Just to clarify a single point here. There are no writers or editors at odds with eachother. Brian is doing this in an attempt to buy it from Jason. I'm moving on to other things regardless of what happens at Hackaday. We're all super good friends and get along great.
As for the rest of the thoughts and concerns, well, not my problem!
interesting. While in terms of speed of communication the world may be shrinking, in terms of experience, it is growing. Had I been born 100 years ago, I would probably only know people/businesses in my city and possibly another or two where I would travel/settle. Now I get news from each coast and talk directly to friends in other continents. My experience has expanded, my world has "grown".
Well, the biggest hurdle is being capable of writing a driver at all. Your average joe isn't going to just "hack" this thing. These are people who are already familiar with programming peripherals to be used with computers.
If you have that knowledge, there are several ways.
1. Open it up, look what hardware is used, find documentation for that specific hardware set on the net. Write code to the specifications of the people who made the components.
2. sniff the communication. This is what Adafruit did (see iantimothy's post). Once they see that communication, they break it down to see what is necessary to make things happen.
absolutely. A personal message will carry so much more weight. I get tons of advertising requests and they barely get read because I can tell they are boilerplate.
Hackaday has adsense, so if you're not blocking it, you get the usual banners.