I don't mind if people post videos of a game that I've worked on for free. But if they are putting intrusive advertisements over my content then I want those videos taken down or the commercials removed. It's not the game play videos that are a problem. I play lots of games, I love using player videos for tutorials, in fact lots of games have a replay function directly built into them to help users share gameplay content and experiences.

But I don't think that too many artists want their work having fast food commercials and 'seen on tv' products plastered over their hard work. I don't see why 'fans' should be allowed to plaster commercials over your work. I don't see why YouTube should be allowed to plaster commercials over my work either. Go commercial free and you can do whatever you want. Tutorials, reviews, analysis, story summaries, detailed walkthroughs, tool assisted speedruns, and so on.

If the true fans want to play games and share their experiences with others then let them. That's great. No one should object to those videos. But when fans are plastering commercials over a video game it is not acceptable use in my opinion. I don't want anything I've done associated with some namebrand product. I don't want fans of mine watching someone play a game I worked on only to have some product pop up in the middle of my artwork. Remove the ads.

If you want to make a video of yourself playing a game for the social experience, for an education tutorial, or for a review, then go ahead. As long as you don't put commercials next to it. Want to put commercials next to it? Then contact the original artists and company and try to work out a deal. If they say no then respect their wishes.

California and New York are engaged in an all out conflict to see which state can erode its citizens' rights the quickest. They'll try anything to regulate what you can and cannot do as an individual. They want to police your every movement, thought, and activity.

Want to smoke cigarettes? Then get ready to pay the government $5 in taxes per pack just for the privilege. They'll throw out regressive and punitive taxes on smoking to create their own vision for America. You can't even open a private club or restaurant that allows smoking without going through extreme legal battles for the permit.

Want a 20oz soda? Well that's against the law. At least that's how they wanted it in NYC. And no more delivery of 2 liter bottles of soda with pizza takeout. That's another law that they want to pass. Banning pizza companies from delivering a 2 liter soda with your order.

Want to practice the 2nd Amendment? You need fingerprints, background checks, additional invasive background checks, registration to a permanent database, tons of money, and expensive lawyers. And if you get a gun or a concealed carry permit they'll illegally give your information over to the newspapers and blogs to reveal your personal information to everyone. Try getting a concealed carry permit for a pistol in certain cities in CA or NY. You need at least $5,000 for the fees and lawyers. It's prohibitive and costs people right out of their constitutional rights. You need to be wealthy to protect yourself.

3D printers? Why not try to regulate them? Everything else needs to be regulated anyways in our new utopian liberal fantasy. After all we need to protect the children from terrorism and school shootings and violent video games.

I would say that I'm ambidextrous, because I use my left hand for lots of tasks (mouse, forks, spoons, toothbrush, pool cue), but then I use my right hand for lots of similar tasks (IBM trackpoint, tv remote, video games). I play almost all sports right-handed especially when equipment is a factor (golf clubs, baseball glove, etc.). Yet I write and eat with my left hand always.

I've always heard the argument. "You are probably left-handed but learned lots of tasks from right-handed people which is why you use both hands". But I can clearly feel a mental difference with certain tasks when using the right side of my body versus using the left.

It seems to me that whatever hand I learn something with first I end up using permanently. It seems like whenever a new task is introduced to me I subconsciously try the task out with one hand and then go with that for the rest of my life. I first used a mouse on a PC with my left hand and never looked back. But for console video games I never change the layout to a left-handed layout.

Studies say that left-handed people live around a year less than right-handed people. Maybe it's all that stress from having to use so many right-handed things like almost every door having its handle on the right side. I can't count the number of times I've swiped my subway card on the left side (the wrong side) without even thinking about it.

By the way this poll is the typical Slashdot poll where it is missing an option. Ambidextrous literally means "uses two right hands". Dexter is Latin for right. Sinister is Latin for left. So someone who is ambisinistrous is someone who has "two left hands" and is likely highly uncoordinated. Where is the ambisinistrous option for all of the people who have zero dexterity?

WRT Manning: I feel a bit bad for him. I absolutely understand that there's a need for secrecy in war-fighting, and I appreciate that the military has the ability to enforce that secrecy with punishment. I still feel bad for him. This young man was not in the best frame of mind, and it sounds like he really thought he was trying to do something right.
It's not just the military information though. Manning was leaking diplomatic information to wikileaks. Thousands upon thousands of pages of documents of diplomatic cables given over to a foreign entity with no oversight whatsoever. Many of those cables containing information and messages that were extremely sensitive and were made public without any attempt to redact or withhold the sensitive information.

There are needs for secrecy in war. Diplomacy. Business. Personal affairs. And no matter how much Julian Assange argues, you can't really have a world where everything is in the open. There are still files from WWI that are secretive because they contain information that might cause international incidents. When you have countries fighting over centuries old conflicts and warring over ancient religions you might want to bury things that could escalate conflict. This was the rational behind hiding Bin Laden's dead body photos. Rather than make him a martyr and have his image being a rallying symbol for terrorists the government censored it.

You think if wikileaks had photos of Bin Laden that they wouldn't release them? They don't care about security of the free world. It's a little game to them to show how powerful they are. "Look at us.....we got Bin Laden's photos WORLD EXCLUSIVE". They are no different than the tabloid media who exploit any (personal) information just for magazine sales and internet clicks.

WRT the material: The first strike seems entirely legit. The one that killed the two Reuters people. They met with armed belligerents, at night, in an area where they knew there was fighting. Everyone wishes they hadn't been in the mix when our pilots and gunners did what they were supposed to. This, however, is going to happen when you have reporters pushing the limits of sanity to get a story in a war zone. Beyond that, it's chopper gunners shooting at a group of enemy combatants with RPG's and small arms, just like they're supposed to.
If three armed bank robbers storm a bank are you going to rush into that same bank with a ski-mask and a camera so that you can cover the story better? These journalists rush into war zones dressed like militants. And they carry cameras that are tripod mounted or have telephoto lenses that look like weapons from far away. When you're in a helicopter and you've just seen a man firing a weapon from the sky, then another man runs next to him with a two foot long metal object, are you going to risk that being an RPG if it is one, instead of a camera?

WRT the handling of the material: The military's approach to the material (denying FOIA requests) was shady, but a pretty obvious function of, "err on the side of keeping stuff secret." You can't have war without casualties, and any time it happens somewhere where people live, some of those are going to be bad kills.

That said, handling of the material was absolutely atrocious. The "collateral murder" video was a selectively edited, perversely annotated, propaganda piece. Every effort was made to point out there were two people with cameras, not AK's, and no efforts (at all) were made to point out the loaded RPG's and small arms carried by the people they were meeting.

The government is fucked either way. They hold onto the material and everyone assumes the worst. They release the material and wikileaks will selectively edit the information just like the 'collateral murder' video to fit their agenda. The military loses every single time. No matter what the agenda that the media wants pushed is pushed. The military has to defend themselves from something, either withholding information, or "MURDERING INNOCENT BABIES".

Nothing to see here. No political corruption or fraud. Just move along people.

"The decision is a setback for the Department of Motor Vehicles, which has a history of such stumbles."

Oh you mean they've done this before? Well let's wait a few more months and then throw another few hundred million dollars at them. And of course a few million to our political and social friends.

"The DMV project began in 2006, according to the California Technology Agency. Instead of using 40-year-old, "dangerously antiquated technology," DMV staffers were supposed to get a modern, user-friendly system that minimized the risk of "catastrophic failure," according to a DMV report on the project."

Dangerous? Catastrophic failure? Were they running an old nuclear reactor at the DMV? Is this the automotive equivalent of the China Syndrome?

I just laugh at California's spending at this point. I'm glad I moved out of San Francisco as the taxes and living costs were insane. Glad to see that taxpayer waste hasn't changed much.

American Chemistry Council (ACC), an industry lobbying group that accused her of bias. A what? An industry lobbying group? Oh thank the heavens someone without any bias was there to moderate proceedings and ensure that objective and measured assessments were being made.

Lobbying is great. It means if you have tons of money you have influence. As long as your corporate or social structure brings in piles of cash you can have dominant political power. I wonder how different the political landscape would look if you removed lobbying and campaign contributions and campaign war chests from play.

Warhammer 40K, Starship Troopers, Aliens/Weyland, Starcraft, and lots of other science-fiction universes have used space marines in their stories. They've all borrowed from each other. I don't think there are huge outcries from the Event Horizon people when the video game Dead Space is essentially Event Horizon the game. Or when 2001: Space Odyssey had its cold interiors and robotic enemies copied over and over. The writer of Alien said that he was enormously influenced by 2001.

Half of the Starcraft units would quote Aliens characters' dialog. And Starcraft's entire Terran campaign was themed and artistically patterned after the propaganda style filming of the movie Starship Troopers. "Would you like to know more"? No one cared. It was cool actually. "In the pipe...five by five".

It would be one thing if this novelist was putting in Xenomorphs or Tyranids in her story. But she's just using the old trope of a modern military man projected into the future. With advanced technology and advanced enemies, even alien enemies. No big deal. I doubt she's even aware of Warhammer 40K.

I read a synopsis of the book....uh....it's not exactly hard science fiction nor is it adult science fiction either. They bleep out the curse words in the novel. So "fuck you" becomes "**** you". Doubt that many Warhammer 40K fans...the kind that can afford to drop hundreds or thousands of dollars on models and game are reading this book.

Our military has enormous lands throughout the U.S. including large areas of forest and desert and even uninhabited towns and cities built specifically for training exercises. The government was building lots of little makeshift towns just to blow them up with nuclear weapons during the cold war. You can find lots of videos of the government testing bombs in massive stretches of the desert. I've taken weapons training on SWAT courses that are like little ghost towns where the instructors have makeshift bridged built all over the course where they can walk above you and take notes on where you messed up something.

It's one thing to have military planes fly over civilian airspace. You have to test these planes traveling for hundreds of miles so of course they'll eventually have to fly over some commercial airspace. Or to have security training exercises be done and rehearsed at an event before it happens. Like the security teams that are not rehearsing the Super Bowl security at the actual stadium. But low flying helicopters? Shooting blanks at civilians and civilian vehicles? What possible reason could there be for that?

What's next? Armed soldiers patrolling the streets shooting blanks at people on the sidewalk? Why not? It's a perfectly safe exercise that won't cause panic at all.

"Hey it's just a training exercise...now put that cellphone camera down or we'll have to detain you. Now go home and watch American Gladiators and go back to bed".

Imagine the fun it's going to be when armed soldiers start firing blanks and some civilian has no idea what is going on and fires back. Or when people start panicking and cause a riot. I'm all for keeping a well trained military....but using our own people as the targets? What kind of self respecting soldier went on this mission without protesting it?

This reminds me of the British nurse who committed suicide after being prank called by a team of Australian DJs. Everyone blamed the DJs for pushing her to kill herself. The family even sued them to get money from them because they felt that they were owed compensation.

It turned out that the nurse had threatened suicide before, had a history of depression, and that the prank phone call had nothing to do with her death.

Now are blaming Aaron Swartz's death on everyone and anything. Was it MIT? Was it the government? Was it him being bullied by them?

Maybe he had a history of depression and had talked of suicide before. And maybe he would have killed himself anyways. And the real issue is not that he was up for charges for 'hacking' or whatever term the media is using this week. Maybe the issue is that he was suicidal for years and never dealt with what caused his severe emotional trauma.

I know the sexier story is that MIT and the government killed Swarts. Just like it was sexier when those Australian DJs killed that nurse. But the reality is that suicide is a major, I believe the biggest killer, for people Swartz's age. So this is not an anomaly death for his age group, it's a common occurrence in society. Mental health is the issue here. Not his trial for 'hacking' or whatever.

A company like this should be shut down. If someone voluntarily gives their data to a social networking site like Facebook, shouldn't that data remain private to Facebook? You opted on your own to give Facebook that data. So Facebook can store it as you want it. You didn't put your contact information on FB so that Spokeo can poach that data and use it to sell your information.

Isn't that data technically property of Facebook/Myspace/etc. anyways? Sure you can chose to give out your data elsewhere and anywhere. But it's your choice. If you only want your data available from Facebook, or YouTube, or the Yellow Pages, then shouldn't that be an option?

When did it become acceptable to post information about people without their permission? As bad as Facebook is at least you have to sign up before giving up your privacy. An $800,000 fine for privacy violations on a mass scale? And not even a fine but a warning for being caught astroturfing and posting false information about their business? Pathetic.

"how are they going to lock out used games on physical media? they will just lock out levels and characters so you are in effect playing an extended demo unless you buy the whole game".

Yes. Capcom shipped Street Fighter X Tekken with a bunch of finished characters locked on the disc. The characters are finished and playable if you flip a switch within the game's code or by purchasing (the still unavailable) DLC.

Mass Effect 3 had content on the disc that was only playable if you purchased a DLC code to unlock the content. There is an NPC companion already on the disc and fully functional but the character is locked until you purchase the $10 DLC code to unlock him.

Now imagine instead of locking you out of a few characters the game locks you out of the entire game until you purchase a one-time use code that unlocks the game. You'll go to the store, buy the disc, and then be required to purchase an 'online pass' style code to unlock both the online and offline features of the game.

Here's some of the ramblings from this anarchist group. Almost reads like the speech the bad guy gives in some C-level movie. I think next time I have to give a speech to my employees I'm going to start off with "human beings are made of flesh and dreams" and see if anyone laughs.

"Human beings are made of flesh and dreams. Our dream is that of a humanity free from every form of slavery, that grows in harmony with nature. A dream that we make live in the moment in which we fight to realize it. Our dream has for us a name, âoeanarchy,â and we are ready to gamble everything in order to realize it. We are not alone in this adventure, in the whole world a new anarchy is blossoming opposite of an ideological and cynical anarch-ism, an anarch-ism empty of any breath of life, which only finds its realization in theory and attendance at assemblies and manifestations, the whole cowardice of a citizenism that stinks of death. A new anarchy is rising from the ruins of this anarch-ism, thousands and thousands of cells that speak among each other through thousands and thousands of actions".

Most people who pay for satellite or digital cable don't realize that most of the money that you pay goes straight to the television channels and not the cable/satellite provider. When you pay your $100 cable bill, a couple of dollars goes straight to Disney/ABC/ESPN. I think just for ESPN alone some cable companies are on the hook for five dollars a month per subscriber. So you are paying to watch channels with advertisements.

On top of the money that goes directly to those channels they also bombard you with advertisements and commercial interruptions. And while for many channels advertisements allows them breaks to reorganize, which can be critical for news and sports programming, there aren't too many reasons other than simply making more money for running commercials during the middle of a sitcom or drama. I don't mind when an NFL or MLB game goes to commercials when the players are running on and off the field. But I stopped watching South Park on its premier night years ago because the commercial breaks were too frequent and killed the momentum of the show. It's one thing when the sport has stopped and then the cut to advertisements. It would be another if they cut to commercials right when a guy delivered a pitch or the ball was snapped. "Stay tuned to see if the Patriots scored after these commercials".

Unfortunately that is how most shows are. "Will this character die...? Find out after we assault your senses with a dozen commercials". Not to mention that most advertisements are BLASTED AT FULL VOLUME compared to the show that is on at the time. It ruins the flow of the show. This is why I almost only watch sports and HBO.

HBO figured out decades ago that people would be willing to pay for premium content delivered to them commercial free. With no advertisers to answer to they could put on shows like The Wire, Sopranos, Game of Thrones, Band of Brothers, and Curb Your Enthusiasm. They don't have to worry about advertisers pulling out of shows. They don't have to censor anything because of the FCC either. And they can write dramas and comedy shows that are purely art and not meant to sell products or have commercial breaks written into them. Considering the extreme popularity of Game of Thrones right now it is quite evident that people want to pay a premium for high level programming that is free of advertising and doesn't have to answer to sponsors or the FCC. Also HBO has a policy where product placement is forbidden. When you see a real life product on Sopranos or Treme or whatever it is there for realism and not as an in show paid advertisement.

Unfortunately most of these other companies haven't figured out that people will pay money to bypass advertisements. This is essentially what people do when they buy a show on DVD or Blu-Ray anyways. People will also pay extra when it improves the quality of programming. Major League Baseball's internet package that allows you to watch all out of market games online is commercial free. Lots of companies are putting their shows up on I-Tunes or the Playstation Network the day after commercial free and you pay for each episode individually.

If Optus wants to distribute works or broadcasts then let them pay a fee to the right's holders. If Optus won't pay then don't let them rebroadcast or distribute material that they don't own. If the right's holders don't want Optus selling their broadcasts for profit then don't let them either.

If people want to record shows or broadcasts on their own for home viewing then that is fine. No one is disputing that. It's not fine when a company is recording broadcasts that they don't own and then charging people to watch them. Producing broadcasts like sporting events costs a lot of money. I doubt that the companies that produce this content want other companies distributing their work without their permission.

It doesn't matter if people are ripping DVDs for home use or recording radio or TV broadcasts to watch later. But Optus was taking television broadcasts and basically streaming them online live.

Torrent Freak seems highly pro-piracy and against paying for anything. They refer to Kim Dotcom as a "celebrity hacker and internet entrepreneur". He was a career criminal who made a living by deliberately charging for access to content that he didn't own, and didn't create, nor have any license or agreement in place to distribute. Hardly an entrepreneur. Just a guy who figured out that it was easy to distribute copies of games, shows, albums, and films, without paying any of the artists or companies involved and get rich quickly off of it. If a country has a career criminal operating a warez empire and they want to crack down on him then good for them. Kim Dotcom is no hero, he's an insider trader, and embezzler, who moved onto his next scam.

What exactly are copyright holders supposed to do about people like Kim Dotcom? Let him make millions off of other people's work? Allow him to continually ignore their requests to remove their work from his site? The fact is that we live in a world that is much smaller and connected through the internet. Information is connected worldwide so why not have some laws, international laws on the books, that are connected as well. To help spread the flow of information while also protecting copyright holders who want their works protected.

"We have reached a point in Australia where citizens can be arrested and extradited to the United States based on information supplied by Australian spies for breaches of US law on Australian soil. Australia has effectively signed away its right to govern its own in matters of copyright infringement when those matters overlap the interests of the United States".

Australia has determined that if someone breaks a specific law that they can be tried in the United States. That's how they've chosen to govern that particular offense. If this is how the Australian government wants it then that's how it is. As long as they aren't flying high school students to the U.S. for downloading a few songs and are actually going after career criminals then I don't see why anyone (other than pirates who want free stuff) would have a problem.

Is it stupid to arrest someone for downloading music or movies? Yes. Is it ridiculously absurd to assert that downloading a few songs is worth millions or billions in damages? Obviously. Is it wasteful to extradite someone to another country for downloading music or games or whatever? Of course. But it is hardly a waste to arrest the guys who run criminal empires that make millions of dollars off of illegally distributed works and extradite them to the U.S. to answer for their willing participation in an organized criminal business.

I don't really have a problem with the Kim Dotcoms of the world being held accountable for their criminal empires. If they live in a country that will extradite them to the U.S. then they run a risk for operating an illegal business.