The article does say that 92% of requests are from US sources... Nice to know who is the big brother of this planet...

So we are not talking about copyright infringement then, OK. End of line. For the rest of those that are talking about copyright infringement my point is valid but for those that are talking about deception I accept that in that regard, as it is not theft, the term is just an oxymoron.

Use a proxy just to go to Facebook etc. so that the man does not know what people are using a proxy for.

It is impossible to permanently deprive someone of a service and therefore there cannot be a theft of a service as theft involves the intention to permanently deprive the owner of the said property. That is why it always was a civil action until the people lost control of the country and big business bought the government.

I would happily stick to a fair market but I am not prepared to keep bending over for those that say I have to just because they can.

You are "dumb". You have nothing to say about the line of work I'm in. I am also "dumb". I have nothing to add about the line of work you're in. I don't see you as being in an ivory tower, I'm just the one who knows that I've nothing of value to add to your industry/science/line of work. Unless we work in the same fields, or related fields, in which case, I have plenty of other means of being exposed to your work, and addressing and debating any problems I may have with it. Scientists are not in ivory towers, and they don't think they're in one. All that said, there's a reason why they have offices and aren't doing work on whiteboards on the corner of the street.

If you really think a town hall meeting is a productive forum to work on highly specialized fields of domain knowledge, I'm not really sure what to say to that.

Since the vast majority of scientific advances don't necessarily originate from one place, person, or time but often many at once, I find the idea that we're relying on lightening to strike in a comment board in order to achieve some important scientific advance rather naive and laughable.

...or how important the non north American market is if you are not Microsoft and given that north America is the smaller market I think that Sony are still on to a winner. Let M$ focus on dear old USA and mop up the rest of the world...

I take it that you do not follow what is happening on this world. The US wants to support the rebels in Syria. That consists of the Taliban and Al Qaida. That is this planet. The Taliban is not a phenomena of one area. It has a much wider appeal. I am wasting my time trying to talk logically to some AC school kid who thinks he has an IQ.

I accept that you did not read all my post, but no, that would not explain it.

That is basically what I am saying. I do not believe that they are using some insecurity, I think they are just asking another company for your contacts with them in return for the contact list they have.

Great, where do you plan to take it?

I know that it is not done on /. to RTFA but follow the flow of the discussion at least. You can 'READ' what it says, and they say they will not contact anyone without your permission. That is the contract. You can decline the option of letting them access your contacts, they still will. Then you can change your password to stop them, they still will. Without you permission or your password, that is hacking. I think that collusion is actually more likely as all these companies are address farms and they would all benefit from a sharing scheme.

No, you are wrong, no 'all' students, only US students. We don't have that 3rd world stuff in the UK.

No, they do not even need to know your password. They have your email address as you have to give them one to open the account. With that they will access your contacts even with your password. You can change your password to try and stop them but they will still contact new people that you add to your contacts. I believe that there is collusion going on with Yahoo/Gmail/Hotmail etc.

I think that the various companies collude.