more than banks hands down. My family are invested in a regional bank and I just got an e-mail stating that they are ending my free checking and that if I don't deposit more money they will charge me $5 a month.

Google may not be perfect and they screw up sometimes but they are the kind of screw ups you glance at shame on you and move on. I mean sure they were taking public wifi data but cmon' it was public data and it was just random packets so that they do location services. Heck, I have an incredibly hard time finding unsecured networks as almost all routers nudge users to security a lot more then they used to. My friend's aptartment has no internet and there are 15 wifi networks and all of them are secure.

Anyways, how can credit unions be shamed for "collusion", they aren't even a for-profit company. Credit unions are the closest thing the banking sector has to a charity so saying they are colluding is like saying the United Way, Red Cross, and Goodwill are colluding for holding joint event.

Take that pirate haters!

Even a pirate can recognize the importance of independent games.

This has been said time and time again. Some Rep tried to do some grandstanding "resolution" but what we really need is a law protecting people's rights to video tape public officials. You can add whatever "under reasonable conditions, without directly impeding, only in a public place (street, public building etc.)" as long as the general act of video taping a cop under normal circumstances (such as in your own damn vehicle) is not a crime in itself.

What the motorcyclist did was stupid and he deserved to be booked with at least careless driving and at most reckless endangerment but the cop shouldn't have pulled a gun out without identifying himhelf as such. The correct thing would have een to flash his badge/say "I'm a police officer, dismount immediately" and THEN pull out his gun and THEN point it at him if he didn't comply.

In Florida the police officers and FHP don't usually chase speeding motorcyclists because it would endanger other drivers due to the speed and maneuverability of motos and just try and get their tag written down.

Could Microsoft have filed for patents that were any more big brother-ish. I mean having people disclose their health to their potential dates or having employees have to disclose ever aspect of their health to their employer.

I guess Microsoft hasn't designed a system in which 'a camera hangs around your neck and records every aspect of your life' (like the truman show)...oh wait they already did that. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/cambridge/projects/sensecam/

I don't usually believe in conspiracy theories but it isn't really a stretch to think that if the Soviets knew that there was trillions of dollars in minerals in Afghanistan that the U.S. government didn't have any idea that there were minerals in Afghanistan before going in.

I mean we have the most well-funded espionage and intelligence in the world. I feel like if there wasn't a conspiracy going on than we must have the most over payed spies in the world. I mean I'm don't know how easy it would be for the Soviets to keep a secret that huge from us.

Sometimes I wish our government had more conspiracies going on, at least our government would not be as incompetent as we are all lead to believe. But alas, I am not a believer in conspiracy precisely because our government is way too incompetent to actually be able to keep ridiculously huge secrets. I mean some intelligence analyst just leaked 250,000 intelligence documents to wikileaks.

This is pretty spooky, I mean the conspiracy theories are kind of warranted considering this station's eerie history.

Someone must have been funding a station that has lasted since 1982 and is powerful to be heard world wide. I have done a little bit of amateur radio and I know that in order to do that you need some serious power, a huge antenna, and quite a bit of constant maintenance. It is definitely not a stretch to think that this station was/is run by the Russian Government as at the very minimum for some sort of testing or maybe as an emergency broadcasting system during a disaster.

However, I really doubt its part of the Dead Hand system. I would think they would use something more secure if the dead hand system was under automatic control. If there is any possibility that it is part of the Dead Hand system than the Dead Hand system is certainly a system that requires some sort of human intervention due to possibilities of interference, false positives, or someone over riding the system to send a the activation codes.

Just my 2 cents, I am certainly no conspiracy theorist but it is always fun to think about the possibilities. There is plenty of stuff that we simply don't know about; however, I do hope that the some of the theories are real because than at least I would know that our government has a high enough level of competence to actually keep fool us in a significant way.

Google was honest enough to actually tell everyone they got this information and that they are deleting it. They came clean and didn't use this data for anything. I'm not saying that we should just be completely "no harm no foul", but just think of how many companies collect much much more private data than that and just hide the fact that they collect it.

I mean cmon in this day and age you should have security and all websites that have personal data use HTTPS. Give me a break, a lot of other corps warrant a lot more of our anger like Sony (taking away a feature that was advertised and adding DRM to everything without telling us), Microsoft (for being Microsoft...although Apple is giving them a run for their money), Apple (for completely going off the deep end and becoming "The Man"), AIG/Goldman/B of A/etc. (for taking all our money...and than asking for more of it after they lose all of our money).

Obviously the bad press had some effect. Otherwise they wouldn't have bothered bringing dedicated servers back in a whole nother game if they didn't feel the pressure.

Most of the time after a game company does something once and ignores the bad press the first they just keep on going because there is only so much bad press they can get after doing the same thing again. Just look at Ubisoft. They already went through the bad initial press from their ridiculous DRM. FPS gamers who are part of clans are just more dedicated to the PC than they are too consoles.

People are fine with playing RPGs on consoles but FPSs are a whole different story altogether.

I know that I am one of many people who decided not to buy the last game because taking dedicated servers out of the game basically took out one of the few advantages out of playing a PC game. The reason I prefer PC games when it comes to online first person shooters is because
1. A mouse is just better suited for an FPS.
2. I have a really good PC that I painstakingly built myself.
3. Because of the sense of community you get from going to same server over and over and playing with the same people.

Without a sense of community a game gets boring after a while and it is just the same cycle over and over again. I have joined a few clans but even when I didn't join the server's clan it was still fun to have a loose connection to the regulars on a server.

I play most non-FPSs on my xbox now in days, but you just can't take the PC away when it comes to FPSs.

Good job voting with your wallet everybody.