It's as public as YOU make it. Those people opted to share their E-mail address with ESRB, NOT with those other 900+ people they've probably never heard of before.

Not to mention that this probably violated the ESRB's own privacy policy, in the process of talking about how companies should... obey their privacy policies.

Then perhaps Blizzard should do something like... hire more forum moderators, or look at using community volunteers as moderators to help keep the trolls in check. But those would cost money, whereas forcing all your innocent customers to give out their real names to every potential psychotic online doesn't cost them anything.

There are lots of ways to deal with trolling that doesn't involve forcing people to give out their real names. Besides, Blizzard already knows the forum posters real names. Despite that it's not stopping people from being total jerks on their forums, so how they think making those names public will stop it is beyond me. All it's going to do is run off the non-trolls who value their privacy.

No, that's not the solution. There are people out there, and I'm sure you've encountered a few, that take any disagreement with them, no matter how polite as an attack on their person and respond like insane psychotics. (Which they probably are.) Being polite is certainly a good idea, but it won't protect you from the lunatics of the world who are either unstable or actively looking for reasons to get offended.

Anonymity isn't just useful to protect the assholes of the world, it's also useful to protect the normal people from the assholes of the world.

I have two Facebook accounts, both use fake names. Said names are based on anime characters I like. I've gotten tons of friend requests on them.... all from other accounts using anime characters names.

So no, everyone does NOT give their real name out on Facebook. In fact I will never do so. Just because a lot of stupid people do it doesn't mean everyone does it.

That the first thing I thought when I read he licenses it all under Creative Commons was "Bet ASCAP would be pissed about that".

But this is a wonderful thing he's doing, kudos to him and I wish him luck. Will have to check out some of his lectures sometime.

Notably, being falsely accused of a crime can be enough to cause a stress reaction on questions about the crime, simply because the person's scared half to death from the accusation and/or investigation. So the sheer fact that you've been accused of a crime can be enough to make you fail a polygraph trying to prove your innocence, thus bringing more suspicion against you.

Never, ever, take a polygraph as part of a police investigation. At best you'll have wasted time, at worst you'll make them even more convinced you're guilty even if you're totally innocent.

Actually, in this type of situation, going with Windows would be better. If students already have Mac laptops, they could run Windows using bootcamp on them, and they'd only have to buy a copy of Windows, not a whole new laptop. By going with Mac laptops it forces parents of students who already have a Windows laptop to either need a loaner, or buy a second laptop.

Basically, Windows works better here because it's more open in the sense you can install it on any supported hardware. Mac OSX can only legally be installed on Mac hardware, making it less open. Linux would also work since Linux can run on both Wintel and Mac hardware.

Ideally they should only use cross-platform software so what type of laptop a student has doesn't matter, but this may be largely out of their control. There's quite a bit of K-12 software out there that has only Mac versions, or only Windows versions. Sometimes there are no viable alternatives for the software in question, or it would cost too much for the school system to switch to another software. (Or, to be completely honest, there's considerable resistance to changing the status quo and the IT department's not allowed to change, because too many teachers and/or staff don't want to have to learn new software.)

It makes little sense even for the maximizing profit crowd, if they priced it more reasonably there would be more sales, which would probably lead to more profit overall. The whole $5-6 DVD thing here in the US proved that, the studios were resistant to it, but Wal-mart used its clout to start it. Sales went through the roof immediately, and all the studios who'd refused to sign on were suddenly clamoring to take part.

Basically, even when there's MORE money to be made by selling more units at a lower price, the media companies have to be dragged kicking and screaming into it. Their shareholders should be royally pissed off.

And a lawyer orgasms.

I recently got one of those continuous ink systems for my inkjet, and it works like a charm. For less than it would have cost me to replace all four cartridges with generic ones, I now have an ungodly amount of ink available. And if I ever do manage to run out, I can just refill the reservoirs for less than the system cost me to start with. It works perfectly well for the printing I do, which includes almost no pictures. For pictures I just go get the digital prints turned into real photos, and they'll last much longer than anything I could print at home, even using HP's "premium" inks. (Although I actually have an Epson printer.)

I think what's going on here is that HP is treating this as "everyone wants to print photos", and thus they assume everyone needs super high-quality premium ink. (Or at least that's the argument they're trying to make to justify their ink costs.) But the reality is, most people don't print that many photos, they print out stuff to read, or maybe a cute graphic, or a spreadsheet to reference, and so on. Stuff that doesn't need high quality inks, it just needs to be good enough to read it. And the cheap generic inks you can get for continuous ink systems more than meets those requirements. But HP and company doesn't want you to know that.

Now I've seen suggestions that the ink may eventually cause deterioration of internal parts of the printer, but by the time I run into that problem, I'll have saved enough money from not buying the expensive ink cartridges to buy at least 3-4 printers to replace it with. Even if I have to buy a new continuous ink system for the replacement printer, I'll still come out ahead. The printer companies know this, and they really don't want all consumers to find out about it, because then their entire business model (practically give away the printers, charge out the wazoo for the ink) will collapse and they'll be screwed.

As I recall, it's the Army Corps of Engineers who were (and still are) responsible for the levee system that protects New Orleans. So that would make it pretty plainly a federal failure from that standpoint.

Too late, they already have that behavior down. I get a couple of E-mails a month from Facebook reminding me that various people I barely know invited me to join. I don't even bother reading them, and there's probably a way to opt-out of receiving them, but damn it, if I wanted to deal with Facebook I would have created an account already. How do they justify sending out those reminders for months and months and months? (It's been going on for over a year.) Needless to say this behavior's made me less inclined to sign up for Facebook than I was to start with. I don't particularly like Facebook's crusade to remove privacy for everyone but themselves (how many FB employees share everything they seem to want to force their userbase to share?), but sending me spammy "reminders" month and month just makes me think of them as... total scum.

Giganews has never advertised themselves as a gateway to copyright infringement. Their advertising has always focused on their retention (which has almost always been higher than any competing provider), their completion (ditto), and other features (like encryption being available). Their DMCA policy is easy as hell to find, linked off the site from the footer. They not only honor DMCA takedowns for stuff posted by their own users, they will remove stuff posted by users at other providers from their servers. Giganews has also been around long enough that it will be difficult to claim their retention is solely to benefit binary groups. Back when they started binaries weren't anywhere near as big as they are now.

Now some other providers have, and still do, advertise themselves as ways to get copyrighted music/movies/software for cheap, and some day they're going to be royally screwed. But Giganews has always been more of a premium service, even among all the other paid Usenet providers, even back when all paid providers were premium services because most ISPs provided their own servers. Their pricing is also in line with that, you can get Usenet access much cheaper than Giganews, but you'll have to settle for less retention, lower completion, and so on.

I don't think Usenet's in much trouble, it's just that the huge level of traffic, and usage relative minority among all Internet denizens is making it into a more specialized area that you have to pay to access. Take for example Giganews, they've been around for quite some time, and they keep upping their retention. Right now they offer 650 days binary retention, 2,522 days text retention, 109,000+ newsgroups and have servers in North America, Europe and Asia. They also just recently added a VPN service free for the top tier accounts, which also get unlimited downloads and SSL encrypted Usenet traffic. All that for $30 a month, the VPN alone is probably worth that, much less all the other stuff. To pull all that off they have to have invested tremendous amounts of money into storage alone, so they're apparently not hurting for money any.

And Giganews isn't alone in offering paid access to Usenet, there's tons of other companies doing it, and it seems that new ones pop up every day. So I think saying Usenet's dying is premature. It may die eventually, but it's not happening now.