However, a company's name mistakingly placed on a list of entities for or against any bill shouldn't equate to slander.

It isn't about someone mistakenly putting a name on the list, it is about someone purposefully putting a name on the list. Slander is when you say something you know is not true. Someone could spend all day putting Slashdot on that list and X amount of people are going to see it. Some will eventually learn the truth, but there will always be those who forever think Slashdot supported SOPA.

2 very different games, I don't understand why people compare them in the first place.

Yeah, it would be like comparing Apples and Microsofts.

Or maybe they exist because big corporations refuse to sell their goods for a 100% discount.

This is the type of summary we can expect now that Cmdr Taco is gone.

"Seriously officer, this guy had a knife and he forced me to steal this big screen TV that is in my living room. I was going to return it after the riots were over!"

People riot after their favorite team wins a championship. It is not always touched off by something violent.

To create a mob you need a lot of people. Social media is definitely making it much easier to do things as a mob. At first it was used for good(?) with those flash mobs of people performing musical numbers. Now it is being used to rob stores. Without Twitter and Facebook, it would be next to impossible to coordinate what is going on currently in Britain. So, unfortunately, technology is to blame.

This could absolutely compromise the investigations. If the emails are leaked the defense could possibly get them suppressed and made unusable in court.

Speech recognition for purposes of translating words into text still has some way to go. There are hundreds of thousands of common words used in different ways and programming for all those possibilities is impractical. But if you have a specific word or phrase you want to pick out, it is hugely reliable and has been for decades. Haven't you ever called customer support before? So if the China wants to filter the word protest, it is trivial with the right equipment.

Should have been article title.

Their entire advertising campaign could be: we are not AT&T. They would still get more iPhone users in 1 year than AT&T managed in ~3 years.

Of course there are other complaints about the iPhone. The point is the #1 reason people either don't like the iPhone or have not purchased it is because it is only available through AT&T. When the iPhone is offered through other carriers, AT&T will likely lose many customers. But overall Apple would gain the people waiting for it to go multi-carrier, plus the people who hate Android, and the people who don't get good AT&T coverage in their area. Google is already maxed out their customer base, Apple has tons of room for growth in the US.

When you have 100+ handsets sold by every carrier under the sun, of course you will sell more. Microsoft just dropped the ball and Google swooped in to take advantage of Apple's contract with AT&T. If it ended a couple years ago who knows if Android would even exist today. When it expires and Apple is allowed to sell the iPhone with whoever they want, Google is going to be hurting. The only complaint about the iPhone is you can only use it on AT&T. Compare that to all the criticisms of Android phones (bad user interface, slow upgrades, no upgrades, poor support, etc.)

Do you want the government who has it anyway or do you want Facebook who will sell it. Each has their own advantages and disadvantages. I personally would prefer the government to be in charge of my identification because they already handle it will passports, social security and driver's license. It only hurts me to give all this information to a company like Facebook.

Credit card companies are certainly not happy with the amount of internet fraud they have to deal with. If the US had a standardized system for online identification, you can bet it would be required by all websites who want to continue to accept credit card transactions. It would be nice to ship packages once again to somewhere other than my billing address.