I was just thinking the same thing. Crowdfund two or three of the most popular and see what happens to their rhetoric.

If Iran ramps up production, and there is even MORE supply, how will that help the price of Oil to rise?

If the Chinese economy dwindles and there is even less DEMAND, how will that help the price of oil to rise?

Iran pumping more = even more Supply.
China economy faltering = even less Demand.

So why would the price of oil increase?

With the price of oil this low, and likely to stay that way for many years, what economic motivation will people have to go with renewable energy now?

It made a lot of sense with oil at 100, 80, 90 dollars a barrel and the price at the pump at ridiculous levels. But when the price of gas and electricity drops in response to oil prices, what will happen to investments in renewables. I'm thinking that they suddenly will not seem as attractive anymore from a purely economic standpoint.

We need at least 60 fps constantly to experience a normal sense of motion. GPUs need to keep getting better because very few of them are able to *maintain* 60fps in modern games when scenes become more complex in certain areas. We also need to look ahead to 4K gaming which no graphics card currently can handle at acceptable framerates. http://boallen.com/fps-compare.html

There is a lot of need for faster cards, and for developers to start making use of the processing abilities of these cards in their games. I'm looking at you MMOs! ( One genre which still makes heavy use of the CPU). Now if the author had said that in gaming the CPU's speed is becoming irrelevant to frame rate, I would tend to agree. http://www.techspot.com/review/734-battlefield-4-benchmarks/page6.html

It's wrong, no doubt about that. And I think it will fail if challenged in court.

But does the person being investigated have the money to fight this aspect of the case?

I see this as a widening of the censorship net around Information Technology.

Precedent can sometimes be a dangerous thing.

Question is why do these technological advances always come out of the United States? It seems that if Linux originated say in Germany there wouldn't be much of a problem with the NSA demanding a back door.
But so much of our technology is tied to the US, and government regulations that it seems inevitable that all the popular software we use has been compromised. Which raises the question that if the NSA can access any computer, what makes us think that hackers have not found the same back doors?

Microsoft never learnt that the reason that Windows had such a large userbase and got so popular was because of piracy. The only reason it spread throughout the world the way it did, was because people could pirate the OS. That cemented a customer base in some businesses, and in the home.

What the developers and consultants can play around with at home they are more likely to recommend and use in the office environments. The office is not going to purchase additional licenses for their consultants to mess with at home. A consultant is not going to go through the expense of purchasing MS licenses for a home deployment when there are alternatives to the cost and expense. When enough consultants feel that way suddenly customers are not going to be pitched a Microsoft solution anymore.

Oh, and the people that just subscribed to a Technet subscription for software will still get the software, only this time MS might get absolutely nothing from that userbase, not even a Technet subscription.

How did they gauge what the impact of this decision would be? Did they talk to their developers and consultants before ending a decades old program that so many had come to depend on?

Microsoft is shooting itself in the foot, again, by trying to force their user base into spending more money instead of adding value. They need to recognise that there is a lot more competition out there, and people aren't starry eyed about Microsoft anymore.

Their move with the Xbox One to lock out the Rest of the World, their missteps with Windows 8 (and from what I am hearing 8.1 as well) are indicative of a company who's leadership is out of touch with its customer base. They are still riding on the successes of Bill Gates and floundering badly in the new era. What is the last great thing that came out of Microsoft?

And now, they are cutting off the people that promote and support their products in the hope of making some more money (from whom?).

What you are forgetting is that before the Fed mandated equal rights, there were NO OTHER OPTIONS.

So far from there being some sort of competition, and free market, ALL the business owners got together and rejected Blacks and other races from their establishments, segregated them and discriminated against them. And they tried to continue doing this even after laws were passed forbidding it.

In South Africa it was the same, do you remember Apartheid?

After that fight and winning those hard won battles, we finally have people coming to an age of understanding, and acceptance, and tolerance. It is finally approaching a point where we can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

And now to talk about reversing all that, and removing these rights and leaving it back up to the "Free Market" ?
Please. It seems now that race relations are starting to be normalised, there are some who are afraid and want to reverse that trend by removing the protections and safeguards which have allowed it to get this far.

It's ridiculous.The notion is either steeped in idealism or its proponent is being disingenuous.

If you really think that if given the choice the businesses that would reject blacks, gays, hispanics etc. would not outnumber those that would accept them you're kidding yourself. What would pertain in the US would be segregation all over again. Business on one side of the street would be for whites, and on the other for everyone else. This is especially true in a time of hardship and economic turmoil. Minorities are always blamed, xenophobia and racism always rears its head when things are rough.

We're not in the clear with race relations yet at all. Political power in major developed nations is still held by the white majority.
To even consider removing and reversing the laws that protect equal rights is unthinkable. It would be a vote for a return to just a mere 40 years ago, to the 60s.

This executive should also see it as lost revenue because HBO Go isn't international, and perhaps if it were people would choose to watch the show in glorious high definition for a fee instead of poke around on torrent sites, start and stop failed transfers, open and close ports and all the other shenanigans that we need to go through...uhh...other people need to go through...ummm....

http://gamer.blorge.com/2013/02/11/xbox-720-wont-turn-on-without-kinect-connected/

"The next gen Kinect camera is said to be far superior over the current device and can recognize up to six people in the room. There are implications that through the Kinect device, the Xbox 720 will recognize and change various aspects of the dashboard such as theme and avatar to cater to each user."

It can recognise you....

*twilight zone theme song*

This is already being considered with the new PS4 and Xbox 720 Kinect cameras. These machines will record in a very wide angle those who are present in the room, and can identify different users.

Rumour is that they can be turned on remotely and law enforcement agencies can co-opt feeds for various purposes. So the Television watching you all the time isn't far off.

If you believe this, though, then shouldn't the head of Maxis that actually made the statements that their servers were doing critical processing for the Single Player experience also take some blame?

If I recall the first position from Maxis was that this was their responsibility, and their design choice, implying it had nothing to do with DRM but was a "design decision" that the team made to enhance the user experience.

What business is it of theirs to go after "illegal" sites? And why can credit card companies be coerced into refusing financial services to entities which have not been found guilty of any charges?

What if Google decides a critical blog is posting "illegal" links or advertisements, can they strong arm Visa, Paypal and Mastercard to cut them off to?

Google should stick to it's business which is search engines/ Android.

We must also remember that Mastercard LOST their case against Wikileaks and afaik must pay about 21 Million USD to them.
http://mashable.com/2012/07/12/wikileaks-wins-battle-against-visa-mastercard/

This action is absolutely wrong, and it's frightening that a company with as much influence as Google (THE search engine of the internet) could be behind it.

They released a lot of hype, but have said nothing about this "MMO".
Bungie is saying that they will bring the first MMO to the Xbox platform (720?), except it will be like nothing we've ever seen before. in my view that means it's not going to be an MMO, rather it will be Bungie redefining the term MMO to suit what's possible in the console environment.

Champions Online, Marvel Universe Online and a few others tried to go the MMO route on the Xbox 360 and all backed off it for numerous reasons including scalability, Xbox Live support, and others ( http://www.ign.com/articles/2010/03/24/champions-online-no-longer-coming-to-the-360 ) .

We've seen the shooter MMO before: Firefall, and the ill fated Tabula Rasa and Dust 514 come to mind. Let's not forget DC Universe on the PS3. So what's revolutionary?

Until we see much more, I don't think anyone can opine that the game looks great or the concept is radically different. What we do know, though, is that cash shop purchases over Xbox Live is most probably a gold mine waiting to be tapped :)

Download the episodes and watch them all at once, back to back?

Others will not be able to afford Cable, may have to wait to view the current episode, or have no digital availability in "your region" etc.

Make these shows available worldwide, at the same time digitally and otherwise and piracy will drop.

Or at any rate, those that pirate will not have been customers able or willing to purchase in the first place.

I'd love to know what countries pirate game of thrones the most, whether it is the United States, or countries outside the US.

What the MPAA and the Networks have yet to explain is why:

A) I pay as much or More for my cable television living outside the US?

B) The US Channels including HBO, Showtime (simply not available), Starz, Discovery, National Geographic and educational channels show premium recent shows and the channels I get outside the United States show older series and movies?

C) Why I speak English yet I am lumped in Latin America where many shows are in Spanish with no subtitles, and foreign language films are unwatchable because there are no subtitles.

D) My Cable companies publicised that they tried to negotiate with US firms to allow them to show the US Feeds and were told that they simply were not available outside the US, fullstop. Pay a million, pay 40 million...they aren't available, take this content which we package for you because we have already shown it to our own people.

E) Why does Netflix Latin America lack over 25,000 movies and series titles that are available on Netflix USA, but I pay the same subscription fee?

F) Why is the content on Hulu not available worldwide?

G) Why can I pay 800USD for an iPhone, 250USD for a Kindle Fire, and 800USD for an iPad but I can't purchase the latest apps or add my credit card to the iTunes store because I do not live in the United States?

H) Why can I purchase a Kindle Touch but cannot purchase over 30,000 books because I am not a US citizen? Why when the Kindle was first available was I paying a dollar more for every book purchase from Amazon?

I) Why are unabridged DVD and BluRay collections in some cases available only in the United States? Why is Amazon prevented from shipping them outside the US?

I'd love a follow up question to the so called "authorities" as to why Foreigners are made to pay more for substandard services and products (in my view, showing old movies at current prices is a scam) and this is not considered a violation of Trade agreements. Under WTO agreements you cannot sell a higher quality product to your own citizens and create an inferior product for export (and especially not at the same price).

Answer those questions, and then we can start talking about why non-US citizens (i.e. the other 6.7 BILLION people in the world) may pirate content when they may be able to afford the products.

Secondly, take a look at this Oatmeal comic which brings the point home as well: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones

Sorry, no sympathy for an industry that made record breaking profits last year while crying about how much money it was losing, and doing its best in my view to racketeer profits from overseas markets through an opaque system of IP licensing and distribution.