The Slashdot title implies some breach of privacy but the article says it was with the owners consent. Is there any evidence that it is actually spying? Was it hidden in some clause in the small print or was it an optional opt-in? Or is it just another sensationalist Slashdot headline?

I agree with the sentiment in regards to BC2 but he is slightly wrong...

Reload and use aren't bound to the same key. "Reload" is R, "use" is E. (Maybe they're the same on consoles but he's supposedly talking about PC games.) The problem comes when there are two things to "use" - like, as he says, disarming a bomb and switching weapon kits. I see your point about context and there is definitely a time and a place for that. However, in his example, if enough people die next to the bomb in BC2 it becomes almost impossible to disarm the bomb as there are so many weapons to pick up.

Even just giving the bomb-disarming action priority would fix it in this instance as you could then just do "press the use key to do use the important thing which is obviously the thing you want to do right now" as opposed to "mash the use key, repeatedly switching weapons until they're out of the way enough for you to start defusing the bomb by which time it's too late as the bomb has exploded or you have been shot because you were paying too much attention to the text on screen telling you what the button will do".

One "use" key often makes sense but if you can accidentally do something very different to what you are trying to do then the system is broken. At any given time a button's function should be obvious and if its function is something you will need to do whilst under fire at the trickiest times in the game then you shouldn't have to rely on reading the text on screen.

"between similar games"

Not "between different installations".

Meh. This could work sometimes and not at others.

In Valve's Day of Defeat right-click is for iron sights. In Valve's Left 4 Dead right-click is for melee and this makes sense - L4Ds melee attack is used about as much as the primary attack as you have to beat off the zombies (no, not like that) while you reload. In DoD your melee attack is a separate weapon so you don't need a dedicated button for it.

Might not be the best example but you get the picture.

Maybe keeping them between L4D1 and L4D2 I could agree with...

I've got a bad feeling about this...

Well screw you too, buddy.

While we are technically a copy of our former selves it doesn't feel that way. If you could - without turning off the brain - take out each part, piece by piece and replace it with something so convincing that the brain accepted it as part of itself then you would never realise that you had become a robot.

However if you built a robot with all your memories, emotions, thoughts and personality then no matter how accurate it was there is no way to transfer the you-ness of you - the real you, the soul or whatever - into the machine. It may think, feel and act exactly like you but there would be no way to experience it. If you were gradually transformed then the "you" experiencing it would never stop experiencing. By the time you are totally changed it would no longer be the original you, but only in the same way that your current body isn't the original you - from your point of view it would still be you.

Any part in particular?

Yeah, I'm pretty sure Lego has 1x4s too...

Thanks for clarifying. That makes a lot of sense and seems a whole lot less big-brother than the summary or my (admittedly brief) skimming of the article seem to suggest.

And now while off the clock, apparently.

Yeah, things like this have been around for a while but it really depends on what you're doing.

If you're only mixing they're perfect - you can find a track almost instantly and they save you lugging a load of vinyl around...although it often means you've got lug around a whole different set of kit and you've also got to figure out how and when you're going to plug it all in without stopping the sound from the DJ who is playing before you (I used to work as a sound engineer in a small venue. Trust me, this can be annoying. Not just for the engineer or artist but for the crowd - cutting the music while the next act sets up is a surefire way of emptying the dance floor).

However if you're a scratch DJ it's a different kettle of fish. I'm not a great scratch DJ but put me on, say, Final Scratch (or any one of these, though to be fair I'd expect time-coded vinyl to be slightly more laggy than the HD2500 mentioned below...but I digress...where was I....) and I will suck balls.

It, like all things, is subjective.

People also buy vinyl because it is easier to mix with. You have direct physical control over the movement of the disc and therefore the speed of the music which gives you more control for beat-matching and makes scratching possible/easier. Obviously, it has it's disadvantages. Your bags are heavier, vinyl can get damaged, it takes longer to find a piece of vinyl than search a digital disk etc. but as a tool for this specific job, many still (rightly, in my opinion) consider it superior.

So what is it? An adventure game with an exceptionally fast gameplay and a weak storyline? An on-a-rail third-person shooter with a terrible aiming system?

You mean how each Google search results link sends a response to Google when clicked before redirecting you to the actual result?

Isn't that kind of vital for them in order to rank and prioritize search results? Wouldn't their service suck if everyone blocked that?