After reading the snarky comments in the previous story about "holding it wrong", "it's an iPhone so it's a feature", and "ban all phones without removable batteries", it's interesting to see what happens if you wait for investigative facts to come out. But where would be the fun in that? Slashdot's comment section is more about cathartic bashing than insightful commentary. Of course, now we'll see accusations that Apple bribed the ATSB or fake-posts from pretend-battery-engineers telling us how the story is wrong or some other similar silliness...

Not to come off as a defender of Microsoft, but Ballmer said that over 11 years ago, and it was in reference to the GPL's viral nature. Ribbing of Microsoft on Slashdot has to do with us-versus-them platform fanboyism more than anything.

To gloat over the irony of Microsoft using cheap UNIX boxes for P2P infrastructure. Even in 2012, Microsoft is still the bogeyman here.

If by linear content you mean quests, yes, it has linear quests because quests have a beginning and end. An MMO like World of Warcraft has barely any sandbox qualities. You level through a certain zone, then you move to the next designated zone, and you run specific dungeons designed for your level. Elder Scrolls isn't like that; you can just go out and do whatever and explore, ignoring the entire main quest line if you'd like.

Not only is the market saturated, but the cornerstone of today's MMOs is a linear content path regularly updated by the vendor. Elder Scrolls made its name for being a do-anything sandbox RPG. The last time such a thing was tried in a mainstream way, we had Ultima Online which ended up having to create a PK-safe continent.

Either it just won't feel like Elder Scrolls, or it will be too full of griefers to compete with mainstream MMOs.

No it wasn't.

Yes, it was. From TFA:

Advocates of export-control reform say that the report is the first encouraging development since 1998, when Congress placed all spacecraft and related equipment under ITAR, following revelations that two US companies had shared technical information about a launch failure with China, without seeking government approval. The move proved a blow to many US satellite firms, which lost international customers who were unwilling to deal with the licensing rules. Universities with foreign students are also subject to the rules, which cover what can be taught in classes and who can work on satellite-related student projects funded by the government.

Bonch wasn't saying the law was created in 1998. He said it was expanded to cover spacecraft in 1998.

Football is a money-making industry. One wonders how much resistance there has been to revealing its true physical consequences.

Yes, you are right, there's no connection between humongous gladiators smashing into each other hard enough to cause concussions and brain damage. Nosiree.

People have a habit of repeating that correlation does not cause causation, but correlation is often a very obvious indicator of a connection. If a bunch of dead football players with a history of concussions end up having the exact same brain encephalopathy...come on.

I think you didn't even read the report. It explicitly states that there was intent to use the data. It was the whole point of the project according to the design document that management apparently approved without reading.

The seven engineers weren't just people he circulated memos to. They worked on the project--five tested it, another reviewed the code, and another helped in some unspecified way.

Let's be realistic here. It's extremely difficult to believe that seven engineers could work on a Street View project, managers could approve the proposal, yet not a single other soul in the company knew what was going on or intended to do anything with the data for the two years that the project ran.

They spent a year and tens of thousands of dollars "investigating" Google and couldn't find any violations of the law, so the make a bogus claim that Google "didn't cooperate". Why should Google? What the Feds wanted was for Google to unilaterally admit to some crime.

It wasn't a bogus claim. If you had read the article or followed this story at all in the last couple of years, you'd know that Google refused to turn over the data they had collected to investigators.

As for not breaking any laws, that's hardly the point. I guess the spin now is that anything goes as long as you technically don't break the law. Way to hold companies to an ethical standard, guys.

Slashdotters may not care, but I guarantee your average computer user will care, and that's why it's news. People don't like it when companies drive vans around their neighborhoods collecting their passwords and such. It's a violation of trust and an issue of questionable ethics. Either Google is bad for approving of it, or they're bad for having such poor management structure and clueless engineering that they don't even notice it going on for two years.

To quote Mike Daisey: "Do you really think they didn't know?"

Replace Google with some popular foe. If Microsoft had done it, then would you care? What if it had been Facebook or Sony? Probably, you'd be ranting about the fact that a corporation can get away with a measly fine for something that would likely land you in jail for "hacking".

Is a content license really required to store files? I think you mean that they need to be allowed to do all those things to provide context-sensitive advertising.

This is why I don't use any cloud services for file storage. Though one could reasonably argue that giving Google, the biggest internet company in the world, a license to your content has larger ramifications than giving one to Dropbox or even Microsoft.

The question is why Slashdot hasn't posted anything about that controversy but instead chose to post about Chrome OS, which nobody uses or cares about. In fact, there's been a lot of shady, selective coverage in the last 12 months that ignores stories that are huge on the rest of the web but happen to be negative toward entities that are popular among Slashdot commenters.

Google has a long track record of taking good care of my data.

This is the same company that sniffed neighborhood wifi data, stored it in an indexed database for two years, and then suddenly realized their "accident" when German investigators began probing.

Never recording any data anywhere would be "safer", in the same way that never leaving my house would make it less likely that I would contract an illness.

There is a line, and the question is whether or not you're okay with sweeping it toward the side of making money for advertising companies or toward the privacy and respect of users.