"You wish you could lower your price and gain sales. Well, there's one thing you can do that will not lower your sales at all, and will probably raise them: drop the DRM."

You heard about what happened to Paradox, didn't you?

Well, more like a Dragunov than an AK-47...

So give the Washingtonian this much credit, he at least caught on that it was Warsaw Pact, not NATO. :)

Not that many IEDs in WOW, at least unless the dwarves have been up to something. :)

You are the kind of person who makes it hard for reasonable opponents of Obama to so much as hold their heads up in public!

More seriously and less Scottishly, this is a very good idea. Read _Achilles in Vietnam_ to learn more about PTSD, and you'll see the point. Remember the need for cameraderie mentioned above; PTSD sufferers need to be able to communicate, and this is the most convenient way. Controlled reenactment of battlefield events would be a very useful addition, as a key part of PTSD treatment is learning to overcome and work past the traumatizing event, but this is a real step forward. Heck, the military acknowledging that PTSD so much as _exists_ is a real step forward.

Also remember that the military is managing to look after itself reasonably well under this administration. We should be very glad that Obama's tsars don't have much interest in the army, and thus he's left Gates in office...

By your logic, there was nothing wrong with Guantanamo Bay.

The right answer is not to dive into the ethically dubious (or the ethically outrageous, in the case of using torture); it's to look for the solution that works best, not the solution that sounds scariest. CCTVs are security theater with particularly creepy overtones; sustained police foot patrols are a better way of helping grandmothers, and anyone else. See also my comment just below, linking to Dalrymple on the lack of police commitment.

Theodore Dalrymple's opinion on the matter is that the police in England just don't bother to solve most crimes -- hardly even to investigate them. That their cameras do such a horrible job of helping criminal investigations shouldn't be a surprise, then; technology is only useful if it's used.

On the other hand, it's merciful that this kind of technology is not used. Privacy is an important thing, and it's not at all true that the only people who have cause to desire it are those who have something to hide; and as to controlling crime, it's foot patrols that work, not surveillance.

Amazon didn't know that it was still under copyright in the US, and didn't have the rights to sell it. When they discovered their mistake, they took it back -- removing the books and refunding the buyers' money. Damages paid to rights-holders are given to compensate for the fact that the violator can't remove every copy of the infringing product they sold; but in this case, they were able to. If this was anything except 1984, this wouldn't have been news at all.

"Smooth Moos" was launched around 1995 -- but the product has so little Internet presence that I think it's pretty much Pepsi's Holiday Special. Coke, beware: you're not Genghis Khan.

I like the idea (and I find myself wondering just how many weapons the game developers have cached :) ), but I think it makes the mistake of assuming that games are sold based on the quality of their story, level design, and the like. I would be among the first to say they should be, but it doesn't seem most games are written that way -- better models and graphics engines are still the competitive focus. This made sense during the growth period of graphics, the late 1990s, but it's less viable now -- it's like late-industrializing countries touting their modernity by building steel refineries and aluminum plants. Graphics are stable now, and the marginal cost for the next step of benefits is higher -- I believe someone on this mentions that _The Chronicles of Riddick_ is about as advanced of graphics as he'd really need in the presence of good content elsewhere -- and game developers need to focus a great deal more on other elements, on quality of storyline and gameplay above all, and less on polygon count. There's precedent for this kind of reinvention to match the new paradigm, too: remember how U.S. Steel is known for the quality of its blog software, and General Motors runs the most popular and profitable search engine on the planet?

Oh, wait.

Maybe not.