A legitimate business was shut down globally for an unknown length of time because one of their customers was doing something wrong. Instead of working with the company to stop it like, oh, I don't know, every other internet business ever, they shot first and asked questions later.

It's the incompetence we've all come to expect from law enforcement that either don't understand or don't care about the consequences of their actions as soon as a computer's involved.

Whilst I agree with you, there's also the (slim) chance that the populace are going to be pissed off enough at disruption of their online entertainment to get upset about it.

Abstract concepts like "freedom" and "civil liberties" and "habeas corpus" are one thing, entertainment is quite another. But as long as most people have their Facebook and their cable or Netflix they'll be happy either way.

TFA says quite clearly that it's the default.

Much like the hawks at Wimbledon that chase away the pigeons, the hard part is overriding the instinct to eat it once they've found it.

Opera's had email inbuilt since Opera 4 in 2000, and the last major update it got was in Opera 10. I don't understand why the article mentions it like it's some new thing.

Do you really want a blu-ray player, AND an HTPC, AND an Xbox 360, etc. cluttering up your living room

Yes, I do. Why? Because electronics are made cheaply and I like the idea that if one thing dies everything else still works.

Windows NT version numbers have gone 3.1, 3.5, 3.51, 4.0, 5.0 (2000), 5.1 (XP), 5.2 (Server 2003, XP 64-bit, XP x64, Home Server), 6.0 (Vista, Server 2008), 6.1 (7, Server 2008 R2). If you ignore the marketing names the version numbering is actually pretty reasonable.

It depends. This new interpreter may be better in some specific circumstances but worse in others, making it unsuitable for most people and highly useful for others. That's the sort of situation where you want to keep both the old and the new and everyone's happy.

I don't know what planet you're from, but this seems to me a fairly unremarkable canvassing of opinions on the topic without editorial comment. The format of the article goes:

Introduction
Police opinion
Westfield uses some words and says nothing
Australian Privacy Foundation opinion
Contextualisation
Professor Maciej Henneberg's opinion

Just because you don't agree with the opinions doesn't make the article biased, it makes those people wrong in your view (and in mine). But you can't deny that their opinions are relevant to the issue - the police, a privacy advocate group and an academic. The only failure on the part of the journalist is the selection of the academic they spoke to, who according to a quick search is in the field of biological anthropology and anatomy.

When an Xbox 360 console is banned, there are offline features that are disabled too - the most significant are playing games from the hard disk, and using the console as a Windows Media Center Extender. Once banned, the console will corrupt the saves on memory cards and hard disks that it comes into contact with so that they can't be used on a non-banned console without re-downloading them from Live.