I tend to agree with you, but in this economy I doubt they are going to have any trouble finding workers

Is it really so difficult to get the atoms up to 88 miles per hour?

Personally I am not a huge fan of gargantuan multinational corporations, so if Google loses billions over this it wouldn't really bother me. But judging from the thoughts of people I know who actually work at Google (as opposed to someone whose handle is FuckingNickName), it's unlikely that the engineer who wrote the code was intentionally violating any laws. Even if he meant to collect the data, he probably didn't realize the implications of doing so.

I think this is a rather silly perspective. I personally provide a chatroom and forum services for players of a game I wrote and have similar services for other software I've written. Sometimes other users answer questions, occasionally I do, and sometimes they go unanswered. There is no "reasonable expectation" that I personally will read anything: if that's what you want, you should find a commercial product and purchase support at a nominal hourly or per-incident fee.

Time spent reading forums is time not spent developing a product. Jeff makes a good argument in TFA that, in many cases, this is a good tradeoff.

Remember that even if the real price of new games rise, that doesn't mean a gamer is in a worse situation than he would have been in the past. Quite the opposite in fact.

Today you can play thousands of older titles for very low prices. There are probably 10 times as many freeware games available today as there were 30 years ago. You can get on youtube and watch "Let's Play's" of virtually every popular NES and SNES title for free. Many of these games are only surpassed by current titles in the graphics department.

In other words, it's a great time to be a gamer even if you don't buy a single "new" game.

From TFA:

You'd think this is a joke, but no. Game companies often spend more on advertising than product development.

And this is why I hate commercial games.

I don't play games very often anymore, but I've found the easiest way to get an honest opinion of a game is to do the following:

• Wait for a few months after the game is released (initial or pre-release reviews are always too positive)
• Go to a game review aggregator site (metacritic, gamerankings, etc)
• Start reading from the lowest-scoring review, up

That works well.

Reviewers who scored a game low were not compensated by the publisher, almost definitely had to buy the game themselves, and usually point out legitimate flaws instead of glossing over them. It's a great way to innoculate yourself against hype.

Is this your personal theory or is this elaborated on somewhere? I'm curious to read the source material, it sounds interesting.

There, fixed that for you. Really, why does the average slashdotter think they know better than the people who do this for a living?

Indeed. The real problem with social data today is how asymmetric the availability is... If everyone's lives were 100% public all the time, it would just become the new norm and we would all adapt and deal with it.

But that's not the way it is at all: some people don't show up on the web, some people who don't know what they're doing end up with all sorts of permanent self-incriminating data, and those of us who know the score work hard to ensure we look good through every available channel.

It's this asymmetry that creates unfairness. If I know your dirty secrets but you don't know mine, I have more power than you do.

It's not so much the fact that all the data is stored that matters in this context (whether companies should be allowed to store the stuff without your permission is a topic for another day), it's that some people get it and manage their reputation and many people don't and are exploited. But life isn't fair, and I don't suppose that will never change.