Amazon reviews of games are completely useless. Almost all reviews for popular games are from people who never played the game and are instead riding the hate circlejerk. I bet if you looked at the reviews for SimCity, less than 5% of them would be verified Amazon purchases.

I don't know if many people on Slashdot have noticed, but this is *not* an untimely change. Why? The price of many new CD releases is now lower than the price of an MP3 album. When Taylor Swift's "Red" album came out, the CD cost $9. The MP3 album cost $15. This is not an isolated incident.

A game that costs $100,000 to make, but sells at $2/game has to sell over 50,000 copies to make a profit. A game that costs $2,500,000 but sells at $50 has to sell the same. Your first point is only valid if you're willing to pay a higher percentage of the cost.

Dear Indie Game Devs:

• Your game isn't intrinsically better than others because it looks like a SNES game.
• Stop making games that think that difficulty for difficulty sake is the best mechanic a game can have.
• Stop making clones of games from the early 1990s.
• Stop refusing to sell your game on marketplaces like Steam, Origin, and the Windows Store. You are not hurting "the Man"; you are hurting gamers and yourself.

PC Gamers:

• Buy games that you like.
• If a game is worth playing, it's worth paying for. No excuses.
• The *only* point made when you pirate a game is that the PC has a pirating problem. You are not hurting "the Man"; you are hurting gamers and yourself.

4G, if you can get it, isn't much worse than satellite. I currently have Exede. $75/month for 15 GB of data usage, 12 Mbps. Unlimited data 12-5 AM. However, satellite has a built-in latency of 700ms. Don't expect to be playing any games that require low lag. Also, that latency is definitely felt while surfing.

You're assuming that the fix for stupidity is evolution. Me, I vote for cybernetics.

Or use Google Chrome. It has an Google-built PDF reader and Google-managed Flash updates. You never have to touch an Adobe installer ever again.

But if you're anti-EULA, Foxit is no help. Point of comparison: The Foxit EULA is 3,683 words long. The Adobe section in Google Chrome's EULA (which covers Flash) is 2,476. Google Chrome's ToS in the EULA is 3,983 words.

I've found Gmail's "not spam" reporting flag to work incredibly well. Never have I had the same email source marked as spam twice after I've told it that it wasn't. That alone makes me only use Gmail as my email provider. Why? Because *all* free email has built-in spam detection, most of whom have horrible learning algorithms. As far as I can tell, most ISPs that provide website access to email pre-check email for spam, too, even if you've never used the website and rely solely on SMTP. And there's no way to even check if there are filtered outs messages if you're using a program like Outlook, because they sit in a spam folder on the website version of your email, never to be sent via SMTP.

The first self-driving cars that hit the market will likely be so decked out in analytics software and video cameras, that it would take the police about 2 minutes to figure out who was at fault in a crash.

What I find particularly worrying is that, at least initially, many of the ethical choices programmed into these machines will have been written by people who tend to be heavy on the Aspergers side of empathy (as many technically inclined people are). Should we really be leaving decisions like this to people who literally can't understand how most of humanity behaves?

Take a good look at that first patent. Expect Apple to sue nearly every tablet maker with that one.

Owning land where I live puts you in the jury pool.

I highly suggest you read the article since the summary is highly edited to make Google look bad. Example: Google didn't send a private investigator. It sent a single Google employee who was jerked around by the bartender and his friend because they wanted to cling to their powertrip. The only lawyer was just guy the bartender knew. Google even offered to give the bartender guy a free phone if he promised to be quiet about the leak until the phone was announced at the Android event.

Bad Luck Google: Sends a guy to pick up a lost phone. Gets screwed around by the people who found it. Still offers a free phone to the guy. Gets called evil by the Internet.

While looking look up this effect, I found a neat article about a laser elevator on xkcd: http://blog.xkcd.com/2008/02/15/the-laser-elevator/

I'm shocked, shocked, I tell you! They could do that despite Chromebooks using the exact same UEFI secure boot that Windows 8 uses? Are they wizards? Or was all the Windows 8 stuff just FUD?

Feel free. Just don't ever expect to have another pre-Abrams style Star Trek movie ever again. I don't think Paramount will ever forget that the JJ Abrams "Star Trek" is the most popular, highest grossing movie in the series. (Grossing more than First Contact, Insurrection, and Nemesis combined. $336m vs $385m)