Agreed, that would be very useful, but I also have many doubts. I mean, the whole debate as to whether you can legally tie an IP to a person is ongoing. We live in a world of botnets, dynamic addressing, and endless numbers of hijacked and infected systems. Obviously, I can't simply ARIN the IP of the person tried to brute force my system as ACME Inc. and then say "ACME Inc. hacked me".

Wow, that's actually rather sad. Just because a system runs doesn't mean its running -well-. You should really give reformatting a shot on one of your older machines - you will likely be amazed at the performance difference. Unless the only applications you have been running have been IE and media player since 2005, you've been accumulating years of registry errors and extraneous system and driver files. I do hope you defragment, at least.

If I'm ever really, really bored, I'm going to go to Best Buy wearing Barbie pink, act like I'm a novice user who wants to buy a netbook, and then refute their points one by one. Now that I know what they are... ;) I doubt I'll ever be that bored, but its nice to know I have a plan C this winter.

Yeah, verk's right: I remember those "mission terminal" dealies - they gave you very generic MMO delivery quests. Its been a while! I left SWG rapidly and angrily, too. Also played Matrix Online, but it was another brilliant concept that had the same dreadful problems. It always felt like too much bureaucracy and mismanagement.

Ironically, I hear an epic NGE was made upon the release of Champions Online. Its even made news articles - guess the developers did not learn, after all.

But you, being a sensible human being, realized that the solution was to buy shielded cables and electronics, not to trash a radio tower that serves your entire area. Yes, in our digital age, interference is irritating, but radio transmission and EMI is absolutely integral to our lifestyle.

I envision either a bunch of drunken teens or a disgruntled homeowner who was trying to explain interference on a cordless phone. Actually, I see alcohol involved either way. And an environmental cause is a great way to cover oneself, both from identification, and from charges if they're arrested. They start getting charged with vandalism, they play the pity card in the media and get free legal representation from an environmental rights group.

SOE has a pretty weak line up of MMOs these days. I believe Matrix Online finally closed its doors last week. Perhaps they will do better in the browser-based market - its mostly occupied by start-ups and the APAC developers. I wonder how they've managed to make so many bad business decisions after Everquest. Perhaps too much bureaucracy. Still, it doesn't look like the right game for me.

Absolutely. World War 1, World War 2, and the heyday of the Cold War prompted much more technological innovation in Europe, the US, and the former Soviet states than anything in the current half century has been able to. Not only was there a desperate need to immediately have superior military technology, but there was a constant cultural drive to out-class our opponents technologically and scientifically. Competition is a pretty deep-seated human motivator. Look how much positive press, and how large of a budget NASA got during the Cold War, as opposed to what it gets now. The Vietnam War, the Gulf War, and the current crisis in the Middle East have produced much less emotion, interest, and motivation in the Western world.

Insightful - yes, that would be a valid reason to make that adjustment. "2/3 of filesharers admit it" would be a nearly impossible study, I would think. I agree though, reading the article, the sample size was not an issue to me. It was the arbitrary changing of figures for (what appear to be) unsubstantiated hypotheses that I don't think is valid statistics.

I agree. Why fix what's not broken? I use Firefox over Chrome for the user interface - I will not argue that Chrome loads pages more efficiently. The lack of standard menus and buttons is really frustrating for me - same exact reason I don't like Office 2007.

SANS ISC has already been doing this for years. http://isc.sans.org/top10.html Old news. The only thing different will be data from non-corporate home users who opt in.