Before or after de-duplication of the data? Before, yes obviously but if that is still the case after de-duplication then gaining much knowledge from this experiment may prove to be a fools errand.

Most of the EBay sellers I buy from anymore ship directly from Asia. I doubt purchasing from Alibaba would be much different, so long as the seller accepted payment from well vetted processors such as Dwolla, Square, AmazonPayments or even those PayPal creeps.

These guys cannot even figure out how to reinstall display drivers on a Win 7 box and they want to sell me a rendering package? Not gonna happen.

I really miss the days when a computer booted into a shell rather than a GUI. Even launching an application required a modicum of knowledge. Granted, expecting a seven year old to learn shell commands, even something as simple as 'load "*",8,1', might be a bit of stretch. If Mom and Dad booted up Logo and let him draw some pictures algorithmically that would probably be better than simply setting him loose in a point-and-click world.

How long until someone snail-mail spams entire communities with install media for a supposedly mandatory security software package purportedly from the Internet provider who has the dominant market share? Seems like faking a mandatory install security software CD/DVD would be a wonderful way to root unsuspecting sheeple with whatever flavor of malware a blackhat desired.

Crank the difficulty up to hard (as you should with any 14 year old game) and riding the backs of space birds in the land of Xen is as much fun as any other part of the game.

In other words, get off my lawn unless you are going to mow it.

Will 2013 finally be the year we have all been waiting for? That's right, 2013: the year of Android on the desktop.

With a decent camera and WiFi it seems like an old smart phone could be hacked into a rather sweet nannycam. Or with GPS + WiFi you could attach it to your car to track where your teenage children are really going when they need it to go study at a friends house. Thank goodness my parents weren't into smartphone hacking ;-)

So Cheetos dust stains are basically permanent?

And you don't think the Asians will seize upon the opportunity save money by adopting fracking techniques themselves? The west may be ahead of the curve with regard to petrochemical energy production but I really don't see any nation leaving money on the table.

For those of us who don't live way out in the boondocks T-Mobile service is on par with every other carrier.

So you think UEFI boot will be harder to root than iOS or Android devices? Look at the custom chipset in the XBox if you want to see what it takes to make a consumer product moderately well protected against being rooted. I have seen nothing in the secure boot specifications that looks as daunting. What scares the heck out of me is the likelyhood UEFI secure boot will end up being compromised without detection and critical infrastructure will be owned before anyone detects it.

Next thing you know mermaids will be serving coffee on every street corner.

By Philip K. Dick?