Spying on foreign nations is the NSA's business. If you don't like that, then it is something to take up with your representitive, but I would have to ask why all of a sudden you have a problem with it, since that has ALWAYS been its business. The NSA is the US's signals intelligence agency. It's reason to be is to spy on the electronic communications of foreign powers.

Now, you can argue the US shouldn't spy at all if you like, but you do have to realise that would put the US at basically the only major nation that didn't. More or less all nations have intelligence agencies. The UK has the SIS (and the Security Service to an extent), France has the DGSE, Canada has the CSIS, Switzerland has the NDB, Finland has the SUPO, China has the MSS, Russia has the SVR (and realistically the FSB, FSO and GRU as well). Nations spy on each other. They have for a long, LONG time.

The flap with the NSA is that they have been spying on American citizens. That is something they are not supposed to do. While some countries, like China, have a unified intelligence apparatus (the MSS is their spy agency, secret police, all that jazz), the US purposely has divided agencies. The NSA, CIA, etc are not supposed to collect intelligence on Americans. That is only supposed to be done by law enforcement, and then only in compliance with court orders.

That the NSA would spy on other nations is not only unsurprising, it is the reason they exist.

In terms of China being an enemy, well you can't really think in those terms. Nations don't have friends and enemies so much as they have interests. As such other nations can align or not align with those interests to different degrees. If you mean an enemy as a nation they are at war with then no, but of course they US hasn't officially gone to war in a rather long time. However China is certainly a nation the US would have many reasons to watch. They are quite authoritarian, the military is heavily mixed up in their economy (I'm talking direct ownership of things), they have imperialistic ambitions and they have a lot of weapons. Thus it should not be surprising if the US has interest in watching them.

Also if you think the US is irrelevant, you need to wake up and have a look at world affairs. The US is an extremely influential country in a tremendous amount of ways. It is the only military superpower at the moment, it controls the world's reserve currency, it has the largest economy in the world, it exports culture (in the form of books, TV movies, video games, that kind of thing) like no other in history and so on. You might wish the US was not relevant, but it is, very much so.

Also it isn't small. Buy a globe. Or use a search engine. The US is the 4th largest country in the world by land area, and 3rd largest by population. If that is "too small" by your metric, then I don't want to know what you rank most countries (which are, by definition, much smaller).

Well three problems there:

1) Not really a Rogue kind of guy. It isn't my sort of game. I like more story in my RPGs which does, of course, preclude random generation. It is a tradeoff.

2) When you play a game made for a PC, it doesn't translate well to touch. Touch dictates some things be done rather differently to work well, and these do not have the UI to deal with that.

3) As you said, they are old, I've already played them. I like new games, not playing the same ones over and over for a quarter century.

It still quite supports my and the GP's point about the lack of good games for mobile.

It has amazed me how hard it is to find good games for mobile devices. I'm a big-time gamer, I'd much rather play a game than watch TV for entertainment. It is my primary goof-off activity. So I have a nice powerful smartphone (Android in this case), and it would be nice to have some portable games for it.

Some I want just for quick things, like waiting in the doctor's office or the like. Those are reasonably easy to find, I have a small collection of simplistic titles that do the trick for that. Still though it took a good bit of wading through crap to find them, and there were some things that initially looked promising but turned out to be "pay-2-win" that wanted to suck tons of money out of your pocket.

However I also wanted some with more substance, for if I'm traveling or something like that. Those... Well results haven't been great. I've bought some of the highest rated and reviewed stuff and so far it has been at best ok, either than Plants vs Zombies (which I already had on my PC). These are games that would be 5 or 6 of 10, maybe 7 in rare cases on the PC or a console, but are the "best" you find. Symphony of Eternity, NFS Most Wanted, etc are ok to play, but they really aren't up to what I'm used to.

Then some games that used to be good go to shit. Like Zenoia. Not a wonderful game, but at least a reasonably competent Zelda type. I have the first two. There are more... but again they are all pay-2-win crap.

Now compare that to the PC. I have more games then I can play. I have games on Steam I literally haven't installed yet, because I don't have time to play them yet, and I have another list of games I'd like to buy, if I have time. My problem isn't finding games I want, it is finding the free time to play them all.

I'll believe iOS or Android can compete with Sony and Nintendo if I start to see some serious amount of high quality titles out. Not a small handful, many of which are ports, but a real library that regularly sees new releases.

X-Com is a great example: That launched a year ago for consoles and PCs. I played it and loved it. So now had I waited I could get it, with lesser graphics, and a rather cramped UI to be touch enabled... No thanks. I'll stick with it on the first-flight systems, thanks.

If you did, you'd know you can take out as much of your money, any time you like. Things like ATMs have daily withdrawal limits to help prevent theft/fraud, but you can go in to a branch and cash out your balance, any time you like (or transfer it to another bank electronically).

With any regular bank or brokerage, you can take your money out whenever you want, on fairly short notice. This applies even if you have tons of money in it. Now, if you have a lot, like lets say multiple billions of foreign exchange reserves, then placing a sell order on all of it will drop the value, the price will have to go down for all of it to sell, but you can do that, if you wish.

Heck that was part of the problem in the big downturn a few years ago. People were panicking and selling their whole portfolio at reduced prices, which of course feeds back on itself. A guy I know is a financial manager and he would try as hard as he could to convince people not to, since it would realize big losses for them, but they wanted none of that, they wanted it in cash (or bonds, or other safer stuff) and they wanted it NOW. So, he did as he had to and followed their wishes.

As the parent points out, the reason Bitcoin wouldn't let you is ponzi type reasons. If someone big cashes out all at once, that could cause the value to drop a lot, which could cause the whole thing to tumble down. They are trying to make sure that doesn't happen, to prop up the farce.

The idea that Anna Lindh was the only one with knowledge and decisive power in the case is simply not credible. And at least one person who knew the murdered foreign minister claims in writing, and claims that other confirm it, and has shown certain supporting materials, that both the minister of justice, Thomas Bodström and the prime minister Göran Persson knew about the planned rendition. In fact, them not knowing about such a decision borders on the unthinkable.

There is far more than enough to open a criminal investigation and throughly examine the roles of everyone involved, as well as a criminal investigation into the security police. No such investigation has been done, clearly demonstrating that if ministers knowingly violate the law they won't even be seriously investigated.

And no, I'm sure Swedish foreign ministers wont trust US assurances. They will, however, do as they're told.

If you've read the Swedish police report it also states that upon waking to him having sex with her, asking if it was unprotected, she also joked it off with 'you'd better not have a disease' and had no more significant objection. Swedish rape law has a requirement for either incapacitation or clearly indicating dissent. The previous evening is irrelevant, but the actions after waking up aren't. With current law if the court has only the plaintiffs story to go on it would not convict on a charge of rape (well, unless it feels like it, of course, it's not like Swedish judges are entirely apolitical).

To get convicted in unbiased court Assange would basically have to convict himself by testifying that 'yeah I knew she really didn't want it but I figured she'd be too afraid to protest', which still wouldn't fit the rest of the story about the morning (breakfast shopping, etc), but which could conceivably be argued away with some creative psychological theories.

The prosecutor is probably very happy with how the situation evolved; she's on record saying that it's good to (mis)use Swedens indefinite detention to give purported victims some extrajudicial retribution. Here she has basically handed Assange a significant prison sentance of his own making even when she knows she has no case. Makes Ortiz look like an amateur.

A more relevant example would be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repatriation_of_Ahmed_Agiza_and_Muhammad_al-Zery which details Swedens participation in illegal rendition to torturing countries, an act clearly illegal both in treaties Sweden is a signatory to and in Swedish law. Unsurprisingly, nobody has been held accountable.

Sweden cannot be trusted with human rights as it takes nothing more than the right opportunity for brownnosing for its politicians to ignore the law.

Consoles are focused on lowest possible cost of their hardware, since they sell to consumers at a loss, or at the best a slim profit. They need their suppliers to give them hardware for bottom dollar. That means you don't get much profit per unit.

Now that doesn't mean AMD is getting screwed, I'm sure they are making money per unit sold, but make no mistake: The reason they got the contracts is they could offer the lowest price and that means a thin profit. So 10 million chips sold in the console is less profit than 10 million sold in a desktop or server or the like.

It is not the grand prize of hardware contracts.

On another note I find it hilarious how fanboys relish in the concept of a competitor doing badly, as if we all wouldn't be more screwed if there was a single company. Personally, I like nVidia GPUs, they work better in my experience. However I'm real, real glad AMD is around. Why? Well if they weren't nVidia could, and would, charge more than they already do, and they wouldn't release new tech as fast.

So if you are an AMD fanboy wishing the death of Intel and nVidia, what you are really saying is "Gee I hope AMD will be able to overcharge me for lower end technology when they have nobody to push them!"

I'm in Seattle. Within the city limits. And the best I can get without spending gobs of cash, for a small-business line, is 1.5mbps. I keep hearing from my telco that we'll have 10mbps Real Soon Now (TM), and I keep hearing rumors of other telcos lighting up the fiber that's already been run throughout my part of town (but inexplicably kept dark). FWIW, I don't think I've ever seen download speeds in excess of around 170kb/sec. Netflix often stalls out buffering, with grotty picture quality; never mind getting HD. All for the "low" *cough* price of around $110 / month.

When I moved to Japan in 2002, the cheapest plan I could get in my neighborhood was $30 / month for 12mbps. Upgraded, at no cost to me, to 18mbps, and then to 24mbps by the time I left in 2005.

So where are these lying shitheads pulling these numbers from? And have they been properly disinfected^Wsanitized?

Judging from the smell, I think not.

http://www.vgchartz.com/article/250982/2013-year-on-year-sales-and-market-share-update-to-may-18th/

Relevant part being lifetime sales:

PS3: 77,313,472
Wii: 99,574,394
Xbox 360: 77,311,669

"Every gamer you know" is not a valid metric. Anecdotal evidence is not useful.

Also this is only the 7th gen. Step back to the previous one and the PS2 is the best selling console of all time, over 200 million sold.

Sorry if it shoots your off-the-cuff rant to shit, but Sony is a force to be reckoned with in the console area. So in Nintendo.

So my guess is the reason they did all this stupid shit is publishers. The game publishers are extremely whiny, and extremely dumb, when it comes to the idea of consumer rights. They seem to think that extreme DRM is needed to prevent piracy (not that it has ever worked) and that they'd have way more sales if only they could do that. So there's the "Check in once a day thing." They also HATE the used game market, they really, honestly, act like it is money taken right out of their pocket. So there's the resale restriction. Also they, of course, hate indies, since those guys sell games without publishers, sometimes very popular ones (Minecraft). So there's this latest shit.

Now the reason for MS to do this would be to make publishers happy and thus to try and bribe them in to exclusives. Convince them to release games only for the Xbox, or at least first for the Xbox. Get a library that nobody else has or can have.

Well if that happens, then who knows where it goes? Maybe people stay mad, they say "fuck you" don't buy the console and so on. Publishers will, of course, go where the money is in the long run and the Xbox will get largely abandoned. It'll be a big failure.

However maybe gamers decide they really want those games. They forget or rationalize away their anger and objections and buy the Xbox and the games. This makes publishers happy and the Xbox gets more games and so on.

Never underestimate how short people's memories can be or what a bunch of pansy-asses gamers can be. An instructive example was Modern Warfare 2. They badly fucked over the PC version of the game and it had a lot of gamers PISSED. There was a "Boycott Modern Warfare 2," Steam group. Had a lot of members. So what happened on release day? You guessed it: Tons of people in that group had bought it and were playing it. Their anger was not enough to keep them from doing what they wanted (http://dbzer0.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Boycott-Modern-Warfare-2.jpg).

Personally I think MS is in for a world of hurt, but we'll see. If they appease the publishers, and the publishers in turn deliver what gamers want, well maybe it works out. I hope not, but it could happen.

You might want to look up your terms. MS is not anywhere near a monopoly on consoles. They have about a 30% market share, same as Sony. Nintendo has about a 40% share. This is for consoles, MS has no handheld.

So sorry, but you can't whine about monopoly here, because MS hasn't got one. They are only one player of three, and not the big one. That is not to say this is a smart move (it isn't) but this isn't some case of a big monopoly throwing their weight around. You aren't a monopoly unless you have total or near total control over a market and they don't.

More likely, this is MS trying to make publishers happy to get more exclusive games. The traditional publishers are extremely whiny about many of the things that the new Xbox is supposed to deal with, like reselling games, indy titles, DRM, and so on. The publishers probably told them all the things they wanted, and MS said "Sure!" That looks like it is going to bit them in the ass big time, but we'll see. Maybe MS ends up getting a lot of exclusives and gamers decide they want those, forget their anger, and buy it anyhow.

Either way, knock of the monopoly whining. A monopoly isn't a large company you don't like, it has a specific legal definition.

Is we need to define what we mean when we ask for someone's sex or gender on a form. I think part of the problem is different people identify what it means differently. Some in the transgender community say it is 100% about what you personally choose to identify as. So you could be genetically male, have an XY chromosome set, and biologically male, as in have male genitals and body structure, but identify yourself as female and that's what you should mark down. However other people might disagree. If you went in to the woman's dressing room at a rec center the biological women in there might not be at all comfortable with that since they identify you as male, due to your biology.

So one of the things we need to do is clarify the terms, and perhaps have different terms for identifying someone's genetic structure, biological makeup, and sexual identity.

Like when you are talking to a doctor, the genetic definition matters. Reason is that health issues do NOT affect both genders equally, and it has nothing to do with appearance or identity, it has to do with genetics. So even if you've had a sex change operation and all that, proper identification as genetically male could be relevant to medical providers.

For most people it is more about biology, as in what bits do you have between your legs. We visually identify people as male or female, and most are pretty clearly one or the other. That is one of the reasons it gets asked for lots of forms of ID is to help ensure that the ID is for the person holding it. For that, we might want to use your biological appearance. If you undergo a sex change surgery, then you change that identifier.

In terms of the pronoun you wish people to use to identify your gender, that really is up to you, though you need to understand it can be confusing to people if you appear and sound different than you identify.

So as you say we need to review why the information is collected, and then define terms to say what sort of thing we are talking about. We can't just say "Well let people identify as whatever they want," since reality doesn't work that way. However if you are just collecting it for no real reason, then don't and let people identify how they wish.

You can have nice, efficient, LED bulbs with no WiFi in them. Go to Amazon, Home Depot, pretty much wherever you like. The Philips L-Prize bulb is the one I'd recommend. Very nice spectrum, more efficient than most other LEDs, long life.

Or I suppose you could just whine on Slashdot about a product that isn't on the market yet.