You had some excellent questions for attorneys Ty Rogers and Ray Beckerman, who maintain the Recording Industry vs The People blog. Here are their answers, verbatim, as they were sent to us by Mr. Beckerman.

Gamespot is reporting that this year's Tokyo Game Show will feature a record number of titles on display, some 573 games. The huge numbers reflects the console launch cycle, but surprisingly a full half of the games on offer are either PC or mobile games. The official TGS site has the full list of games, with Square Enix having some particularly interesting titles on offer. Sony has released the list of playable PS3 and PSP games that will be at the event, with heavy hitters like Heavenly Sword, Lair, Resistance, and Warhawk rounding out the list nicely. Game|Life has some commentary on the games selection for the curious. "Also on Sakaguchi's plate are two Xbox 360 RPGs to be published by Microsoft. Blue Dragon was reconfirmed to be shipping this year, and Lost Odyssey will be at Tokyo Game Show but ship in 2007. Microsoft's dreams of publishing the next big Japanese RPG don't stop there, however. The company's partnership with Star Ocean creators Tri-Ace will come to fruition next year with an RPG called Infinite Undiscovery."

MarkusQ writes, "The NY Times among others is reporting that Google is ramping up its lobbying clout (registration or bugmenot required). The 'Don't be evil' search engine company has hired the infamous astroturfing and dirty tricks firm Direct Connect, Inc. You may remember DCI from their recent attempts to pass off their 'Penguin Army' video as a product of some lone wit, unconnected with their client, Exxon. Or their involvement in Microsoft's 'even dead voters love Microsoft' campaign. With a staff of veterans in the biz (such as Chris 'Swiftboat' LaCivita and Jim 'Electioneering' Tobin), led by Tom 'Big Tobacco on the Dole' Synhorst, I'm sure DCI will be able to give Google whatever they're paying them for. The question is, what are they paying them for? And does 'Don't be evil' imply 'Don't pay professionals to be evil for you?' Or could there possibly be a non-evil reason to hire these clowns?"

Maggie McKee writes, "New Scientist Space reports astronomers have found a planet less dense than a wine cork and 38% larger than Jupiter. It circles a star about 450 light years from Earth. A similarly bloated planet has been found before (HD 209458b), so these puffed-up planets may be quite common. But no one knows how they got so swollen. One possibility is 'that some poorly understood mechanism has separated hydrogen and helium in each planet.'"

New games site OGX has up an overview of last week's Austin Game Conference. The piece touches on the big talks (Rob Pardo, Jon Landau, Vernor Vinge), and gives some informational tidbits about the always-interesting panel discussions. From the article: "Community was also a topic that was frequently the primary driver behind a panel, or as a secondary topic that rose up in relation to the topic at hand. Gordon Walton, Studio Director for Bioware Austin held a particularly radical presentation entitled 'Rethinking Service Offerings.' Walton noted that the player perspective about customer service amounted to 'No matter how we do service, we suck.' and questioned why companies spend energy on a perception based challenge that they have not been able to overcome. Walton's premise was that since the customer service infrastructure for a MMORPG eats the most revenue and generates less than favorable results, it may be entirely possible to cut customer service offerings down entirely to a set of automated tools and save the money spent designing for satisfied customers."

DeathElk writes, "The Sydney Morning Herald recently featured an article espousing the virtues of desktop Linux. From the article: 'Linux is shedding its hard-core techie image in a bid to woo ordinary human beings seeking an easy-to-use operating system that can be downloaded for free.' Is this a step forward for widespread GNU/Linux desktop adoption? Too bad the article doesn't mention the large range of live CD/DVD distributions available for try-before-you-fly, or the range of Windows applications tested and working under Wine." Also, the article is slightly unclear on the concept of open source, defining it as an arrangement "where the source code can be modified upon the request of users or other developers."

DocJohn writes, "For the second time in 3 years, Segway has announced a recall of all Segway Personal Transporters. The problem described is that the Segway 'can unexpectedly apply reverse torque to the wheels, which can cause a rider to fall. This can occur when the device is tilted back by the Speed Limiter and the rider comes off and then back onto the device within a short period of time.' A software update is needed to fix the problem." This AP story mentions President Bush's 2003 stumble on a Segway without speculating on whether the cause was the software glitch behind the current recall.

The news came in late from Japan, with details on the North American launch. This morning, Nintendo's New York press conference expanded our understanding of what's going to be happening on November 19th. 1up has coverage of the event, as well as Japan's virtual console pricing, the opening lineup details for Japan, and news that the ex-FFXII director is excited about the Wii. Hopefully this will mean innovative support of the platform by Square/Enix. Over at Gamespot, they have their own conference coverage, as well as a rundown on the system's media functionality and first-hand comments from the engineers that built it. Finally, for a bit of analysis, Next Generation explores what the return of the pack-in (the inclusion of Wii Sports with the console) means for the industry at large.

greenechidna writes "The Register reports that the Royal Society has put its archives online. From the article: 'One of the world's most important historical records will be made available online for the first time today. All the Royal Society's journals are free for two months and include stone-cold scientific classics going back to 1665 and the foundations of modern inquiry.'" You can set up your own account at the Royal Society; if you follow the link in the Reg article, you get logged in to some random account.

An anonymous reader writes, "Disclosure. Just a word, but in the security field it is the root of progress, sharing knowledge and getting bugs fixed. SecurityFocus published an interesting collection of quotes about the best disclosure processes. The article features 11 big vendors, 2 buyers of vulnerabilities, and 3 independent researchers. What emerges is a subtle picture of the way vendors and researchers differ over how much elapsed time constitutes 'responsible.' Whereas vendors ask for unlimited patience, independent researchers look for a real commitment to develop a patch in a short time. Nice read." Wikipedia has an entry for "full disclosure" but none for "responsible disclosure."

LividBlivet writes, "The Senate Judiciary Committee approved a bill that not only authorizes, but extends, US warrentless wiretapping. No accountability. No oversight. No definition of 'terrorist.' No record of who voted for what. Great way to devolve a democratic republic into a fascist theocracy. Me worried? Yea." Here is the text of SB2453, the National Security Surveillance Act (PDF). Confusingly, the committee also voted out two other bills, one of which "all but declares the warrantless wiretapping illegal," according to Wired.

An anonymous reader writes, "The GIMPS project has found a new record prime. 2 ^ 32,582,657 - 1, clocking in at over 9 million digits, is a Mersenne prime, as were the last few record primes. Here is the 9-megabyte decimal expansion."

rdwald writes, "After over a year of hanging in maybe-planet limbo, newly-classified 2003 UB313, nicknamed Xena, now has a permanent name: Eris, goddess of strife. Its moon will be named Dysnomia, after the goddess of lawlessness — in Greek mythology, Eris's daughter — certainly not a reference there... I don't think I'm alone when I say, 'Hail Eris! All hail Discordia!'" In the same IAU announcement (PDF), Pluto was given its official minor planet number: 134340.

GoCanes writes "Salon has an article named 'Why Johnny Can't Code,' an interesting examination of the dearth of line programming languages available today. At first I wanted to read this and say aha, here's a simple line oriented language that's available through open source, but after reading the article I couldn't find any. And being an old fart, I remember the days spent with edlin and basic."