If there is evidence (even circumstantial) that an individual is a terrorist or plans to carry out illegal activity (or that a given email account or ISP account or forum account or other online identity is connected to terrorism or illegal activity) then that should be sufficient evidence to get a warrant from a court (even a secret warrant if necessary) to allow their communications to be monitored.

My real point is not that we shouldn't be going after the bad guys (we should) but that we shouldn't be using dragnet surveillance on everyone (good and bad) as a way to catch the small percentage of the population who are planning to do bad things.

What I am really trying to say is "we should not use terrorism as an excuse to make the world less secure or less free" (this includes bans or restrictions on encryption, internet censorship, unconstitutional or illegal acts by governments and their agencies, deliberate backdoors in off-the-shelf software and hardware to make it easier to break and wholesale collection and retention of data or metadata without a warrant or any suspicion of illegal activity)

As one of the founding fathers of the United States said, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety"

I dont like the scumbags that shoot up chocolate shops and newspaper offices or crash airplanes into buildings or blow up nightclubs but I would rather see 1000 terrorists go free than to see a single innocent person have their privacy, security, civil liberties or constitutional rights violated.

Its clear from reading here and elsewhere that no-one likes the way Radio Shack hits you with the hard sell on cellphone plans the minute you walk in the door so why are they still doing it? Do they sell enough cellphone plans to clueless sheeple? Do the cellphone carriers pay them too much money for them to give up selling those products? Do they have contracts with the cellphone carriers that prevent them getting rid of the products? Or are their management too clueless to see what's going on in their own company and just how much is being wasted on crap like cellphone plans that they aren't making any money from?

Its not the taxis that have prevented the rail line to the airport, its the operators of the toll road out to the airport (dont know Melbourne well enough to know exactly which road it is). The contracts signed at the time the toll road was built specified that the government wasn't allowed to compete by building a railway line for x amount of time after the road was built.

Blame Jeff Kennett and the liberals for that mess (they signed the contracts and did the deals to build the Western Link toll road), not the taxi drivers.

Verizon and Verizon Wireless are 2 different entities.

How is Origin malware? What does it do that makes it malware?
It does have DRM but (depending on the game) its not exactly rocket science to either remove the DRM or find an existing no-DRM crack for your purchased game.

+1 to this, Miranda IM (my IM client of choice) even pulls executables from SourceForge (infected with the crapware) as part of the update system (it says "hey, there is a new version available" and you press a button whereupon it opens a link to the sourceforge exe in your default browser for you to download and run)

I suspect the alternative (hosting binaries somewhere not-so-scummy) would involve costs the Miranda IM team cant afford to pay...

Some random guys in ski masks shoot up a newspaper office because the newspaper prints something they don't like and all of a sudden most of Europe wants to bring in censorship and restrictions on the freedoms that a democracy is supposed to bring? Isn't that exactly what the terrorists want? Shouldn't we (and by we I mean the democracies of the world and their citizens) be protecting our freedoms in the face of bad people like this?

I dont support terrorists but I also dont support most of the actions that have been taken by governments in the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany and elsewhere in the name of the so-called "war on terror" (there are some measures like strengthening and securing cockpit doors that do make sense though)

Libel laws in the US generally may not be as broad as those in Europe. But try criticizing a company like Monsanto or Cargil or ADM or others in "big agribusiness" (even with the most rigorous proof that what you are saying is true) and see how far you get before being sued under "food libel" laws (which exist to make sure all the nasty stuff the "big agribusiness" companies do stays hidden)

It doesn't matter if the taxes and tariffs in Brazil are set at 0%, 50%, 100% or even 1000%, it wont do a thing to encourage electronic manufacturing in the country. In fact, I suspect there is nothing that the Brazilian government could do that would get electronic manufacturers to build product there short of dropping wages and other costs low enough to make building there (instead of building in super-low-labor-cost countries like China) viable.

I have no idea if the Wii U has been fully hacked but I know for the Wii you can download disk images from the internet, use any of the various exploits out there and easily play pirated games, you dont need optical disks (blank or otherwise)

If the cable companies unbundled the expensive sports channels like ESPN and Fox Sports they could reduce the cost of the new no-sports packages by an amount that is less than the cost of the sports channels but still enough to make people happy they are getting a saving.

If the sports channels cost $10 per month per subscriber, they could reduce the cost of the new no-sports package by $7 and make $3 more in profit from those customers.
Sports customers would also be paying the non-sports cost (and making the cable company the same $3 in profit) plus ALSO paying for the sports pack (which could be priced at $13 in the example meaning that the cable company gets $3 profit from it)

Obviously this is a simplification but with my example, everyone who doesn't want sports earns the cable company $3 more profit (possibly even more depending on whether the subscriber numbers increase as a result of the cheaper no-sports package) and everyone who wants sports earns the cable company $6 more profit.

If Gogo doesn't have the bandwidth to handle streaming video, they should just block the sites outright. Better to do that than to mess with it in this way.

Even without baseband support, if your OS/platform of choice exposes the cell tower ID to the main processor and gives you APIs to trigger it you could have an app that looks for the towers you dont like and when it finds one, switches the phone to airplane mode and gives you a warning. Apple does not provide the relavent APIs (although anyone concerned enough about privacy that they are worried about rogue cell towers shouldn't be using a crApple phone anyway)

Android appears to provide APIs for getting the cell tower ID. Switching airplane mode on cant be done by apps as of Android 4.2 (it was made a protected setting, presumably for valid reasons) but if you root your device you can overcome that limitation.

If you have an N900, you can easily get access to the cell tower ID AND toggle airplane mode via dbus calls.