Then you'll have a society afraid of fighting off a violent attacker, choosing between death on the sidewalk or in an execution chamber.

It appears your hunch isn't that far off from reality:

SCOTUS Rules Petiton Signatures Are Public Record.

What, do you think they verify if your answer is factually correct?

A person could find out what school you went to, while no one but you is going to know you put in "The Napoleonic Wars" as the acceptable response.

Opera's had native bittorrent support for years, but I'd suspect that the other browser manufacturers would consider adding this as a built-in feature either bloat or indicative of supporting piracy.

Left 4 Dead 2, pictured right below that drug use notification and a major point of contention in this classification debate, would still have trouble because it features downing a bottle of pills or injecting yourself with a syringe of adrenaline in order to continue killing zombies, and has an achievement related to that as well.

Amazon has actually had this feature for a while: Loaning a Kindle Book

Also, when the loan period is up the lendee gets a link to buy a copy of the eBook from the Amazon store, so publishers might see an increase in sales, especially if the loaned book is the first of a series or something.

Isn't that similar to the Tesla Roadster?

If I'm understanding the article's quote correctly, Gabe is talking about how the iOS devices and the XBox 360 only give you the choice of only one digital distribution service, shutting out potential competitors.
On computers, Steam competes with other digital gaming services, such as Direct2Drive, Desura, GoG, and so on. Later on he goes on to say how a hypothetical Valve-produced console would be "open" so that users could use Steam's competitors alongside Steam.

Because those corporate whores are the ones who publish the books that hold the information.

If you really want to support the freedom of information, petition your university to use OpenCourseWare.

While that is technically true, you can permanently upgrade to the normal account with your first purchase in their store. See their FAQ.

You have to add a minimum $5.00 to the Steam Wallet to buy stuff from the store, so practically you can look at this as the price of getting a normal account. If you feel like spending $1 on a cosmetic item is unfair to other players for whatever reason, there's a Map Stamp item which basically lets you vote on your favorite maps, and the creator gets a bit of that money.

And if it's the DLC system itself that you don't want to give money to, you can try looking around if there's still retail copies of the game around somewhere.

Most of the purchasable items that affect stats can be acquired during normal gameplay via the random drop or crafting systems. The cash store was introduced as a shortcut to people who didn't want to invest time in randomly getting a certain item they wanted, but it's still possible to acquire these items by spending no more money than the initial purchase of the game.

Also, the items were introduced as alternate play styles for each class. People complain about some items being over/underpowerd, but that's true of every game. You can still play well with just the default weapons.

You're right, I hadn't.

My bad.

No, but Apple could chose not to ship you anymore iP[a/o]ds. This is targeted at retailers trying to use the products in a promotion to get customers, not at a normal user who wants to give their device away to a friend (although I'm sure that they've already developed DRM to do just that).

Apple is probably doing this as a proactive maneuver to protect their brand name from being cheapened.

I remember it being stated before that Activation is trying to position itself as a multi-faceted, digital entertainment company. Relating an online FPS to Netflix or Facebook pitches it to investors in terms of other succesful businesses whose main product is delivered via the internet, and is enjoyed by the average consumer and not just niche gamers/geeks.

Team Fortress 2 (PC) has had this since at least last fall:
http://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Mann_Co._Store

Also, they have a similar store for Portal 2.