Is HDMI getting feature parity with 1980s SCART cables? Back then it was pretty common to daisy-chain set-top boxes. Well, now we only need bidirectional audio-video, although I have a feeling that DRM will get in the way of that.

It's anonymous. Google would have to do nothing less than an INNER JOIN between two tables of their database in order to associate your name with the identifier. Therefore you can assume that your privacy is 100% safe.

Wine does have an implementation of cards.dll.

I for one hope that it never happens! To me Scala is a puzzler generator. I prefer complex, but readable code instead of shorter code whose complexity - and bugs, and unforeseen interactions - have been hidden away by the pantagruelic grammatical structure of a programming language.

Java generics, by the same author of Scala IIRC, were supposed to make our lives only simpler. They usually do. But then they also brought in type erasure; they introduced compiler warnings, their suppression mechanisms, and the concept of "unsafe" code into the language; we started to see confusing signatures such as Enum<E extends Enum<E>> ...

That's the only reason they're making all this hand-waving: have their customers believe that their data is safe with them - even when obviously it isn't the case - in order to reduce the damage to their revenue. Google's core business model lies in harvesting, analysing and storing massive amounts of user data. This depends entirely on Google's ability to have access to that data unencrypted. NSA and the likes will always share that ability with Google - or be a piece of paper away from acquiring it - so talking about encrypting the "pipes" while retaining the key to the data is pure gimmick.