As long as it controls better than that damned RC plane.

Which is wholly different from gamers presented with the choice between 60fs 1080p Fallout 4 and some abstracted $5-off discount on a used retail version of the same game. The discount is an transient illusion of value, the money sent back to devs is worth so much more in terms of future game quality and diversity.

I don't know that they haven't, but I have no evidence or reason to suspect that they have, either.

As far as I know, Kinja page placement is done through an automated system - the higher-up comments appear to be weighted by the number of responses by the number of users. It's a private system, so I don't doubt that there's some level of censorship, but those top level comment threads were loaded with comments…

What can they possibly do to me that matters? If my credit card and SSN are stolen and used, there are minor hassles involved in sorting that out - I've been through that process before. Or do you mean that the threat is that I'm going to be unjustly imprisoned? There's legal recourse for that, and, if that fails,…

Yeah - on a fundamental level, the freedom of choice you have is simply not buying it. If your long distance friends won't interact with you in any other way, you also have the choice of not interacting with them. Sacrifice is often part of sticking to a principle. Personally, I don't see anything wrong with it, or…

You can't take it with you.

Who would watch that? Why would they care?

It's always a mistake to assume people who disagree with you must be paid off to work against their own best interests or are simply ignorant/too young/too old. That creates a paradigm where your opinion is the only plausibly true and correct answer, and nobody can learn anything and the conversation can't go anywhere…

Sorry to keep responding to you, I was flipping through your comments on your profile. I don't mean to harp on this, but assuming that everyone posting who disagrees with you is a 'paid troll' is simply delusional. Are there paid product endorsers online? Yeah. Is assuming people that agree with you are being…

A video camera is a collection of lenses, motors and circuitry - it can't 'watch' you. It would take a human being on the other end to watch you, and that person does not exist, because there is zero benefit to be gained from that. Don't be so self-important as to assume a mysterious, unknowable authority figure gives…

Cool - that's the one real power you have as a consumer in a capitalist environment. Don't buy things you don't want.

And how many people don't have internet-accessible devices with cameras in their home? And how widespread has hacking and stalking been? That is straight-up paranoia - time to buy better weed.

Man, it's not 'stealing your money' if you simply refuse to buy it. Nobody's taking anything by force here. If you don't want a device that requires a camera to function, don't buy a device that requires a camera to function. Simple, no?

If that seems naive, you might want to examine your level of paranoid delusion. The lawsuit that would come from anything that resembled using their devices to spy on you would destroy Microsoft, and the data they could collect that way would be worthless. Moreover, we've had in-device cameras for ages - monitors,…

Sure, but you make money by enticing customers to spend it. If they don't make it appealing, we won't buy it.

What do you think is a more effective tool for targeted marketing - cross-referencing the games and movies you enjoy, or having computers (or an army of 3rd world telecom workers) figure what the green thing in the corner of your living room is?

That is ridiculous.

The Kinect-based surveillance paranoia here is ridiculous. I know it's hard to get out of our own heads and come to grips with realizing that the rest of the world doesn't particularly care about our individual subjective experiences of existing, but nobody anywhere gives a crap what you're doing in your living room.

Not yet, but that's because publishers aren't going to undermine the potential $60 retail sale of a physical product (tied to many areas of their distribution chain and the contracts and sales numbers that go along with that) with a digital sale that doesn't support many of their business partners. Steam publishers…