When you haggle over a price, do you immediately reveal the maximum you are willing to pay? And do you expect the seller to immediately reveal the minimum they are willing to accept? Or do you keep "secret", at least for a time, these amounts?

Nope, it works both ways. None of the negotiating parties are willing to reveal up front the maximum concessions they are willing to make without first knowing something about what the other parties are willing to concede.

There is some place for secrecy in negotiation. If our negotiators are trying to get the best deal for us, they don't want to reveal what concessions they are willing to make until they have a sense of the concessions other parties are willing to make.

The problem is that, at least in the US, the trade negotiating agency has its priorities set by a limited number of industry advisory groups, and these groups are not representative of US interests. The composition of the groups is about 20 years behind the times, so as a result you have a trade agency pushing for copyright restrictions without thinking about how they will affect the technology industry.

The trade agency also expends a disproportionate amount of bargaining capital on intellectual property, thus reducing what it is able to accomplish in other areas, such as labor and environmental standards.

Finally, the trade agency writes its own interpretation of US law into free trade agreements. It's usually pretty close to what US law actually says, but sometimes it misinterprets it, or US law changes and the FTA text ends up saying something completely different.

In a sense, we've always had real-time reporting, since you've always been free to go outside and look at your meter whenever you want.

Well, the US operates the GPS system itself, which is a distinct advantage in a time of worldwide military conflict.

Probably contravenes typical /. viewpoint, but smart meters are great. I have one and love it. I get a feed of its data and create a daily plot based on that information (see here).

Smart meters allow accurate time of day pricing, which can help reduce overall consumption and reduce costs for everyone, customers included. It allows the utility company to know more about where demand is and how it varies, and have a better sense of the condition of the grid (especially useful in outages).

In theory I could deduce all sorts of things about you based on your energy usage given enough resolution. Yes, maybe the police will order the utility company to produce records for a person they suspect is running a grow operation in their basement (though probably just the total usage would be enough to deduce that).

I don't care for a TV that will record audio all the time, so I won't buy one. Funny that the device I don't have choice over (the meter) actually provides me with real benefits, while other companies are trying to sell me devices that don't offer nearly as much benefit.

Lest we forget: http://www.wired.com/2010/08/a...

Why would it be different? I don't know, maybe because mammalian brains' learning mechanisms and the way they react to stimuli are shaped by a series of useful heuristics that arise from the bio-chemical structure of their brains, and it's not at all clear that there would be direct analogues in an artificial brain?

When I lived in Virginia, I saw two launches from Wallops - one at night, which was spectacular, and one during the day, which I could barely make out but was still fun to try and spot. Viewed them from Arlington and DC respectively. I've since moved to Connecticut, but I'm going to try and spot it tonight.

Whoa, whoa, slow down. I think you're a little off-base here. Be reasonable!

... It's probably going to be more like "you owe us $80 million for the $100,000 you hid in bitcoin".

The real danger to your privacy comes once you've joined the network, giving it your real MAC address, and start sending a bunch of data around that isn't encrypted end-to-end (like web browsing).

Well, it sorta-does. They have first dibs on over a third of earnings, which I suspect is far more than the single biggest shareholder gets. Doesn't come with all the bells and whistles like voting in board members, mind you...

Or just right-click on the start button and click Network Connections.

This refers to something that was added in Windows 8/Server 2012. There's lots of nice stuff there, actually. http://withinwindows.com/blog/...

At a guess: the sale may come with contractual obligations -- e.g. if IBM has agreed to design and manufacture chips for a certain third party for a certain length of time.