Right I mean we had phones before that so why the email or IRC and before that we had the USPS so why bother with the phone and before that we had messenger services so who needed the USPS. Just because it's a new form of communication does not mean it acts in the same way that all other forms of communication does. Following you logic is doesn't make sense to ever buy a new book.

Most of the stuff in the iphone store I wouldn't pay for at all on a windows or linux box. They are not as easy to find I guess as an app store but I am not sure easy to find makes it work an infinite amount more money. While there is a world of difference between the price point of games on the iphone and the PC/Mac, there is also a world of difference is quality. If you compare similar products you will find that they are of similar prices.

http://www.joystiq.com/2008/01/24/the-xbox-turns-a-profit/ Xbox turns a profit starting First quarter 2008. http://news.teamxbox.com/xbox/20346/Xbox-Division-Records-Second-Profitable-Year-in-a-Row/ 2009 ends 2nd year of profit for entertainment division on high sales from Xbox/xbox360 even being a tough year the xbox brand carried the division. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/28220/Xbox_360_Division_Pushes_165_Million_Profit_For_MS_Q3.php 10% profit for entertainment division on Xbox sales. http://www.joystiq.com/2010/10/28/microsoft-announces-record-q1-revenue-thanks-xbox-360-consoles/ MS sites xbox360 as big part of profit numbers. http://xbox360.gamespy.com/articles/110/1104553p1.html xbox live had $1billion in revenue for 2010. I know you guys hate MS and want to see them fail but that took 2 minutes.

All MS need to do to take over the set top work is put a couple cable card readers in the 360 and allow external storage for content it records. Let it surf the web and ingrate netflix and Hulu. Sell that as the premium xbox360 Media Center and sell it for around the price of a TIVO and within a year or so it will have taken over the world.

The control it adds is great but the end users will hate it to the end of the world. If you have any network issue at all you no longer can do anything at all. At least now with thick clients you might have slow or no access to network served apps (email, web, etc) but your local stuff is still there. You can write an email even if you can't send it, you can finish up a powerpoint, or at least play games until the network comes back. Thin client + network down = pissed off and useless employees.

The DOD can take it multi-million dollar contract and go somewhere else. It's not up to the DOD to force companies to make smart business transactions, but if I was a stock holder at Google or Apple I might be a little pissed.

While it's not hard to see social games making huge amounts of money via a number of schemes, it's hard to see how in the near term they would turn out profits even close to the pay to play gaming market given that they have all the monetary avenues of the 'social' game but got the players to pay for the game as a start. It seems more likely that Massive Multi-player will become more social, more reachable and those games will easy away at the social games over time.

If we didn't mark everything under the sun as classified it would be a lot easier to keep the stuff we need to keep secret that way. Only about 5% of what WikiLeaks has put out ever needed to be classified to begin with, and 95% of that didn't need to be classified anymore.

These guys are not idiots and they could care less about the cell phone networks. They are trying to shoehorn past a bunch of lobbyist paid shills in congress a law that will force the govt to give free Wi-Fi. If we/they play the cards right we might see more and more of this bypassing all the local and state regulations on internet and cable monopolies. Maybe drop from grid network tech in there as well.... Hmmm

But your missing the point. The govt is not forcing this, this companies are willingly giving this information. I can willingly tell the police anything I want and they can ask me for anything they want (I just don't have to give it to them without a court order) and I am 100% free to give it to them. This companies are happy to work with law enforcement and they own the data.

I don't disagree that many people have some expectations of privacy in certain situations even if they don't legally have it. However the idea of being surprised that the govt could use your credit card to track you seems pretty either disingenuous or at the least willfully ignorant. Credit card companies will sell your data to just about anyone (That's where all that junk mail comes from), why would anyone think they would be less cooperative with govt requests than they are with private company requests.

Duh!! Honestly the data isn't private protected data, it belongs to the companies we did business with and they can do what they want with it. They might not want to piss us off, but it's better not to piss of the legal authorities either. As a result they are more than welcome to give it to the govt., police, or any party they like. Honestly this has been going on in dozens and dozens of ways for a long, long time and I can't believe this is really news. Didn't we all already know this?

In the meantime solid American born IT workers that I know all over the country struggle to find work. I guess it's cause they can't live on $25k a year, but the kids out of collage can.

I understand that civil court does not have the same strict rules about how clear cut the case must be, but I have yet to see a case where the evidence didn't just show that it might be that IP, which might have been used by this address, which is primarily used by X person but likely many others and then is most cases fail to show me that the files in question where actually the data they say it was. (IE just because the file is called meninblack.mkv does not mean it's the movie Men in Black) I admit I am not a lawyer and that i have not read all the cases, but of the ones I have, have yet to see it any real evidence at all (Mostly just very poor understanding of the technology used the the advantage of lawyers to extort money)