There's a whole season of "The Wire" about this very topic.

Usually email marketing databases include a lot more than name and email. They can include identifying demographic info such as home address, sex, age, income, and more to allow for message targeting. Now it's possible that these guys only took names and emails as Kroger and US Bank have announced, but I wouldn't be surprised of Epsilon perhaps underplayed the severity of the breach to their clients.

Not sure how or why, but they still get a shit-ton of traffic and Yahoo Mail has 3x as many users as Gmail.

What would make a company that has no "real" assets that valuable?

Their brand alone is a valuable real asset. The data mined from their users' profiles is for the most part very real, as well. Most of the value lies therein.

How else would they have any stats?

didn't the PS3 and Xbox 360 cost more to make at launch time than they were selling for?

GM should have built an augmented reality gaming system into the windshield so they could make up the loss by selling new software.

As far as I know it was never confirmed that they used boxcutters...no one really knows what they used since all the witnesses are dead and most of the evidence destroyed.

I think this could be accomplished with a few UI tweaks in Farmville. Zynga: You owe me royalties if I ever see an "Oilville" game.

If they would build such tech into web browsers as easy as checking a prominent preference button it could make a huge difference in the ability of governments to repress their people.

It would be easy enough for these countries to simply outlaw use of such browsers. Sure it would be harder to enforce than blocking individual sites, but it would only take a couple dozen public stonings for the masses to capitulate.

Slashdot is a news aggregator...it can only link to stories that exist.