Same! Love Protopage. Everything MyYahoo used to be.

Thanks for this. SO much anti-union bias here. If you are in a Union and don't like how it's doing things you can get involved. Go to Union meetings, become a Shop Steward. Unions are fundamentally democratic. As to "merit", typically merit is determined by whoever pleases the manager above them the most. At least with seniority there is an objective measure, how long you've been doing a job. I've seen lots of idiots promoted on merit because they say the right things to the right people (which is arguably maybe the most important skill for getting ahead in life so maybe that's as it should be). I've seen idiots based promoted based on seniority as well, but at least they have lots of experience. Even under a Union you can be fired, it just has to be justified, it can't be arbitrary. In my experience there is typically some form of graduated discipline: verbal reprimand, written reprimand, suspension, termination. I expect the Union to grieve each step since it is the Union's responsibility to advocate for all members, but if management documents all infractions, it's entirely possible to accomplish.

As someone with kids, changing the clock sucks, in either direction. Especially when they are babies, babies can't tell time. All the supposed benefits about "having daylight at x time" can be addressed by having seasonal times for businesses where it matters. We already have summer hours and winter hours around here for plenty of businesses.

How will this effect Roll20? That's what I used Hangouts for mostly, much better than the Roll20 native chat. Hangouts was always a decent cross platform video chat.

The "singularity" does not necessarily require artificially intelligent computers vs. pseudo-intelligent computers. It only requires an exponential growth of change in technology, mediated or enabled by some sort of computation. The details are semantics I suppose, the key is the exponential technological feedback cycle. I think you could make the argument that we are already in it, via augmented intelligence. Used Wikipedia or IMdB lately? From your smartphone? Remember when you had to know stuff, instead of efficiently looking it up? I think the professor is right in one sense, but misses the bigger picture, we are already in a technological singularity.

I actually tend to agree with most of her points. As a white male gamer I don't feel threatened or offended, and looking at women in my life, I can see how the tropes she observes serve to exclude or discourage them from playing games. Although my oldest daughter is still much better at Call of Duty than me. As an older gamer I can also say it's boring to always be served the same narrow range of narratives as well, one reason I guess I play mostly indie-style games (whatever that means). From a purely selfish reason I'd love to see more variety in protagonists and narratives. Also, I love playing games and I'd love to be able to share gaming with more people, so again, having more variety would only be a good thing. Am I wrong? Am I missing something?

GOG.com is pretty handy. I'd even go so far as to say their stance on DRM is even enlightened. They seem to be doing a good business also. Buying a game (which is meant to be "fun") laden with restrictive DRM would seem to directly diminish the "fun". I suppose in the original article, wrt movies many people rent a movie, watch it once and that's it, hence the permanency of their copy of the movie might not be a big deal; but I can't imagine many video-philes liking these companies' distribution models. I agree with many other posters, that when it comes video, DVD is much more useful, precisely because it's DRM is thoroughly compromised. Hence I would actually spend real money on a DVD, since it effectively lacks DRM. I suspect the mass of consumers who will mindlessly continue to buy everything that the MPAA/RIAA want them to in the format they currently bless more than makes up for my lost sale. Especially if you can end up selling the same movie to the same guy 3 or 4 times in 3 or 4 different formats...