As a geek I'm honor-bound to demand some sort of support for this mathematically interesting statement. Were ebooks really adopted at a rate proportional to the number of ebooks already out there? It's plausible, but sadly I suspect this is just careless hyperbole.

for (;;);

/* We owe him a great deal. I'm glad to have benefited from his work and will honor his memory. */

Agreed, however...

...the BART authorities did have an obligation to keep that equipment turned on for normal, paying riders. We're not talking about a private business here; BART is a public, government-run facility and those transponders were paid for by our taxes and fares. They were shut off out of needless and stupid paranoia and it wouldn't have helped prevent an unlawful protest even if one did materialize, so it inconvenienced riders including me for no benefit whatsoever.

And yes, the inconvenience was relatively small. But do you think it's wise to let them take an inch here?

I'm surprised that more people aren't complaining about the limit on purely-offline, single-player characters. (I.e., you can't have any, and can have only ten online characters at a time, even if they never see any multiplayer.) It's enough to keep me from buying the game. I'm a chronic altitis sufferer and I won't be able to relax and enjoy the game if I know I'm tapping a finite resource when I click the "New Game" button. Even if the game is good—especially if it's good—I'd rather avoid the temptation to get invested and be all the more be frustrated when I eventually hit the ten-character limit. Better to just play Diablo II and Torchlight instead.

And by the way, the game will still be cracked.

But then what is the value of showing the defendant "what it was like to have something he really valued taken from him" if the court hasn't even concluded yet that he's guilty of taking anything of value from anyone else?

Hideo Kojima (of Metal Gear Solid fame) had a similar idea early in his career and apparently has been trying to implement it ever since. His idea was for a game that would erase itself if the player died in-game, forcing him or her to go buy a new copy if they wanted to try to play it again. This was a purely artistic idea, though, meant to force the player to empathize with their character's simulated mortality, and as far as I can tell wasn't motivated by greed. Luckily, all his colleagues realized how crazy it was and never let him get it off the ground.

Doing this to kill the secondhand market is just despicable, though. I hope this turns into a scandal for Capcom. We can all point out how DRM harms legitimate customers and secondhand business until we're blue in the face, but this is going to do it in such an obvious way (that's doesn't even have the pretense of anti-piracy!) that it should get people's attention.

I interpret "evolutionary scientist" as a scientist specializing in evolutionary biology.

Obligatory XKCD counterpoint! http://xkcd.com/763/

I love Civilization. I've been a big fan of the series since I played Civ II at the age of 13 or so. Just the other day I enjoyed getting reacquainted with Alpha Centauri. But when I found out last year how Civilization V was being released—with every little civ and scenario nickel-and-dimed out as DLC, with a pitifully small selection of starting content for your fifty bucks and it being painfully obvious that they were withholding finished content to sell it to you later—I said "no thanks". Some day, when they're done shilling their so-called "expansion content" and the complete, ne-plus-ultra pack is available on Steam for $20 or $30, maybe—maybe—I'll buy it and find out if there was a good game under all the shameless greed.

So I hope it means something when I say that StarCraft 2 doesn't seem to be done that way at all. It plays like a finished game, with no game mechanics visibly held back to make the expansions more appealing. Blizzard hasn't tried to squeeze any more money out of it with DLC; on the contrary, they've pushed out free bonus maps as they did for their other RTSs. The campaign's story is the right length, and feels like a complete, self-contained episode in a series. If (as they plan) each expansion gives us another equally-sized chunk of story and some new game mechanics as a bonus, I think that's a fair product to sell and I'll happily buy them. And in case anyone from 2K Games is listening, take note: this is why I happily bought the expansions to Civilization III and IV also.

And just so you don't think I'm a fanboy, I don't think everything is perfect with SC2. The all-online model is obnoxious, forcing you to download custom maps through an "app store" is hideously stupid, and the DRM and "you get only one username and profile" thing still make me want to punch someone in the head. (Maybe I want another name! Maybe I think it would be fun to start over earning achievements on a blank slate! Did you think about that when you were trying to make the next Steam or Facebook or whatever? *pant* *heave*)

I've often read that remembering something is a constructive process. I tend to think of it like checking out a revision from source control software. All it has are a bunch of diffs and pointers, and it executes a process on them to construct a snapshot of what the code looked like at some particular time. From that perspective, the snapshot is a new piece of output, even though it's cached information from the user's perspective. Human memory is said to work the same way: it's reassembled, not retrieved.

So, if a person has eidetic memory, then one would expect them to have a better than average "ability to extract what's meaningful out of the immensity of stimuli the brain encounters". On the other hand, since a defining trait of eidetic memory (as the term is often used) is being able to recall any detail and not just "what's meaningful", it must also entail exceptional ability to store and recall mass amounts of raw data (the diffs and pointers in my analogy). But nonetheless, I'd expect them to be exceptionally strong at filtering and reconstruction as well if they're able to form that data into coherent memories and verbalize them.

Then I suppose the hyperlearning hypothesis is saying that the reconstruction process breaks down because the data is too abundant and disorganized. Maybe I can extend the file storage analogy a little further: a hard disk that's so full that you can't defrag it? Or one where deleted files stay behind and come up instead of whatever you tried to overwrite on those disk sectors? Corrupt file system table?

IANAN/P (I am not a neurologist/psychologist). This is all my layman's, Wikipedia-level understanding and would welcome elaborations or corrections.

Nope, citation actually has next to nothing to do with it, at least under U.S. law. This is a critical difference between copyright infringement (a legal matter) and plagiarism (an ethical convention held among academics and journalists), and is commonly misunderstood.

Not to mention that mysterious gaps in your collection will probably appear the minute Amazon gets squeamish about sexual morality or discovers they screwed up the licensing.

And they should have eaten the liability for selling something they shouldn't have. They had no right to force their customers to share the burden of their error by screwing with something that was theirs, not even if they provided refunds.

The analogy is inapplicable. The point is they weren't selling a physical copy, they were selling a digital copy, and they dishonestly reneged on the transaction.

False. If I pay to download an MP3 or PDF over FTP, that file is mine and the seller is never going to be able to delete it (at least not without engaging in some black-hat stuff). Paying for ephemeral permission to access something within a walled garden is totally different.

I've been interested in this approach to public surveillance for some time now. I consider myself a strong privacy advocate and I absolutely don't condone any encroachments of privacy in the home or personal communication, but I also try to be realistic about expectations of privacy in public places.

An analogy: if you're relying on a crappy cryptographic protocol for security, that's often worse than no security at all, since it gives you the illusion of safety and leads you to put sensitive data places where it can be cracked. When I hear people decrying government-operated surveillance cameras on public streets, I sympathize and often agree with them, but I also wonder if they have the same sort of illusion of privacy when they're on the sidewalk, camera or no. The government isn't collecting any information with that camera that wouldn't also be accessible to a crank with a window to look out of. Granted, the government has a lot of power to collate and abuse that information, but even that observation seems to assume the absence of a sufficiently dedicated network of private cranks with access to a sufficiently large number of windows. These days, that might be a poor assumption.

So maybe it would be a good thing if we did have surveillance cameras in public places so long as they were streamed to the Internet where anyone could watch. I wouldn't say I'm especially comfortable or happy with the idea, but it might be the net best choice. Some sort of crowdsourcing, whatever problems it might invite, would at least give the cameras some chance of being used to catch actual criminals, which statistically the government is not succeeding at. And it would give us a more realistic understanding of modern privacy and encourage the voting public to have a clearer discussion about where the cameras don't go. It would suck that $person can watch you walk into $embarrassingplace from their desk, but they can already do that if they've got a gossipy friend with a smartphone who's in the right place at the right time.