It's the guy with the Patent on PAEs that's really raking in the dough.

There is a mentality that assumes that because The Bible says that the end of the world will happen when God wants it to, there is no point doing anything to protect the world. If you can destroy the environment in order to gain wealth and power (and it's really about power, power to abuse other people and impact their lives in negative ways), then that's a good move because The End is foretold and you just want to get what you can before that happens because wealth and success are the keys to the gates of heaven.

It's no surprise that the ultra-conservatives are gaining so much support. People want change, but they don't want to do anything to make it happen themselves - so they put their trust in the people who scream God the loudest.

Aaron Sorkin said it the best in the Newsroom. "The Tea Party are the American Taliban". They only want to destroy, because then they can prove they are right.

It's still a shame that MS have backed down on the always on video. I was looking forward to a all the law suits from MS recording child-pornography with all the naked under 18 y.o's playing on their console having a turned on camera pointed at them.

The other think I love is all the people saying stuff like "OMG Microsoft consoles are dead, the only true gaming platform is Windows" - it's funny to see them not realize the irony. Windows will follow whatever XBox does, just look at Metro.

I kind of agree.

However there are some things that will make this nearly impossible to claim even if you manage to find something.

It needs to be new, which means something they didn't know about.
However, they don't need to tell anyone when they learn about something new, which opens a perfect hole for them to say "Oh that one, we knew about that one" even if they didn't.

The line "a new exploit technique that is capable of bypassing the latest existing mitigations in the newest version of Windows" is also important. Because if gives them another way out of paying for it. "Oh you are using Windows 8 with security patch 8.12.235321, but we are about to release security patch 8.12.235322 which has already fixed that - so you weren't on the latest version."

These are old tricks, which I have seen used by companies for other things where there is supposedly a reward.

Imagine going to Shakespear and saying "Sure we will publish your plays, but every person who buys a copy will get a different version where we change the words and the cadence a bit."

Buy a copy of a play for every actor, all of them have minor variations which cause massive confusion.

Hell, change the Bible randomly; that wouldn't get noticed at all.

If they broke it apart based on OS, apps and services wouldn't it have been a very uneven split? Something like 50/45/5?

More than this, if you copy yourself to a different vessel, your memories get copied. This will include the movies and television you have seen and the music you have listened to.

Copying of movies, television and music in any format is big bad evil according to the wonderful US legislators who take lots of money from record companies and movie studios - so backing yourself up is a copyright violation.

This will be important to remember when the uber wealthy (probably the executives of the same record companies and movie studios) back themselves up. Because then we charge them with illegal copyright violations and get them to vacate their new bodies. Of course by then they will give each other free distribution rights and use it as a hammer to stop the "irrelevant plebs" from ever being able to save themselves.

Until HTML includes DRM and half the stuff you create ends up being unreadable.

Well, really we are probably good for anything that can be opened in a text editor for a long long while; but the point is there. Anything can be lost to data format shifts.

As someone who had to re-type a 80 page document because the company stopped using the software the document was created on, and didn't have a licence for it an no converter found online worked - I can say this does happen.

How many people are going to shell out $600 for software to open something they want to make an edit on? How many are going to just give up and find someone to rekey it, or just give it up as a loss?

With more and more systems including format locks, in 50+ years historians will likely have a lot of trouble finding out details from today. Kind of like it is now when we go to look at archival film from WWII and find it's all faded into obscurity. We have the same problems, just with different causes. Then it was lack of preservation of a medium with a limited lifespan. Now it's storing stuff in formats that will go away as they are improved upon, blocked, or just forgotten about.

Sure if your in your 20s, or even 30s, you probably haven't realized the copy of your grandfathers photos are sitting on a floppy disk in a proprietary format. But when you get older you may encounter these issues.

They have finally sorted their major design requirements.

* Viewers not in the US will have the audio 200ms out of sync from the video.
* The first 45 minutes will be the dps waiting for the tanks and healers to show up.
* The movie will start out with the Horde and Alliance with about even representation, but in the last quarter of the movie the Horde will have 80% of the screen time.
* Melee will get great action shots while the casters need the camera to be stationary to be able to do anything.
* During the action scenes, 1 in 25 cinemas will be required to freeze on a frame for 10-15 second, then play the paused bit back in 1-2 seconds.

If you want to maintain the 'gravy train', then become a religion. You get all the benefits of being a business (scaling from a small business to a multi-national corporation), and you get massive tax breaks, lack of governmental oversight, immunity to many laws where Industrial Relations or Health and Safety are concerned, and the ability to seek legal action against anyone who says your goals aren't good for the community.

What I am really trying to say here is, until Religions lose their special exemptions with regards to money, people and property - the gravy train still exists. It's just only for the very special few. Mostly those who don't need it.

And yet the US is adamant in it's right to enforce it's laws on internet presences that are not based in the US because they are used by US citizens. You can't have it both ways.

More importantly, just cause Facebook is based in the US doesn't mean that's the only law it has to worry about if it does business in other countries. You aren't going to allow foreign owned companies to ignore US laws while operating in the US.

The only way this comment would make any sense would be if Facebook specifically blocked anyone who wasn't a US citizen from using their service. They not only don't do that, they actively advertise and monetize in other countries.

Robots producing food with genetically coded human contraception included. Reduce the birth rate by 50% and the roll on effect is massive. Reduce it by 90% and things change pretty fast.

I stopped playing because Blizzard have gone too far with the "enough content to keep everyone happy" element. Warcraft was always a time sink, but it was manageable. With the speedy rollout of new content (new major patches are on the PTR often before the previous patch is fully open), the change of focus from normal raiding to LFR with it's long queue times, and the extreme amount of work that needs to be done to complete anything now, it's just too much.

I still love the game, and I still want to be able to log on a few hours a week and play my character, but it really is now a fact that unless you can dedicate 8-12 hours a week, you aren't going to come close to being able to complete content before it's replaced.

There is also a personal effect for me that as I am playing a cloth wearer and not living in the US, the game constantly tells me to stop playing. MoP introduced way too many battles that require frequent use of abilities I don't have. Watching a DK or Paladin in blue gear able to easily defeat mobs that are nearly impossible on my higher latency cloth wearer in much better gear, is such a downer it destroys the fun in an instant. More and more World of Warcraft is requiring a US ping time, I used to work with five people who raided weekly, all of them pushing normal and often heroic raiding content. Since MoP came out all of them, without exception, have either stopped playing, or stopped raiding.

I remember wishing Blizzard would hurry up and release content faster, but they have gone way overboard.

This is especially true as the current version of the tax software that pretty much everyone has to use to submit their End of Financial Year tax data only works with Internet Explorer, and has troubles with IE 8+.

As I don't have a machine capable of running IE 6-8 I spoke to an accountant, who told me they collect the data and submit it using IE 7.

I looked, and it is all submitted using http (not https), so there is absolutely no concern about even the minimum amount of security on peoples TAX data. This includes everything from income, dependants, name, address, TFN, phone contacts... the lot. All submitted using http in IE.

Fun times people. Fun times.

This is actually very common for Pearson Vue, and I have never heard of them allowing someone to take the exam again without having to pay full price. It happens so often I wonder if it's part of the revenue stream.
Basically.. "People need certification for work or they wont earn their income, so if we screw them they have no choice but to pay again to get it complete. If this happens to 2% of people, we get an instant revenue bump from those people paying twice."
It's fraud, but no one seems to want to do anything about it.