Look, police informants are not whistle blowers. You may think they deserve to be protected, but the term whistle blower has a specific meaning that does not equate to police informant.

There's no point in even comparing a smartphone to an Xbox. Conflating smartphones (still primarily used as phones, therefore always connected to network) with tablets (often WiFi only and connected only when an available network is within range) actually hurts your argument. (Xboxes are stationary so they don't have the same connectivity problems of Wifi tablets.)

No one I know uses Xbox Live, and of the 4 360 owners I know (myself and 3 others) I'm the only one who has it connected to the Internet. Two of the others are typical gamers who like shooting things, the other is a lady who bought it so she could use Kinect for... whatever it is one uses Kinect for. I think it's yoga or dancing or something... but I don't really know.

Now, the main reason those others never connected is because they don't have WiFi for their Xboxes and they don't have a hub near it due to the layout of their homes. Which brings us to our next difficulty and a fatal flaw in the current Microsoft strategy.

Microsoft, like many before them, has contempt for video games. They want a system that's an "everything box" and "used by the whole family." "Women are the new core, " is not just a pickup line for Microsoft executives, it signals a major change in how they are positioning the Xbox in the home.

Currently, my Xbox is hooked up in my office to a computer monitor with HDMI inputs. Why isn't it hooked to the big screen TV in the living room, one might ask? Because if it were, my wife would literally have killed me by now. Then she'd have all that blood to clean up off the carpet, not to mention disposing of the body. I love my wife, so I don't want to put her through that.

So, our set up now assures her that she will never have to miss a single episode of Law & Order: SVU, and I will never have to watch a single episode of Law & Order: SVU. Marital Bliss!

But it means I don't need to use the TV functions of the Xbox. If I want to watch Netflix, or Amazon, or HBOGo, I just switch the monitor over to my computer, although when I'm watching TV I prefer to do it with my wife (unless it's SVU or something about those non-Star Trek Cardassians.)

Now, if I do what Microsoft wants, and hook the Xbox One (which I'm not planning to ever get, but I said that about 360, so you never know) up in the living room, I will no longer be able to use it to play video games.

In which case, aren't I better off with a Web connected Blu Ray player, or a Roku Player?

Sounds like someone doesn't like their Telescreen....

1. Pick a Tablet (I suggest notApple unless you need Apple for work... well, or if you are rich and don't mind being a wastrel.)

2. Make sure the tablet has the following things:
Mini-HDMI Out (For when you have access to a decent sized monitor.)
Ability to connect Bluetooth Keyboard and Mouse
BSSH
Ghost commander
Remote Desktop
Wifi
Some kind of case that doubles as a stand
bigger bag to carry tablet and accessories

3. Suggest buying 16gb and rigging up personal server for external storage.

4. Buy the tablet

5. set up tablet screen with stand, connect bluetooth keyboard and mouse, BSSH to linux box. (Or remote desktop, depending).

6. Use use Lynx, IRC, Pine.

You are now the coolest kid on your block.

People don't buy consoles for other applications, they buy them for games. To give you an idea of the problem with PCs (and understand, I'm perfectly ok with tossing all the consoles into the Crack of Doom and just having non-gimped PC hardware, in fact that sounds like a perfect world) I'll just talk about my joystick experience.

I have a lot of extra Wii classic controllers. I keep getting them as gifts, I've got like half a dozen of them. Seriously.

So, the crummy, used, knock-off XBox 360 controller clone I was using with my console-style PC games went to controller Hell, so I thought, "I'll buy an adaptor for my extra Wii controllers, and use them." and I did buy the adaptor.... and what did my console style Pc games say?

"Nah-ah! We only work with Monopoly brand controllers! Take your non-Microsoft controllers elsewhere, peasant!"

Now, I hunted around and found some hackware that said, "Use our clunky hack-ware into tricking your Pc into thinking that your non Xbox 360 controller is an xbox 360 controller."

Now, obviously, it's stupid to complain about this, because if I had an Xbox console, I wouldn't be given the option to use a Wii controller on it.

But I wasn't using a console, I was using a PC. It wasn't just adapted Wii controllers either, I checked, it was anything that you couldn't also plug into an Xbox and expect to work.

The main problem B&N has is the lack of truly open tablets. When I want to read one of my Nook books, I read it on my Kindle using the Nook app (or on my old E-ink Nook if it's a novel and not a technical manual).

So, given that, why were they in the tablet business? Because if they relied on other tablets to carry their application, they risked being muscled completely out of the market.Now the Nook app was trivial to install on my Kindle, but I expect that Amazon could break it in their gimped implementation/fork of Android if they wanted.

(Incidentally, before anyone thinks, "well you are the sucker who bought a gimped Android Kindle," I haven't bought either a Nook or a Kindle, they were both gifts. I did buy a Blackberry Playbook, so who be smart now? Yaaarr....)

i'm trying to figure out who "walled garden" is good for other than the first movers who get a demi-monopoly and the top also ran who gets to live on the edge of the cliff unless they take the throne. (See: The History of Video Games NES to Present.)

To me it's idiotic that Microsoft, who built their business on "we don't care who makes software as long as it's for our platform, though someday we may steal your idea and give it away for free with the OS," trying to be the 4th place Also-ran walled garden. but I'm just a simple country programmer... I still think there's money to be made by someone saying "screw the walled garden, we'll make it up in marketshare."

And this, too, can be laid at George Lucas's doorstep....

In Bioshock Infinite, Fink allowed potential to employees to bid on jobs. "Who can do it in 30 minutes?" I have 30 minutes. How about 15, who'll bid 15."

Utopia.

Although some might think it's insulting to a professional to have to bid for a job and pay for the bid with free work, I feel that this innovative thinking tells you what a wonderful place Facebook would be to work.

I only want such a mask if I also have the ability to summon hordes of flesh eating rats.

The owls are not what they seem.

"As manufacturing goes the way of agriculture, the job market must shift into new types of work lest mass technological unemployment and civil unrest overtake these beneficial gains."

Yeah, the job market can't do that. That's the problem right there. People who were doing skilled or unskilled labor and were replaced by machines aren't suddenly going to be able to become successful in a "creative class" job. If they could have, they'd probably have done that instead of the manufacturing job.

On the plus side, with so many manufacturing jobs having been shipped overseas, if they actually build the automated factories here in the US then that might make some number of jobs come back. (However, they'll probably build them in one of the Labor Hell countries anyway, which only sucks for the people in those countries.)

The fittest survive.
What is meant by the fittest?
Not the strongest; not the cleverest --
Weakness and stupidity everywhere survive.
There is no way of determining fitness except in that a thing does survive.
"Fitness," then, is only another name for "survival."
Darwinism:
That survivors survive.

-- Charles Fort

I'll field this one. There's a few different Gods we refer to when we start using "God" in thought experiments:

1. A Blind Watchmaker.
2. A Spoiled, Brutal Child
3. A Perfect, Immortal Machine
4. Further interesting ideas

However, people who are talking about God who isn't part of a thought experiment, but who actually worship Him usually are referring to American Jesus, who cries when you:

1 .Look at pictures of naked women
2. Play Dungeons and Dragons
3. Read Harry Potter books
4. Are gay
5. Refuse to believe that dinosaurs and humans coexisted.

A lot of people really don't like that guy.

Ia, Ia Slashdot fhtagn!! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!

They plan to Zynga-fy their company.

Pity that they are sitting on IP worth millions in competent hands, but those are the breaks. (And they've been sitting on lots of great IP for decades, so this isn't a new phenomenon.)

Oh, as to treatment of employees... it seems I have to link to this at least once in any discussion of EA:

A Cut Above