Except Apple has been silent. According to the article, the Secret Service got involved on its own. If Apple had been pressing charges, the FBI would be the ones busting down his doors and raiding his house.

That's the odd thing about all this: They SHOULD have no ability to install software. They're set up to not allow that sort of thing to the walk-bys. When you walk up to a computer in the Apple Store, you are not logged in as an Administrator.

As a social experiment. How many people will re-tweet this (and with what levels of anonymity-fueled ebullience) without checking sources? As recently as ten minutes ago someone re-tweeted this as if it were true.

Extra bonus points if any so-called "news" outlet -- radio, television, or internet -- actually reported this as true.

Of course, for some, 'social experiment' is the excuse. It's really for the lulz.

Are you serial about that?

Speak for yourself, I didn't want that carpetbagging asshole here!

Look, can we compromise here? Since he's all for no government can we jointly ship him off to, I don't know, Somalia?

I see absolutely no reason why this could possibly be a bad idea.

Though maybe if I RTFA I'd get a better understanding of what's going on besides from the /. summary. =D

You say that like private corporations and for-profit groups are not above interfering with research themselves.

It all comes down to whom do you trust to want to screw you over.

Well, if I had any faith that this data wouldn't be used for marketing shenanigans, I'd be leaning towards saying that this is good data to have. There are a number of interesting trends that I can think of off the top of my head that could be investigated with this data.

Unfortunately, 'selling data' kind of implies that it's going straight to marketing.

It was only decided correctly if you consider a corporation to be a person.

Weather corporations are persons or should be persons is, to be fair, worth a debate of its own. Even speaking as a progressive, it'd be a good debate to have.

Interesting. From what I'm reading, this is not a partisan cut at all, but rather axing a program that has shown absolutely no results in the time its been running. In that case, it absolutely should be axed.

SHHHH! You're going to give ICANN ideas!

But all in all that's probably not a pro

And no matter how much money the Old Republic stuff made, no matter how much fans love that era and those stories, no matter how much they might make (at least internal) consistency and sense... Lucas will overwrite all of it in favor of what he cobbles together.

Lucas is a control freak -- that's not a bad thing when you're aiming for quality storytelling and you really are a top notch storyteller. It's a definite bad thing when you're a mediocre or moderate storyteller, and you don't trust anyone else with your creative work or ideas. He cannot at all stand anyone else playing in his sandbox, because they don't share his unique vision of the sandbox. So when a bunch of folks make a pretty keen sandcastle that's got flying buttresses and towers and complicated and exciting architecture, Lucas will kick it all down and replace it with his... adequate, technically good but nothing-to-write-home-about sand towers he makes from buckets. (Let's break the metaphor: He has good basic filmmaking skills, but not much more than that; I think he bought into the Joseph Campbell interview a bit too much. If he stuck with space opera instead of trying to make them deep mythological passion plays, his films would be a lot better. This of course is IMHO.) There's a reason why Empire Strikes Back is considered the best film of the franchise.

...that Jonathan Swift wrote "A Modest Proposal?" I mean, I've seen some people make rather ham-handed attempts at a satirical suggestion, and everyone goes 'Yeah, yeah, Modest Proposal, uh-huh," but are folks on /. actually thinking this guy is being anything but satirical? Yeesh.

You petty much nailed it on the head. An MMO has to make a great first impression. STO is struggling after a mediocre release and poor reception. (On the other hand, the devs there are really into the community interaction; other companies could do worse than do that, even if most of it is putting out fires and damage control.)