Wow judging by the amount of intolerance and pedantic annoyance in this and you previous replies I'm guessing you must be really smart and the fact that you must interact with us mere mortals must just eat you up.[/vent]

I for one thing would have liked to see whether the results observed in the group that received the games console were seen also in the control group after they received their consoles. That would certainly seem to have been completely feasible. Also it would be interesting to see if the test scores improved over time because as we all know when you have an awesome new toy you want to play with it all the time but interest wanes as time passes.

Something tells me that a few decades ago the introduction of a baseball kit or a new bicycle would have produced much the same effect.

ps: Mister Dvorkin, please don't eviscerate me again with your clever, clever wit.

I wonder if the researchers thought to look for correlations between parents who were willing to let their children get away with not doing their homework before doing leisure activities, computer game related or not?

So Italy has basically painted a great big target on every single operator of social media.
Apparently if an Italian moderator or admin ticks me off I can simply upload some offending bit of data and call the cops...

Actually I'm thinking this might be part of a policy to make PC gaming in general a big enough pain in the neck to cause the majority of PC gamers to migrate to consoles which are far more robust when it comes to content control. The gradual shift towards "Games-on-Demand" for the consoles will then achieve the goal of killing second hand selling.

I smell a defamation/libel lawsuit

"Well sir, you have a choice; you can turn blue and maybe regain some function or you can stay paralysed and not look like an alien".

I'd need to be pretty damn convinced before I willingly had myself turned a light blue.

People paying for content is not the issue here. Execs thinking that a for-pay service in a world of for-free services will be viable is. There will always be a free alternative and that is where people will go.
People like Mr. Diller believe that if everybody gets together and starts charging for content then consumers will have no choice but to pay up.
The fact is there will always be a free alternative. I'm not saying there isn't or won't be a market for premium content.
Just that there will always be free. Free-as-in-beer and hopefully free-as-in-speech.

Shoutcast to the rescue, yes you have no control over the track selection but it's free, the actual streaming providers are completely decentralised and I've found that recently I'm not really using the next and ban features of Last.fm. Yes Last.fm will be missed but it was by no means indispensible.

I just can't believe slashdot actually linked to some OSS zealot's (the kind of idiot who makes the rest of us look bad) blag and presented it as credible news.

Don't get me wrong, I applaud any opportunity to push OSS in favor of proprietary software but the kind of obscenity laden ranting this person was spouting gets dismissed as such and hurts our case for OSS.

Oh an Iceland's economy has not collapsed, it is seriously ailing, but not dead yet.

I may be misunterstanding the tone of the quote but it seems to me that the 'consumer protection' being discussed here is the actual regulation of EULAs.
  To put it more clearly: It seems to me that the FTC would regulate EULAs to protect consumers from being screwed over by software makers' overly complicated EULAs