Or what about if you let people themselves judge what is a good game and what is not. Besides, most of these games have been available on Windows for a long time. I owned all of them but Hammerfight and paid the full price for them. I honestly haven't really played those games that much. I did still throw a few dollars to this Humble Bundle because I think it's for a good cause. Does that make me a cheap bastard?

However, they most likely have to pay something to Steam to have such arrangement.

Canada should join Europe instead, we have Spotify and Voddler here.

For Europeans there's Voddler, which is basically Spotify but for movies and tv shows. Both are much better than their US counterparts, too.

Having heard this from the staff, PS3 and Xbox 360 are mostly trying to compete with each other. This includes both customers and exclusive game developers, like Rockstar and GTA series have been in the past with Playstation. That's also why I think both companies are shooting themself in the leg. While they compete and try to destroy each other, open source consoles like Fuzebox will get a major market share. You can code your games on them and play your favorite old games in an emulator, or modify to the devices to do whatever you want. All that while Sony actively works to close Linux and homebrew software from PS3. It's only a matter of time until Fuzebox and similar consoles will win.

No it's not. Yahoo will change to use Bing in 2012. It haven't been changed yet.

Yahoo doesn't use Bing yet. The announcement was made in 2009, but they will transition it in 2012. Long time to do it, I know.

Seriously, the amount of stupid unknowning comments on this (and most other Microsoft articles on slashdot) is mindblowing again. Just because Xbox was first sold at a loss to gain marketshare doesn't mean the same is true today. They also have many other profitable ventures, but I guess you can't just see that behind all the hate.

That is just stupid. The reason why Google can serve better results than Bing is because they get to know a lot of long-tail keyword data from their visitors that Bing just cannot get because of their lower market share and user count. That is why they also have extensive user tracking and usage information gathering services. It's something that you only get if you're a leader in search services, and you only get there if you can get that kind of data better than competitors, which again means Google will stay where it is no matter what competitors do. It's just completely absurd to say that Google is leading only because they have better infrastructure.

Just because you know Google's ads and AdSense doesn't mean you know the whole online advertising business.

But instead of just talking without actual facts, why not look at what GeekNet (Slashdot's parent company) offers. For example Slashdot seems to be offering Standard Display advertisement, which is based on CPM (ad views) that go up to over $100 per 1000 views. Clicks doesn't matter. Then there is Poll Advertising, which costs $50000 a month, and Powerswitch, exclusively designed for Slashdot and goes at $90 per 1000 views. But don't let the facts get in your way.

You're linking to global stats. not U.S. stats. Google isn't doing so great in countries like Russia or China either, and US is the most profitable market (and the GP is also referring to it in the post, see title)

What I found stupid about the whole thing was the sentence

Yeah yeah, slashdot has the FAQ point about it being US-centric site. But including the word "world"? That maybe true for US, but it varies by country. For example Yandex is the largest search engine in Russia and Baidu is in China, and they both lead Google by miles.

Because it's pain in the ass even for us geeks, and much more so for normal users. Build-in adblock with filters in every browser would also put most of the sites out of business, or they would start charging subscription fees to access their content. I rather take the possibility to install such myself if I want to rather than destroy the existing "free" models that currently make the internet possible the way it is.

Yes, because all malware comes from emails, and you've never ever searched or done anything new or something you don't really know about on the internet.

Eh, when people make an account on Facebook or Google+ they usually have a huge spike of likes then. All your favourite music, movies, games and so on.. After that it slow downs and people like things randomly when they come across new things they, well, like.

Even if Google does get some code running that detects and bans them, well, it doesn't take long for people to study what works and what works and act upon that information. People aren't that stupid that they would just continue doing shit that gets them banned, they will route around it. Besides, a few mistakes in bans of normal people for no good reason does A LOT more harm than getting rid of a few accounts used solely for liking websites.