Well, in theory, yes, but it's not very practical. Not only do you and your recepient have to agree on a code, it can also be pretty suspicious if the person trying to eavesdrop on you knows a fair lot about you (e.g. that you'd probably not usually do a birth announcement in a newspaper because you're living alone).

If that's what you plan to do, in this day and age it's probably less suspicious if you start a Facebook page, recruit a few thousand "friends" via some FB game that rewards you for having a lot of friends and post things that sound like they're part of your dull, boring life while actually being the code for your target audience.

As if people care about that. If they did, the average EBay scam could not be pulled off, and yet it's still going strong, after years and years of the same trick being pulled on the same people.

The DOD called, they claim they have a patent on that shit.

Depends entirely on the games you play. In the average FPS you're right. In pretty much any other multiplayer game, being the first to load can be a decisive advantage.

Steganography is neither limited to data at rest nor to pictures. As long as you can transmit data that need not have a certain format to be considered "normal", you can transmit data hidden inside other data. If everything fails, transmit a lolcat pic that contains the data you want to transmit as a mail attachment.

What's harder to hide is source and destination of your traffic, though with a bit of creativity and the use of international providers even that's not completely out of the question.

Use international politics to your benefit. If you want to evade the government of country A, find out what countries would rather not aid them and try to use resources in those countries.

Who'd have thought you'd ever be happy about a deadlocked legislative, hmm?

You know, I know, possibly he knows, but it seems to still work on the dimwits keeping him in office.

You mean, like, say, end to end encryption?

What a novel idea, you should patent it...

Here's the third: Take your business elsewhere.

The world is a large place. Someone might want to tell Mr. Bigwig that his laws mean jack in all but one country.

Well, the Great Depression hadn't happened yet, and none of that commie 'New Deal' nonsense, so if you would really prefer to keep partying like the Gilded Age hasn't quite ended, you might see a trip back to the '20s as progress...

To the degree that it doesn't merely shove people from Company A's product to Company B's product(which would probably be roughly a wash hedonically, though possibly slightly negative if a company were to discover that the marginal value of a dollar spent on advertising is higher than a dollar spent on improving products...), I'd have to assume that the news is more or less 100% bad.

When the punchline is that possessing Product and/or Service X will make you better off; and the target demographic is 'people who currently don't have one; but might be willing to believe that', it's pretty much best-case that the ad will fail, and increasing levels of added dissatisfaction with lack of Product X for the other cases.

You'd pay him that much?

Even after his tragicomic “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief"; but, not to worry, “Whatever regulatory changes are made, they will pale in comparison to the change already evident in today’s markets...Those markets for an indefinite future will be far more restrained than would any currently contemplated new regulatory regime.” performance?

(I guess, horribly enough, the fact that the events of the day did move him to concede that the 'free markets just full of rational actors!' model...might have a few weak spots... actually makes him a better empiricist than more than a few other economists in that camp.)

Best of luck with that. I all in favour of boat floating, and whatever floats your boat, as they say.

By the way, how did the each of the 80,000 servants and 72 virgins available as a reward for each one of "the people of heaven" die, anyway, and do they remain virgins forever? Just pondering, and these little "logic viruses" keep invading my beautiful dreams.

Unfortunately, what you avoid in union management you gain in contracting company executives and shareholders...

Even if you derive so much pleasure from stepping on workers that it's illegal in 14 southern states, that's an expensive way to get rid of some unions...(and that's the best-case scenario, the cost-benefit looks worse if you don't.)

Alibaba is mostly (possibly entirely, I don't know how much if anything they sell on their own account) the middleman. I'd be fairly surprised if they don't make it past 'consumer protection' (such as it is) pretty much entirely unscathed. Maybe they'll even add an abusive mandatory binding arbitration clause!