Unfortunate to hear about your neighbor, but there are a lot of substances available to people that can do harm in quantity. Can we jail food producers? Alcohol producers? Can't we hurt or kill ourselves with almost anything, given enough of it?

At some point, don't we have to take responsibility for what we choose to consume? It's not like a lot of these products don't come covered in warnings anymore.

Makes sense in some ways - if there's no LAN play, there's no pirated Hamachi or VPN or what have you networks popping up to play. I think that can turn a bunch of pirated games into effectively SP games.

I don't think that's going to get them any extra purchases (obviously it might cost them some, or at least yours), but the customer-as-criminal mindset is pervasive today.

I know nothing of what the military specifies for their aircraft or these types of equipment, I'll assume it's of a higher grade than I need in my corporate LAN.

Regardless, fiber is tough enough to run through conduit, can be bent around corners (not right-angle turns, perhaps) and for my use, can be spliced together in the field with a piece of plastic worth about a dollar and some inexpensive tools. The military can afford to wrap the fiber in something protective to prevent kinks or breaks if they wanted, and maybe even design connectors and transceivers that will stand up to more shock or abuse than your typical switch/router patch cables and transceivers. Point being, it's a robust technology that's been in use for a fairly long time (relative to computer tech).

From TFA, it sounds like they're multiplexing a lot of logical connections into a few single physical connections. How many different systems are required for an F22 to fly at combat readiness? How many of those systems have interconnected parts requiring their own communications? Running entire systems' electronic conversations over (relatively) few fiber cables sounds incredibly more scalable, and if the initiative works, reliable than point-to-point or -multipoint copper for each device. I suppose "a lot" is an understatement.

How'd you like to see the book of checklists for a system that has miles of potentially faulty copper? You can troubleshoot that one, I'll do the one with a bundle of fiber I can count the number of strands on. :)

From TFA: "While a browser can remove “normal” HTTP cookies, the privacy controls in a web browser like Mozilla Firefox or Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Internet Explorer can’t remove Flash cookies, which can only be removed by using two separate services available on Adobe’s web site."

Also: "At least one browser, Google Chrome, now allows users to control the Flash cookies from within their browser’s privacy controls."

I'm ignorant of other browsers' features, being relatively happy with my Firefox/Adblock/Noscript bubble of sanity, but it seems that Mozilla and other developers might push to clean up after more of their plugins' messes. If the plugin makers don't care, at least Google's team seems to. Why can't Firefox by default? Opera? Even IE? I saw no mention of Silverlight in that blurb, but I imagine it can be used for tracking too. Of course, people would actually have to use Silverlight for that to happen.