Because seeing this on the news as an advertisement for a TV show wasn't enough.

There's already been a court case about this, and the company which was doing it lost.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CleanFlicks

Canada's got two of them, with really imaginative names. :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radarsat-1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radarsat-2

The level of cost involved used to provide a limit on the intrusiveness of the search. Police used to need to provide at least 6+ officers (2 on 8 hour shifts) to watch an individual, that means that following someone involves substantial cost to the department. The cost itself provided a check on the intrusion.

Using a tracker changes that entirely. The police can quickly check many, many trackers from a central location. They don't need to invest 6+ officers to each individual, it's 6+ suspects per officer! All of a sudden, large scale intrusion is cheap and the limit is no longer present.

That's the point you need the courts to step in and put limits in place.

It's called a Loaded Labour Cost. Back the last time I had to deal with this (back in the 90's), the LLC for a staff member, regardless of salary ended up being around $150k/year. That's how much it cost the _employer_ to have you in a seat, pretty much regardless of your salary.

So, the federal government can either pay that themselves and have a full time employee on their staff, or they can pay that plus a markup and have a contractor they can get rid of whenever they want.

The contractor is typically better if only for the ease of downsizing.

http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2008/12/another_bad_metric_error_wages.php
http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/10624/calculating-loaded-labor-cost-for-roi

It's the _total_ international internet traffic which is down 10%. Given that P2P forms 30-50% of an ISPs traffic (supposedly), that means that there has been a 20-33% drop in P2P traffic. So, while it sounds small, it is actually a large difference to P2P, all without a single $25 letter being sent out.

Android is a loss leader, and not worth a lot to Google. Google's patents are probably in their core business, search and advertising. Since a lawsuit would result in settlement and cross licensing, Google's patents are worth a lot more for keeping Microsoft out of that core business than saving HTC $5-15 per handset.

Because vectors can't be initialized from initializer lists. At least, not until C++0x:

std::vector v = { "xyzzy", "plugh", "abracadabra" };

Won't compile with older C++ compilers.

While the following works now:

char *foo[] = { "xyzzy", "plugh", "abracadabra" };

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2B%2B0x#Initializer_lists

Considering we've seen a story about how everyone is using the same password everywhere, and how Sony got hacked again , exposing even more passwords, is it any surprise that a number of people are having their iTunes and PayPal accounts attacked and drained to buy game gold?

iTunes and PayPal are pretty huge targets, but who'd attack a single game if they had access to the back end?

If someone can grab access to files by uploading a hash without worrying about sharing, that means they can generate random hashes and gain access to files. ouch.