Causing games to be more social also helps sell DLC. If your bud buys those extra maps or levels, now you are more compelled to do the same, otherwise there is no more co-op for you. It is all about being able to sell more. While religion, politics, or anything else may be tackled in games, it is not to force a point, it is to create a world/scenario that can be relevant to the player. Why? So they play it more, recommend it to friends and buy the requisite expansions. Again, all about the money.

If we do we'll have to come in on Saturday.... ummmm, yeaaaah...

Don't you mean "Hang on to your wallet, your change is leaving"?

Whew... for a second there I thought our satellites were getting just as obese as our citizens!

...lawyers. Distracted by the sheer joy of getting to hack at lawyers, nobody will ever make it to the castle.

Besides, there are enough lawyers to last hundreds of years, at least.

In this case everyone was growing to expect just that, and would therefore be taking it seriously. Or at least people that could do something about it would. Now, since nothing much has happened people are lulled into a false sense of security and become lax or start considering the threat that something big was happening on 4/1 the real joke.

Now that the hype has supsided, what better time to strike? I think that dovetails nicely with GreggBZ's earlier post about the holiday weekend (for some of us).

Whew, thanks for clearing that up for me. I guess it's a really good thing we got all those resources flowing or else oil/gas prices may have spiked, er, spiked higher, or something like that. I guess they just haven't managed to bury that super-secret Iraq-to-DC oil pipeline yet.

Yarrrgh! Looks like they buried the hatchet. The new conglomerate will be the Warner Pirate Brothers.

You have precisely made his point about the government being the major threat. When you refer to your statistics on domestic violence, you are talking about threat of force. Yes, you are much more likely to be hit by a friend or by family than some random stranger on the street

With privacy I also maintain the government is the biggest threat. First, without it making the laws and with them instituting the related punishments for the offenders, and rewards for those reporting you, what incentive would anyone knowing you have to report you? They are making a calculated judgment on the return they get for turning someone with whom they have a relationship, and the benefits that it entails, in to the government. If the incentives were not there, the likelihood of family members making egregious violations of your privacy would decrease dramatically.

The government has no need for people close to someone to report them if they can work their way far enough into your private life. Only when they begin trying to find those things out, those private things, that someone close to you is more likely to know, only then does your family become a threat. The root cause still remains the government and its desire to know more about you and control more of your life.

And on a lighter note, I would also have to say that the government is also the most inept at not letting information leak out. Banks have a much more vested interest in protecting data. With government it is simply "oops" and whatcha gonna do. Couple that with your friendly government being the only ones that can force anyone or any thing to turn over any information they desire, and there you go. I think it would be chilling to see the information squirreled away in the depths of some of the buildings around our capitals.

Ok, I'll leave the whole "obviously troublesome for democracy" thing alone for now.

Why do you automatically assume the studies that are referred to are simply news articles? Do you for some reason find it hard to believe that papers published in a reputed journal might "smell fishy" to somebody? I am pretty sure that these journals publish papers for discussion, and a by product of that is some of these papers proving suspect or flat out wrong as a result.

The poster is not saying throw out your "advanced scientific techniques" but rather take those in conjunction with common sense (and maybe use a little of it to interpret them).

Thank you though for looking at that post as rather plebeian. It can only serve to make us "non-scientists" more amicable toward people like you.

That is, until governments force them to. On an individual basis most people would not, especially now that money is tighter around the industrialized world for most people. It is a lot easier to agree with these things when your standard of living is not under pressure.

You certainly have more faith in the intelligence of governments than I do.