I echo somebody else's comment above that comparing this to a school board is disingenuous. A court order is far different than a school board going fishing.

For this case, a court order for information from a person's web account should have a way to subpoena the information necessary without requiring disclosure of passwords. That's reasonable, just like how with a court order a suspect must provide the keys and/or open up a safe on their property if such is specified in a search warrant. It's similar. The problem comes that with some models of computer security, that information is not available without a privacy violation (giving up a password). It's quite a conundrum.

That being said, in this case (and many others) I'm shocked that Facebook (& friends) don't have some type of "legal request mechanism" that would work as a "backdoor" for this type of thing. They can reset passwords and such, so it's hard to believe they don't have a mechanism to handle requests from legal systems for a history of posts, images, etc. The law should always require a warrant to access it if it's not publicly posted, but other than that, I'm surprised it isn't already there.

Click on a link from your email appearing to be from your bank/microsoft/your friend you trust, and then download the .exe and run it. You're compromised. Phishing and/or social engineering still works, and it doesn't even need a person on the other end to work.

Not the same thing IMO. A great amount of malware requires that the user does something. So "download our .exe and ignore the security prompts!" is still a very large section of things, and has nothing to do with a secure OS or not. Programs running as a user has as many rights as a user themselves. That's what most virus software is for: detecting that you're trying to run something that's "bad" but it's not exploiting security holes to do so. It's just running with "full trust" just like any other program on your machine, and behaving badly.

Exactly. The international report, we're doing not so hot. The one funded by one of the largest communications companies in the country who has an interest in the status quo: we're awesome!

Gee, you think there might be some bias?

I have not bought ANY fps games on consoles because of this issue (closest is metroid, and that at least had lock-on, and such, and so was OK). And there ARE exclusives, so no, I can't necessarily play some games, so the company is losing money because of this.

If you want to put out separate matches for each type, then fine, have you able to set up matches with controller-only, K+M only, or mixed. But don't just cut it out entirely. They ARE losing sales from this policy.

There was a rumour a while back that the UT players on the PS3 using M+K were just destroying the controller players. Which is not a surprise to me in the least.

I too hope this to become universal. It is the #1 reason I can't play FPSs on consoles, because I feel like I'm playing with one hand tied behind my back when using the controller.

This is what seems most plausible to me. Somebody had a number about the laser power (fraction of a second pulse, but still), and somebody else put that out as the energy source's power.

This is the thing: why isn't he making this directly into a small generator system before making it portable? Scale it up to the point that the turbine problem is a non-issue, and sell THAT. That would prove that the energy source itself is viable (economically too) and not a pipe dream.

Basically, that he hasn't already done so makes me skeptical that there isn't "something else" wrong here. Doesn't pass the smell test IMO.

Now having said that, I hope I'm wrong. I love this idea. But still, I'd like to know why this part hasn't been done already. This smells like trying to get investor dollars on something that MIGHT work instead of selling something that DOES work.

Speaking of 45C... you'll never EVER see a temperature in Egypt officially reported as 45.0 degrees C or higher. The reason is that there's a law on the books that says that if it's that high, it's "too hot to work" and thus people need to, by law, given the day off while it's that hot if working w/o A/C. So the "solution" for the government is to never report higher than 44.9C.

Really. My wife and I were in Egypt last year (an awesome tour), and a thermometer somebody had showed 58C (this was near Farafra in the western desert), but the digital road sign said the temperature was 44.9. We asked about it, and the locals told us what I just said above.

So up to 45 in Cairo? Sure, but probably even higher.