Before getting too paranoid about google analytics, take a look at the actual cookies it stores. E.G. in Firefox "Tools", "Options", "Show Cookies", search for "__utmz". Whoa, there are a few hundred. Check out the one from Slashdot - in my case: "9273847.1252068577.1.1.utmcsr=(direct)|utmccn=(direct)|utmcmd=(none)". "9273847" means "slashdot.org". "1252068577" means me, when I go to Slashdot. The rest of the stuff has to do with how I found the site. But now look at __utmz for say, pennyarcade.com: "84531096.1252070740.1.1.utmcsr=(direct)|utmccn=(direct)|utmcmd=(none)". It's a different web site ID, but it's also a different user ID. There's no correlation between the person who goes to slashdot, and the person who goes to pennyarcade. Google can't tell that they're both me. My ID is different on every single web site that uses Google analytics. The only purpose of the ID is so that, for a single given website, they can tell the difference between one person visiting it a hundred times, or a hundred people each visiting it one time. There's no other personally identifiable information tied to that number. Your analytics cookies on all those sites are not correlated with each other; they're not tracking everything you do.

My initial feeling is that this sounds like nonsense: the word "video" in "video game" pretty much implies that vision is required. However, maybe he's asking for something that's not too unreasonable: a better brightness control, or a high contrast mode, or a way to limit extraneous detail, or something that might not be incredibly hard to include as a part of all games, and that would open up the whole are of video games to people previously unable to experience them. I'd have sort of a hard time arguing against that.

I also wonder about the legality. Unless the upgrade explicitly warns you that a feature is being removed, it seems that they're taking back some of what you bought. "Upgrades" are generally to fix things that the manufacturer wasn't able to get into the initial release that should have been there, or to fix dangerous bugs. If you bring your car in for a recall and they fix a problem but also remove the radio, you would certainly have grounds to complain and presumably recover damages.

That's exactly how I interpreted it too. DRM: "the rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated".

Since the subscriber has no control over the amount of data sent to him from a site (ads, flash videos and music that play automatically, etc) it's hard to see how people would be willing to accept a pricing model that charged them for data they hadn't asked for and didn't want to receive.

Haha sucker - all I had to do to hax your system was telnet in to it. I'm deleting all your files while I'm typing this messa

Seems to me this problem basically solves itself. Once it's possible to make computer generated images that can fool anyone, there's no longer any reason to use real people. It becomes incredibly cheaper and safer to use computers. So it will no longer necessary to distinguish which ones might be real, since virtually none of them will be.