I recall President Laporte doing an interview at CES with a company producing headphones that already perform this functionality, and then some. I can't recall the name at the moment (CES was basically 85% headphones, too many to recall), but I know the TWiT CES coverage is up on the YouTubes for anyone less lazy than I.
If you can, use CloudFlare for SSL instead. $20/month and you get a ton of other features. You don't get last mile SSL support to GAE, but at least it stop script kiddies in coffeeshops.
Ignoring the absolutely horrible name, this will be dead on arrival because of the price alone. Even for a new or small company that doesn't have the industry clout or initial unit production numbers necessary for minimal component pricing, there's just no way to justify a $200 price tag for what appears to be less than $15 worth of actual hardware. Especially when the only significant difference from competing hardware (priced nearly an order of magnitude lower) is wi-fi and what will amount to an unnoticeable performance increase.
Yes, controlling via wi-fi is a nice potential feature, but they would really need to have the appropriate third party software interfaces (Android, iOS, and browser) ready by the ship date. And even then, it is unfortunately not a $165 feature.
If by competing device you mean the Raspberry Pi, I wouldn't consider their hardware to be in the same market. That's like saying the HTC G1 is competing with the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. They're generations apart. A 1.2Ghz dual-core processor doesn't come cheap, nor does the 1GB of RAM on top of that.
Your statement that it's only $15 worth of hardware makes me question the validity of everything you say.
The reasons for this are obvious, and probably have nothing to do with the cost, difficulty, or politics of streaming. It's more likely due to the majority of their by-mail customers routinely going inactive for months at a time, while still paying for the service.
That inactivity is so well known that it became a talking point in social commentary and has even been the punchline of late night jokes.
Ouch. That's exactly what happens to us: 2 disks, that we wait a month to remember to send back.
The article does point out the "for now" aspect, though. "f(x) = DVD profits" is large, but with a negative derivative, while "g(x) = Streaming profits" is smaller, but with a positive (first order, at this point?) derivative.
Yeah, I wonder if the per-user profitability will fall now. It would make sense that the remaining DVD users are largely ones who are making a decision to stay with it because they actually use it.
That's a double-edged sword. If a significant portion of the population adamantly boycotted any particular industry, their response would be to claim piracy as the cause and use it as ammunition for their argument.
It's nearly impossible to win an argument when one side is so willing to not only lie, but engineer those lies to manipulate a population that doesn't know any better (including the folks making decisions on behalf of that population).
Consonances are sometimes described as being inherently more pleasant to the ear and dissonances as less pleasant.
This is probably the only article I've read about harmony that properly uses ambiguity when describing the pleasantness of dissonance. As a (very) long time, die hard metal head that both appreciates and enjoys the musicality that dissonance can produce, it irks me whenever someone makes outrageously definitive claims that it causes physical pain, depression, et cetera.
Also, which intervals or chords are interpreted as sounding dissonant is significantly dependent on culture. There are sounds that were once considered dissonant in Western music that are no longer.
Where in Google's blog post do they claim to still follow the link? They provide no technical details for their process, so if we're speculating, it would make far more sense that rel=nofollow adheres to the same guidelines as a meta/robots.txt nofollow.
And this speculation for the "shared on" functionality doesn't exactly add up, either. If they're not following links with rel=nofollow, why should Google be legally or even morally responsible for storing a massive and entirely extraneous relational database, and then checking against it every time they follow a short URL from another site, just to see if it was shared on Twitter at some point?
