I personally believe that revealing things after the fact is the cowardly and less effective way of dealing with the issue. Doesn't it make more sense to bring deceit and lies to people's attention when public pressure can be used to change government behavior while those issues are ongoing? Waiting until the issues are in the past is going to leave us with only one thing: regret

The problem with reducing pricing in general, any product or service, doesn't matter which, is that the lower you reduce a price and the more often companies do it, the perceived value of that item drops and won't recover for years. (it can take up to seven years for prices to return to what consumers perceive as “normal.” - Martin Lindstrom, Neuromarketer)

There are two downsides and one upside to this:

The downside: Indy developers continually discounting their product means they will never be able to get away with selling it at full price after. If they weren't careful with their pricing, ie, the discounted price being below cost (if 'cost' can even easily be determined for a digital copy of a game) they could find themselves in trouble with funding future development.

The upside? Combined with Steam sales for big games, the discounted prices are going to devalue PC Games as a whole. You're going to see many more sales in the future since it's going to be tough to make the same money as they were used to otherwise.

Downside, part two: Publishers that aren't PC exclusive might see this as a liability for producing games for Windows/OSX. Console game sales aren't likely to be affected (or affected very little) by the devaluation of PC game prices. It can be a smaller market, the development is more complicated and the expected price for new games is dropping. The end result is obvious.

I'd also like to add: 3) What are the consequences of being caught vs the consequences in letting the event happen? 3.5) Are the odds in your favour enough to take the chance given the answer to the above?

In this case, the information is out there. Most of the damage is already done. How much damage is would even be avoided by removing it from trending topics?

Now think about how much damage it would cause to get caught asking/forcing major companies like Google and Twitter to help "reduce" the damage. I'm not only talking about the damage to the government. I'm also talking about the damage to Google and Twitter and other involved sites.

Not to mention, for a government who would go to lengths to force/ask Google and Twitter to remove trending topics, they've done a pretty awful job at reducing the damage in other mediums.

Conspiracy theories in my mind always come down to two basic questions: How many people would would need to be in the know in order to pull off such a large scale deception? And how much do you trust those people to stay silent about the conspiracy?

Let's put it this way: Top secret documents accessible by people with reasonably high security clearance are now making their rounds around the web and news media. Do you really think nobody is going to think twice about involving potentially thousands of employees in covering up secrets when clearly it can't work for some of the most classified documents in the world?

The site Lamebook.com, a ...I guess you could call it a satire site is also in legal trouble.

Agree completely

Two weeks ago I tried to find a new release PC game in a mall that has 4 stores that at one point used to stock PC games. Now, every last one of them is down to maybe one rack with awful, awful discount games and maybe a recent release if it's already managed to sell 20 million copies. Maybe it's due mostly to strategic selling by store owners, but around here I think it mostly comes down to the big companies buying up the shelf space.

Companies like Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo will shell out millions of dollars to ensure they get guaranteed prime shelf space. With no similarly sized PC Game companies able to do the same.

But don't go feeling sorry for companies like EA that are getting squeezed out of stores. EA was notorious for shelf buying years ago to the point where each of their games (including the Sim Towers and Sim Ants) would get multiple facings while competitors games (like the original Half Life) had to be turned to the side to squeeze into the remaining space.

You're oversimplifying a very, very, very complex system. We're getting better at creating vegetarian diets that can fulfill our bodies needs, but we're not quite there yet. And to remove the effects of livestock completely you're talking about a vegan diet and not a vegetarian one (A milk producing cow still requires an inefficient amount of grain to keep producing milk). And there are zero vegan diets that come anywhere close to meeting our bodies needs. And the diets that come closest are thanks to the import of grains and supplements from the other side of the planet (the transport of which kind of defeats the purpose now doesn't it?) So while we might have a Whole Foods down the street from us, the majority of the world does not. So to expect everyone to be able to survive on a vegan diet without the means to stay healthy doing it is rather short sighted.

A more sensible solution would be to reduce our meat intake to more reasonable levels and try to eliminate cows and other inefficient ruminants as long as we can ensure we get proper levels of nutrients elsewhere.

A big chunk meaning 1.3 percent?

I suppose this depends on the field you're talking about. Physics and chemistry are less susceptible to corruption, but then you get fields like human biology, psychology and social 'sciences' whose data can easily be subjected to manipulation or bias. To suggest that all scientists are fully immune from bias when it comes to qualitative results is asinine and dangerous.

If science has taught us anything is that we should question everything. Never trust a source to be 100% correct.

Agreed.

Two supporting points:

1) Facebook didn't even have a positive cash flow until 2009. That's an awfully long time to wait around for your financial model to really kick in if you had lofty financial goals in the beginning. That was back when Facebook had about 300 Million users. Passing the 100 Million user mark (Hell, the 10 million user mark) without implementing a strong financial model makes it pretty clear to me that they were a) playing it by ear and b) weren't that eager about making tons of cash (because they certainly could have at that point).

2) Zuckerman had continually turned down enormous amounts of money for the site while also giving up significant shares in the company to third parties which would be quite contradictory behavior for someone motivated by money.

Computer technology seems to be one of the few industries left that really seems to continually push the limits in innovation. I fear the day when this isn't true.

They need one more option:

Give users a quick link to display a -clean- Facebook page and news feed. A lot of people are getting fed up with seeing non-stop wall posts for farmville and news feed items and application requests. I've known several people to leave the site for this exact reason. Sure, you can block various applications from showing up on your news feed, but as far as I know you can't hide them from other people's pages. Even if you could do this, it would be tedious to constantly filter out every application's posts. Additionally it's also quite possible that people may want to see the items only sometimes.

Forcing people to manually block applications (ie, income generating advertisers) only does 2 things: 1) Piss people off due to the tediousness of it and 2) Permanently eliminates those advertisers ability to make money off you. Wouldn't it just make sense to make people happy and at the same time not cut off advertisers completely?

When I try to discuss this with religious people, they often argue that my 'moral code' is based off of Christian teachings and wouldn't exist otherwise.

What they fail to understand is that their moral codes were created for very sensible reasons that likely predates their religion by millenia. We are social creatures, this is how we evolved. Our ability to function within groups has always been so crucially important to our survival. So within those groups, rules naturally form to make sure that group functions as well as possible to help give it better chances of survival. In small groups "for the good of the community" reasons work fine and dandy, but when groups grow beyond Dunbar's Number then more extreme measures have to be taken (as people will lose connection with the 'community' in larger groups and no longer feel as obligated to contribute to it). And the desire to avoid eternal damnation works well for the most part.

16 Labels on my personal email and about a dozen filters

75+ labels on my work email and about 3 dozen filters

Frankly, I'm going to be pissed if I did all that work for nothing

You're right on that point. However give it enough time after it's achieved generic status and you could start losing that market share and have a very tough time maintaining it or getting it back. But that is mostly just true with physical products. In the land of the Internet websites will be born and die out long before this would ever be an issue.

You can't blame FB execs for wanting/expecting their company/product to last forever though.