I believe you might be unaware of the almost nonexistent line separating corporations from government. Decisions on capital hill aren't made with your vote. They're made by corporations with massive wallets and the ability to purchase lobbyists and politicians who favor their own interests. Voting offers only the illusion of participation in government and while incumbents and challengers alike will tout their differences during campaign season, once in office you'll be hard pressed to find much difference between them, Democrat or Republican. Delude yourself into thinking otherwise if you want but in the real world your vote counts as little more than a tiny squeak in comparison to the roar of corporate financial buying power in politics.

Unless you've been living in some alternate reality or are just another one of the sheeple in this country who keep their heads buried firmly in the sand, the need for oversight should be painfully obvious. A database like this would be useful to banks looking to recover assets of course. However, I seriously doubt you can sit there with a straight face and offer a guarantee to everyone that this MVTRAC system will be used only for this purpose at the exclusion of all other possible uses a government or private organization that is not involved with asset recovery could have for it. In short, it's not the initial intent of the program that bothers me, but rather the broader implications on privacy. Creating yet another tool for people to be tracked and their driving habits monitored without bothering to put some framework in place to oversee who has access to it and what it's being used for presents a far to tantalizing opportunity for misuse.

...Or it's one of the finest examples of our glorious American business model:

1. Patent something, no matter how vague or generalized it is.
2. Sit on said patent and do nothing with it.
3. Wait for someone else to invest all the R&D, production, and marketing resources on something that infringes on your patent.
4. Sue for said infringement.
5. Profit on your patent without making any investment in the product or service that the patent was granted for.

As one of the people who have chosen not to have my web browsing experience ruined with rampant, uncontrolled advertising, I can say that if a website tried to pop up an ad, mask the content behind some overlay ad with a quiz, or generally do anything that interferes with my activities, I will promptly close the offending site and add it to my blacklist of sites that utilize intrusive advertising. I'll hunt down and add blocking filters for ad content from other hosts to prevent it from being displayed on a site. And I always make sure similar measures are put in place on any computer I'm involved with, at work, at home, or when I'm fixing someone else's computer. I've got a perimeter appliance in place at work and at home that allows for URL blocking and filtering, extensions for Firefox (Adblock, etc..), and a massive HOSTS file I install on any computer of my choosing.

I have no problem doing this, either, because I don't believe in paying to be advertised to. I eschew all forms of television (cable/satellite/antenna), radio (satellite, HD, and regular), and any other form of content delivery that I do not have the ability to fend off the glut advertising on. When it comes to my Internet connection, which I do have control over, I am fully justified in blocking any and all ad content because nobody has the right to make a profit off my bandwidth, processing power, LAN network capacity, and the hardware I have control over without my consent. If a webmaster hosting a site with advertising on it wishes to make sure I see their ads, they can cut a usage check payable directly to me for the privileges of advertising on my infrastructure. It costs me money in monthly internet and power bills, upgrade costs, maintenance costs, etc. to keep my infrastructure going at work and at home. Why should a webmaster, who is using advertising on their site to pay for the same costs, be able to use my time, infrastructure, and network for their profit?

In short, pay me and I'll start letting you advertise to me. Otherwise, I'll filter your advertising. If you make it so that I can't do that through more intrusive advertising, or by preventing access to your content without dealing with your ads, I'll block your site entirely from my entire home network and my entire work network. If your site offers premium accounts with a guaranteed ad-free experience and your content is worth paying for, I'll throw down the money for an account without a problem.

Here's a bit of helpful information for you:

Creditors who are expecting your monthly payments on time for credit cards, rent, house payments, car payments, and so forth don't take your knowledge and skills in lieu of payment. Only a fool walks away from his current employer without first securing a position at another, especially in this economy. There aren't enough employers out there begging for "top flight" talent to justify walking away from a job because management ran afoul of your opinion.

Furthermore, knowledge and skills are not job security. Rather, they play a significant role as one of the many facets of job security. Other factors, including attitude, ethics, productivity, and communication skills, play equally relevant roles in ensuring job security. You can have all the knowledge and skill in the world at IT, but if you possess only negligible amounts of any of the other aforementioned traits, then you're no better off than the kid flipping burgers for minimum wage.

I preferred Lewis Black's 3-level system he talked about in one of his comedy shows:

Level 1: "Jesus Christ!"
Level 2: "God dammit!"
Level 3: "Fuck me!"

Exactly. How is this "curriculum" relevant to producing functional citizens in our society in our schools? It doesn't teach them anything they can use in the real world. Is the RIAA expecting employers and higher education institutions to base acceptance on whether or not they received a passing grade in this?

Pretty sure that's Family Guy: Blue Harvest spoof on Star Wars that the whole "INTERGALACTIC PROTON POWERED ELECTRICAL TENTACLED ADVERTISING DROIDS" thing comes from...

I'm not sure what the purpose of these data mining contests are. However, as a member who prefers instant streaming over my XBox 360 over waiting for the mailman to drop off a DVD, I hope the contest yields a better selection of instant playback material. Instant playback on Netflix currently suffers from a mediocre selection of obsolete, boring, B-grade movies. One can only watch Dolph Lundgren's "Retrograde" so many times before questioning whether or not the Netflix membership is even worth it.

Agreed. The easiest solution to this problem is to simply run your own DNS server. I run both a Linux (bind9) and Windows DNS server on my own network and do not perform any lookups using my ISP's servers, OpenDNS, or Treewalk. Anyone with a spare junker PC kicking around the house and the ability to follow guides like those on HowToForge can circumvent this problem with minimal effort.

I'm not surprised this happened and, as much as I'll probably be modded "Troll" for this, I'm not really outraged by it. Everyone responding to this article is fixated on the fact that he got arrested because he was modifying consoles. What I think most people are missing is that he modified them for personal profit, charging people money to have their consoles hacked. IANAL, but it seems to me that had Mr. Crippen provided his hacking services at no charge, he would have probably received (at worst) a simple cease and desist letter or a minor slap on the wrist.

For the record, I'm not against modifying devices to allow them to do things that would fall outside manufacturer specifications. In fact, there's some pretty neat stuff that can be accomplished by using consoles as something other than a video game system.

In short, I don't see anything wrong with Mr. Crippen hacking the XBox, Wii, PS3, or any other console. However, charging money for the "service", knowing full well that content developers would wind up losing out on profits from the sale of games, probably wasn't a smart choice.

I demand a re-release of Full Throttle to be included in this.

I know I'll probably get modded as a troll for this, but the article doesn't offer any actual evidence that Microsoft is changing search engine preferences without users knowing it. Even the author himself doesn't say that there's conclusive evidence. He writes in his article:

and

The author of the article doesn't bother to conduct any meaningful research into the purpose of the Windows Search service or what it actually does. Now I'm all for throwing the punches at Microsoft for the stupid crap they pull and I wouldn't put it past them to do something shady and underhanded like this. However, this article is little more than the rambling conjecture of a computer illiterate who can't tell the difference between a system service and an online search engine. If you're going to post articles about the devious, dirty deeds of Microsoft at least have the common sense to post articles with at least some level of truth behind them.

I'm not seeing how this story or any other story about GM and their "Volt" is noteworthy. The Volt is not a marvel of engineering. It's not innovative. It's the same crappy "hybrid" concept that every other auto maker has tried to push. The Volt only goes 40 miles on a charge before rolling over to the gas engine. And at the nearly $40,000 price point, why bother buying it? If you spent a bit more money, you can buy a Tesla Model S, priced at about $50,000 (assuming you can get the rebate). The Model S doesn't even have a gasoline engine, goes over 7 times farther than the Volt on a single charge, can go from 0 to 60 in under 6 seconds, and looks a hell of a lot better than the Volt IMO.

If GM uses this new laboratory to produce cars with no gasoline engine (all electric), I'm on board. But if they use it to push this ridiculous Volt and other similar hybrids onto the market, it'll be just another waste of our taxpayer dollars.

Did you realize that you are completely wrong about this? The D900T is not MXM.

So the answer is no, I did not try purchasing an incompatible MXM video card to put in a laptop that it wouldn't fit in. I also said I didn't buy the laptop, nor would I ever buy Alienware. Please read the post and know your hardware before responding.