A sense of ownership over articles is one of Wikipedia's most cited problems. It's one thing for it to devolve naturally, but these are people who are by and large going to be naturally defensive of their work to begin with.

Everyone who's taken a droplet sample from me, has taken it from my fingertip. There's usually a preemptive apology involved, because they know it stings like an SOB, but it's definitely still operating procedure where I am.

This is why I've been using Duckduckgo instead of going straight to Google. This is why I fucking hate going to Amazon: I don't need a website second-guessing what I'm looking for! I have disparate interests; I follow links to weird shit put up by friends and acquaintances; I am perfectly capable of navigating a web page and using CTRL+F to home in on what I'm looking for. Your 'helpful' user agent GETS IN MY FUCKING WAY.

I don't need my results pre-pruned to flatter my politics. If someone links me to the reviews for Tuscany whole milk on Amazon, that doesn't mean I want to buy dairy products over the Internet! 'Suggested' content is computerized guesswork with a signal-to-noise ratio that gets worse and worse because I keep poking around and following links because (holy shit, and god forbid!) I'm curious!

They'll start serving ads when they're confident that most of their users won't (or can't) move to similar sites. Make it popular, make it indispensable, even, then make it pay. People will put up with a lot of annoyances once inertia's set in.

My first thought was of the mythical 'Seaman Staines' on Captain Pugwash...

Derivative works, and delicious plastic nanoparticles.

The Lone Ranger: Hollywood wants the western back. Badly. They were one of the big tickets for decades, and names like Eastwood and Wayne still linger in the cultural consciousness. They don't need fifty foot robots, or giant space cruisers, or enormous special effects budgets, but they're still full of good 'ol fashioned gunplay and man-on-man violence.

A decently written and produced Lone Ranger could introduce a new generation to the character, in the same way that superhero movies wag the slowly collapsing comic book industry and (re)introduce people to characters like Superman, or Tony Stark.

No. No, it wouldn't. Remember: you're trying to sell a movie to the general public. The general public has no need, nor desire to remember which of the Houses and Clans is which, how a PPC is different from an ER Large Laser, or any of the other bits of minutiate that fanboys baste themselves in. Miss a beat, or cut a corner, and those same fans will scream and throw poop like enraged monkeys.

It's not like Lord of the Rings, or Game of Thrones, where virtually everyone in the western hemisphere has either read it, or knows someone who has. Geek properties like Battletech are a tiny niche, spread out over dozens of borderline pulp paperbacks and fluff from scads of rulebooks and boxes. They simply aren't worth the effort for J. Q. Public to immerse themselves in.

More likely they'll come to the conclusion that someone was playing silly buggers, due to the lack of non-structural detritus, middens, or other forms of human leavings.

Because you know, I could give a shit about spammers. It's the otherwise legitimate companies that drag their feet taking me off mailing lists I never signed up for, or make it an ordeal to find the unsubscribe information on their page or in the e-mail-- in the latter case, that shit sometimes doesn't even show up in the plaintext version.

Christ on a crutch. Just today, I got an e-mail from OnLive because some bot or idiot used one of my addresses to sign up with. I went to their opt-out page, and among other things was given the option to reroute their fucking newsletter to someone else's inbox without verification. In retrospect, I should have looked one of their executive e-mail addresses up and given it that.

They're probably trying to fold it into google+, like everything else.

He hasn't been forced out because they know he's learned to wield two chairs, Florentine style.

It sounds to me like Dropbox is hitting a subscriber wall, and they're desperate for anything that will make them look attractive to the money people again.

Personally, I'm never dealing with these dumbfucks again. This is the company that turned passwords off for every goddamn client and 'box' in their hands for several hours before the blunder was caught. I'm not going to trust them with my goddamn grocery lists.

Everything to do with Tim Schafer being constitutionally incapable of reining himself in. And you know, that's fine when you've got a publisher holding the purse strings, and ultimately able to put their foot down when things get out of hand, especially when it results in titles like Psychonauts and the other amazing adventure stories he's helmed. It's a lot less okay when you can't go to the publisher and ask for another million bucks to see things through.

Actually, there is a problem with goals here-- specifically, that there wasn't one set in the first place. The Doublefine Kickstarter was an experiment that asked for money to finance the creation of a game, and a documentary film of the whole thing. Nobody knew what it was at first, certainly nobody expected it to get out of hand, and then Tim decided to make something Totally Amazingly New and proceeded to torpedo the budget.

What he has now is a fantastic idea, but it's the kind of fantastic idea that wants a whole lot more money than the KS brought in, because it's going to require a lot of artists working their hands down to the wrists.

I'd make a LifeLock joke, but apparently they're based out of Arizona.