Linux-port may be a huge advantage in the future. As any company can hire a linux-hacker, the number of OS-developers working on Linux far outweighs the other platforms combined (especially if you count Android as Linux). Even if the OS of the future is not Linux-as-we-know-it, chances are that it will be heavily influenced by the current crop of Linux-developers.

When Steam was ported to the Mac the (absolute) number of mac-users was probably lower than the current Linux-userbase. Besides, Linux is what the more, ehm, fanatical users are using. Mac OS/ iOS users on the other hand tend to be more casual about gaming. Having the extreme gamers on you side could be a great advantage.

Personally I think Valve cannot afford not to do this, even if it turns out te be failure. Desura has been offering their product on Linux for month. If Valve doesn't step up they will loose the Linux market to Desura before the fight even started. If Desura becomes a hit on Linux it might challenge Steam on other platforms.
The entire demonstration seems to be too good to be true. I think it's FUD to keep Linux-users away from Desura. If they can keep up this sherade for a few month Desura will go out of bussiness.

Some further remarks. We know that Valve employs a number of Linux programmers for the server-part of the games. It has also been suggested that the Steam-backend runs on Linux. We also know that Left4dead has contained Linux-bits right from the start. It might be the case that one of the backend-programmers continued the Linux port as a hobby, just like Doom was ported to Linux by a single guy with some free time.

I generally like Valve and I really hope that they are serious, but a few years of waiting has made me a bit sceptical.

While I agree with your opinion it's not going to change anything. New technologies are always hard at first. Most routers with IPv6 are high-end routers targeted at people that read Slashdot, not the average home-user. Yes, it's a mess, but nothing that people buying such routers are not able to deal with. The few people that actually use IPv6 at home tend to make a very conscious decision on what router to buy.
By the time that ISPs start rolling out IPv6 to consumers they will select an appropriate router for their customers.

You do realize that almost every NAT-box also runs a firewall?
Consumers don't see it because it is linked to the NAT interface. Whenever they 'forward' a port, the firewall is also adjusted to let this port through. Heck, in Linux (which all of those routers seem to use) NAT is special case of firewalling, both are managed with iptables. Granted, consumers have a lot of trouble with port-forwarding, but (only) using a firewall will not make this any more difficult and might even simplify things a bit.

The elephant in the room is that if you use a firewall you'll loose end-to-end-connectivity, which was supposed to be one of the big advantages of IPv6.

It's called i2p: http://www.i2p2.de/

There are always desperate people around. Hunger is a very strong motivational tool. It sucks that people screwed up, but being an ass about it is not going to change that retroactively.

I disagree. Convincing TSA screeners is pointless. They are just low-payed employees with no influence whatsover. Protesting is about getting attention for your cause from the masses. As this story is on Slashdot I think he succeeded and that his protest was very effective.

Allready happening. A few weeks ago the Dutch media were portraying TOR as the new Sodom & Gomorra of the Internet. Questions have been asked in parliament about blocking TOR. Ofcourse the media only focus on the downsides of having a truly anonymous network and not on the reasons of building such a network in the first place.