This assumes that people are entirely rational, educated on the issue, and not persuaded by FUD. I find all three of those assumptions to be false most of the time.

This is also the reason that EA won over, say, BofA. The majority of the population doesn't notice EA's shenanigans, but banks tend to have a direct (and larger) impact in their lives.

Traditional FBSD practice doesn't place /usr and / on the same partition. I usually take it a step further and put /usr/ports onto its own partition due to the nature of that beast.

It's possible, but we're taking a lot of this "study" on blind faith from Athiest Shoes. They didn't explicitly spell out their methodology. I find a sample size of 168 packages pretty small given the volume of US mail there can be.

Once scenario is that someone saw the tape and used that as a visual reference to organize the packages. If all of those were sent out as a group in a single shipment, that would skew results to appear that the labeling causes the delay (technically, yes, it did, but not because of some misguided religious notion). The other packages were simply not labeled at all, and wouldn't have been lumped into a single group using the same visual indicator (the tape) above.

So package group A (with the tape) would act as a single shipment, and a single delay causes a delay for everything. Package group B gets dispersed among many shipments, allowing more tolerance for delays - a single delayed shipment affects a smaller percentage of Group B.

We could sit here and pick apart each others' analysis, but the bottom line is we're looking at a pretty vague inforgraphic and extrapolating some pretty sweeping generalizations from it.

No. It's possible that the two packages were split into 2 separate shipments due to truck capacity (as an example). Shipment #1 ships out on the last truck at the end of a business day. Overnight, a snowstorm could hit, causing Shipment #2 on the first truck out the next day to be delayed because of poor road conditions.

Logging IP addresses happens regardless if I'm logged into an account or not.

Considering I'm equally anonymous on Slashdot whether I'm logged in or not (having never supplied any real information for my account), Slashdot would still have problems with laws forbidding anonymity. As far as this site's concerned, I'm a username, password, and throwaway e-mail address.

This feature was removed a couple of revisions ago. My original PS3 started having extreme noise and heat issues (yep, got one from that batch), so I intended just to buy a new one and do a drive swap. No such luck.

(Sony removing features? You dont say...)

No, but refusing to sign the release form due to something that the agent may not have the authority to modify on the fly doesn't constitute seizure, either. It's just something being held a little longer at customs because of an error.

Hell yes we do! Beer specials and $10 all-you-can-play for a night? Good times.

Bungie made two more Halo games after breaking away from Microsoft (back in 2007), so I wouldn't say they immediately jumped on new ideas.

Maybe for the always-on connection, but not the used-game lockout. That's just the submitter trying to sensationalize using a rumor from over a year ago (no, really, the link is a slashdot summary from over a year ago).

That won't fix the issue of not being able to installing games when you upgrade your PC or OS. When Steam disappears, your games will only work until your system needs an upgrade. Then you're SOL unless Valve will distribute installation images with those offline play patches.

It was 4-5 years ago, but I reported it wherever ftc.gov told me to (it was an online form).

This is probably the best suggestion. If you ever have reported robocalls, you know that they refuse to investigate the complaint unless you appeal the initial "nothing to see here, move along citizen" cookie cutter response.