Reminds me of the infamous Deus Ex boat bug.

For those that aren't aware, the original Deus Ex was released when pirated games were heavily distributed via sneakernet and usenet in the form of spanned 2 MB (or 2.88-- it's been a while) RAR images. Needless to say, this was a lot of diskettes for the games that were coming out on CD at the time, so the cracking teams would cut out every ounce of fat that they possibly could: cutscenes, non-vital sound effects, you name it. The games ran, but you were likely to miss a lot of story and fluff.

An early Deus Ex rip went through the same process, but for some reason would just stop at an early point in the game-- specifically, when you hopped on a police boat and sailed off to the next level. It turned out that the scripts used to drive the in-game cutscenes weren't designed to fail cleanly, and one of the missing sound effects caused this one to hang partway through.

People with pirated copies started complaining and looking for tech help with this baffling bug. It didn't take the devs long to figure out what was going on, and only took slightly longer for people who'd paid for it to start leaping down the throats of anyone asking for help getting past the 'buggy' cutscene.

...for this to go down in history with the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon.

...but only so I could find out when they actually had any decent leads, or found the perpetrators. Between rumours on the Internet and rumours being thrown up by the traditional media, there wasn't any point in seriously following things until then.

The problem with your suggestion is twofold, simply stated:

A) People are easily convinced of falsehoods, and nowhere near so easily convinced otherwise when the truth comes to light.

B) Companies that can afford to throw tens of thousands of dollars/sterling/euros at someone for complaining about less than two hundred can just as easily afford public relations efforts to concoct and reinforce damaging lies about people they feel are a threat, feeding back into A.

Later, Kerrigan discovers that she's the only entity in the Swarm that can handle a bra clasp.

I really wish I had mod points, because White Flame hits the nail right on the head. Small local businesses need the Internet like a fish needs a bicycle. A blogspot page for events, maybe a simple '90s style page to show off bits of inventory and provide contact information, and that's really all they need at most.

Shit, I'm a gamer and I've spent on average a hundred bucks on upgrades a year for probably the last decade. With the exception of the occasional Cryengine game, there's been very little released in the last several years that demands (or even just begs) for regular, massive upgrades.

That was my reaction. I suspect they're going to wildly misread the 'subversive Star Trek' theme and make it so Roj Blake has more space-sex than James Kirk.

I hate to break it to you, but under that kind of model you'd probably be watching four channels worth of serene blue nothing. Cable packages subsidize less-popular channels, which includes... Syfy, TLC, the History channel, not that they're huge losses at this point, and basically anything else that isn't driven by one of the major basic networks or popular premium channels like HBO. Even they'd be impacted, because while advertising is a huge source of income, contracts with cable providers provide steady baseline funding as well.

In a nutshell: A lot of the crap you don't watch is ultimately funding the stuff that you do.

Anyone with the gumption to claw their way out of an unmarked grave deserves an interview at the very least.

Ask a Zentraedi.

Whitelists are a fair idea in principle, but in practice malware-laden ads distributed by promiscuous ad networks are a problem. While reputable networks allow sites to tailor ad campaigns and block specific ads or types, they often trade spots among themselves which can result in bad ads slipping into rotation despite the safeguards. And 'bad' can range from 'loud, expanding Flash' to 'welcome to the botnet, comrade'.

Sites that are particularly large, or under a big umbrella, Slashdot for example, can avoid this kind of thing by running their own in-house network... but smaller sites don't have that kind of luxury. There still needs to be an interest in vetting submitted ads by those internal networks as well-- curse.com is basically an ad network with forums and MMO add-ons floating on top, and they have a bad history of serving malware and spear-phishing attacks to their users.

Mmmno. If you really think that there's one single reason why Linux has never swept the non-nerd world by storm, then I have an open-sourced bridge to sell you.

The formulation might be different. American soft drinks tend to use high-fructose corn syrup, which lends a different flavour than the glucose/fructose mix that's typical in Canada, and worlds away from stuff made with cane sugar.

Oh, that's easy. Take it down for 'improvements', set up a Kickstarter, and promise an assortment of Tux-themed gewgaws bought through Dealextreme in exchange for pledging at a variety of levels.