Also the article is so general that perfectly innocent tracking can't be distinguished from malevolent tracking. Do I realize that part of Google's search ranking involves tracking visits to a page, and to eliminate spoofing will keep a pageranking from being driven by a single IP address clicker? Yes. I want and expect that.

If they are selling particular information about MY search to insurance companies, I'll be as furious as anyone else here on /. But the description of tracking in the article is so general that I can't tell how concerned to be, which is equally annoying. I hate false positives.

Exactly (and this point was made by Dixie_Flatline several points above).

When I listen to Pandora, I specifically expect and want to discover new music I haven't heard before. I'm specifically wanting to hear something new. When I like something I hear, I look it up on Spotify, where I can listen on demand to an entire album. So Pandora really is more like radio and should pay less per track. Nothing to see here.

Another point that should be made is that I'm 53 and have already paid for most of the music I listen to on Spotify. I own it, I'm just listening to it on Spotify instead of LP or CD. So most of the artists being paid by Spotify wouldn't have earned a cent when I play their music. And statistically, that's true of MOST of the music on Pandora, although I hope to hear new stuff, I mostly hears things I already paid for.

All pretty reasonable, rational, and fair.

I'm not a climate science denier, but the people coming up with these headlines (the sky will disappear) are not doing scientists any favors with this "morning doom and gloom" machinery.

Sony should be admired for diversifying decades ago. In the early 90s, they were one of the most respected device manufacturers, but they saw that the money was in content and diversified into Playstation and Sony Pictures. Microsoft moved into hardware (Xbox), and Apple stayed in both. Samsung stayed purely hardware, for the most part. Palm tried to keep both OS (GeOS) and make hardware.

You could fault a lot of Sony's moves, but they survived the turmoil in display devices. Did not make a big smartphone play early enough. But just saying they should return to hardware manufacturing is really ignorant of Pacific rim economies, Japan in particular. They may not succeed, or may retreat into a camera niche, but Sony aspired well and failed where many others failed.

Thanks for explaining it so well. I was trying to think it through, how concerned I should be. So, idiot I guess. Curious who would the "plant" be working for. I take it that you believe NSA is in the business of taking trade secrets from companies like Siemens of Germany and giving the engineering to... um. USA corporations? Or multinational? Because Siemens medical equipment, CAT scans, etc., are.... um. Yeah, I'm still an idiot. Can you 'splain some more?

Here's how I see this. For the average person, if an actual NSA person was paid to follow them or look at them, the NSA would get tied up and bored to death. There are far too many people using Sim cards than there are government employees.

So second, could this private information be used by a rogue NSA employee, say an old college boyfriend to stalk or "peep" into private correspondence? Snowden has absolutely demonstrated that risk, that any of us could be somewhat randomly spied on. But the odds of any single one of us being examined is still as low as previously stated. Annoying but low actual risk.

Could a dictator use this access to information to cow us into subservience? Seems a stretch. In the USA example, if a Democratic/Republican president let slip they were using this info collected by the NSA for political means, the opposing party would hang them with it.

So the most likely use is, as NSA claims, to catch bad guys. Saw John Doe used porn, saw Jane Doe was in AA, but no time or interest in that, they are looking for Bin Laden.

The second most likely use would be a politically active person trying to change the status quo. Like Martin Luther King. If FBI Director J.Edgar Hoover had his hands on this kind of access, the USA would have been screwed. But then again, they assassinated King, and today it would be much harder to cover that up. The FBI directors now have to worry about a Snowden in their midsts, which should keep them more honest.

Mathematically, I'm extremely unlikely to be affected by Bin Laden... the mathematical of terrorist threats is smaller than getting hit by a car (for now). And the likelihood I'd be targeted by a college stalker or NSA agent is also very small. So is the risk that my social security number will be picked off of dropbox. The risk here is that a true intellectual agent of change will be targeted, or that Al Quaeda or ISIS will screw the international banking system so bad that the entire world economy is screwed up and people panic and break into stores and start killing each other. So I sleep at night hoping NSA is as concerned about the latter as much as I am, and hope to God they also fear and realize the precedent set by J. Edgar Hoover.

In the final analysis, I hope people with liberal arts degrees choose to go work for the NSA. The one former employee of NSA that I know personally had a liberal arts degree, and I hope she's not alone. I hope people who care about and worry about the things I worry about are working there, and sometimes I fear the reaction to the NSA is similar to the reaction of hippies in the 60s to business and capitalism... all the agents of conscience were afraid to get their consciences dirty, refused to go into business management, and we had 2-3 decades of business management dominated by assholes. We want more Snowdens in the NSA, and hyperbolizing the agency's "evil" is perhaps the greatest risk.

And is false information "anti-matter"? Could be we will witness the end of the universe in a flame war on /.

Well, anyway the drones will be produced privately elsewhere soon if not already. No one's putting this genie back in a bottle. Reminds me of when it was illegal to export 286 computers in the late 1990s.

"Click to Hit" Go online, create a user profile, enter photo of your enemy into our facial recognition software, and our private security drone will execute your enemy in 3-5 business days.

One must be long overdue. It's not like, super certain, that current civilization will last longer than the Ptolemaic Dynasty.

"For every "terrorist" they track through the mall, how many ordinary Joes like me who like their privacy are also tracked and stored in huge databases for all time?"

Indeed, all of them.

Have you noticed you can go into Best Buy or Staples, pick up a camera or look at a printer you never searched for online, and you find ads for the device on Facebook? Didn't notice? Give it a try. It's far beyond this 2013 (minority) report http://www.businessinsider.com...

According to in depth research performed on several subjects throughout the 1960s and 70s, being paranoid makes you drive slower, while lowered inhibitions tend to increase driving speed.

And loud music was the original "gateway drug".

The model is only as interesting as "prisoners" are defined simply by X and Ys. What if a prisoner X has a reputation for having 'defected' in similar situations? what if prisoner Y has a reputation as being a stand up guy, "honor among theives" type?

Trying to extrapolate social behavior, reasoning and evolution from such a simple model is like trying to build a house with nothing but circles and squares. It can be done, but nature observes triangles. Add a third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh prisoner, put them on a lifeboat with enough food for 5 people, and try the math again.