This could be cool if it were the original date from T2, but it's not.

Wrong. 99 cents is way overpriced for many songs. If songs were 10-20 cents apiece for CD quality (128 kbps mp3 isn't nearly CD quality), piracy would go away.

This seems fine. I mean, if people are willing to watch pirated copies of a movie shot with a camcorder in a theater, then restricting them to "above-DVD-quality" isn't much of a punishment. Seems like a huge waste of time. The people who have $5000 home theater setups - the people who care about HD quality - are not the people downloading a 700 MB rip of Avatar.

Just sayin'. Verizon has lots of home users at 25/15 Mbps down/up, I hope they aren't throttling us to 2 GB/month.

This is what I assumed it was from the subject: after "X" days, the image would "expire" from the server. This encryption thing is asinine. Is every browser going to include support for this dumb scheme?

He runs the State of California, which owns (or is paying for) the phones. Sounds like he's saying "I want my phones back." Confiscating makes it sound like he's taking people's own property away from them.

Report everybody, so everybody is on the watch list. Then the watch list is useless. Well, more obviously useless.

Every website has different rules for their passwords. Some sites require at least 6 characters. Some require at MOST 10 characters. Some require special characters; some forbid special characters. Because each site has completely different rules, this leads people to develop lowest-common-denominator passwords that work across sites. If there were standard rules for passwords - at least 8 characters, must contain 1 letter, 1 number, one "special" character, max length 100 characters - then people would be able to create very strong passwords that are easy to remember, and use them across sites if they wanted. Imagine attempting to bruteforce this password:

I wuz bron on the 21st Day of January, 1966

A simple phrase with personal meaning and some misspellings. Create 3 tiers of passwords - one for throwaway sites, one for semi-important stuff (maybe Facebook/Twitter), one for critical stuff (email account, banking). Since no two sites seem to have compatible password rules this can't currently be done. I remember GoDaddy as being unbelievably strict to the point that I need to reset my password every single time I want to log in because I have to create such an impossible password for them that I can never remember it.

I assumed this would happen back in October and was modded troll. "That only happens in America!" Greed is universal.

PS, I'm shocked -- SHOCKED!

Google's a US corporation, so isn't it by definition an "interested party" in any transaction involving the US government?

The show was stupid. It was cancelled because it sucked. Poor attempt to piggyback on the popularity of a great show (BSG). Don't overanalyze this or try to glean any special insights. Bad show sucks, aired on bad network, is cancelled. The end.

They'll just pour more money into marketing/lobbying whatever the ITU is until they change their mind. When does a multibillion-dollar corporation not get what they want?

You put your data on its server for the purpose of sharing it with others. Any expectation of "privacy" on a system designed to share information seems misinformed, especially when all that information is further shared with third parties (apps) over whom Facebook has no control. You might reasonably expect your FB inbox to be private but that's about the only type of information on the entire site that isn't "shareable."

Plus, if you're not accessing a service exclusively over SSL, do you really care how private the data is that you're transmitting?

While that's true about paying a subscription, if you assume your basic subscription is $30/month, and HBO is $15/month, then what you're "paying" for with a $30/month subscription is just two channels worth of content. I get probably 200+ channels with my FiOS subscription. While I don't want all of those channels, there's no a la carte option that lets me select what I actually want, so $30/month for 200 channels is pretty reasonable. If every channel was commercial-free, like HBO, you'd probably expect to be paying $15/month per channel, but maybe you'd be able to select the channels you want. Still, I'm pissed enough at paying $30/month for 200 channels, I'd rather pay $10/month for 50 channels. But I can't anyone being okay with paying $50-60/month for 4 or 5 channels, which is what would happen if they did away with commercials.

I thought they were going to be taking on Court TV. Darn.