The feds have been putting pressure on banks to stop taking accounts for businesses they do not approve of. So far, they've gone after accounts of the porn industry and gun stores. I fully expect them to target tobacco stores in the near future. They do this by suggesting to the bank that they would find it necessary to conduct thorough and repeated audits if the banks work with "less than desirable" businesses.

Twitter was a notorious Slashdot sockpuppetry ring. It has since become a microblog service.

-- @PinoBatch

With all the carrier grade network address translation (CGNAT) going on in mobile networks and in developing countries' wired networks, I imagine that matching people by IPv4 address would need a team of humans to weed out all the false positives.

Anonymous Coward attempted sarcasm:

They are when the trailer shows the good parts.

Partial list of twitter users: Erris, MacTrope, gnutoo, inTheLoo, willeyhill, westbake, odder, ibane, DeadZero, freenix, myCopyWrong, right handed, GNUChop

Unless you're buying music and you can't find a particular track on Google or Amazon.

You forgot watching Hollywood movies (lawful DVD player, lawful BD player, clients for each country's DRM'd streaming services) and preparing tax returns.

Unless a service provided only by said "robber barons" is required to get and keep a source of income to keep a roof over your head.

So /r/carporn isn't enough transmission porn for car geeks?

Many (but not all) can choose another locality.

So why over the past decade and a half hasn't Microsoft added additional support in Windows Notepad for LF, on which every other major platform has since standardized?

Last time I checked (which was today), creating a Gmail account required a mobile phone number. So for someone buying a mobile phone in order to have a mobile phone number in order to create a Google account, where is one supposed to search for reviews of mobile phones? If a different web search engine, then why not just stick with that instead of using Google Search?

I was building up to that. An oligopoly can have the same negative effect on buyers as a monopoly.

Let's just say that curation helps keep a flood of amateurish games from cluttering the list of new releases presented to prospective game buyers.

The relevant market here is not Windows but operating systems compatible with widely used applications. And at the time, enough of those were exclusive to for Windows that Microsoft was using its monopoly in one area (copyright in Windows) to secure or strengthen market power in other areas.

I agree. Access to rights of way is a natural monopoly that has been allocated inefficiently in the past, and I presented an alternative to this inefficiency in another post.

I wonder how much of "invented here" syndrome is related with frustration with curation on the popular curated platforms (iOS, Windows Phone, Windows RT, and game consoles). Cryptographic lockdown applied by the operating system publisher blocks end users from writing their own applications or writing a mod for an existing application. Because people are unwilling to go through the organizational overhead of becoming a licensed developer, they stick with the vanilla version of whatever they can get from the platform's official app store.