Maybe the rise in wiretap requests is because of pressure to actually make the requests rather than perform them anyway without a warrant.

Hey, I can hope.

"Any data which is housed, stored or processed by a company, which is a U.S. based company or is wholly owned by a U.S. parent company, is vulnerable to interception and inspection by U.S. authorities. "

What doesn't fall under that? To be free of any potential US influence, EU users and companies should make sure the places they do business with have no ties to American companies? Sounds like ISPs, CDNs, web hosts, etc can be asked or forced to comply with government demands. It won't surprise me if there's a chilling of overseas demand for US Internet and Internet-connected services.

If a 5-star review initially gets people to make a shit purchase, I'm not seeing where the likelihood of a flood of negative reviews won't balance out any astroturfing or shilling. I can see it happening in a low volume item, where a few saps buy something crappy after reading a fake review, and then don't come back to warn away other shoppers, so the cycle continues. I wish they gave example items, or somehow polled customers who felt they fell prey to fake reviews.

Also, does the 85 percent statistic mean they've accepted some kind of gift or freebie, or just that they were offered them? TFA isn't clear.

TF2 is a good point. At least in TF2's case, dropping the price below anyone's impulse buy threshold grabbed a lot of players. I was surprised that $0 got so much more than $9 or $5 or whatever it fell to, not to mention the amount of times it was bundled or given away.

Robin Walker cautioned that they aren't at all sure it would work for many, or perhaps any of their other games, but it was interesting to see so many new people when they thought that everyone who wanted TF2 had it. I think they might keep a large portion of these new players, as well. The account limitations are pretty hard to bump into, and don't cripple you. It's practice and ability (or lack thereof) that limit you. Overall, people seem to have a lot of fun with it on the servers that Valve spun up recently for them.

With WoW, I'd be the first to think they advertised their customer base to death, but I guess there's always room to be surprised. Difficult to say without real numbers or statistics, which Blizzard is pretty scarce with providing, but maybe upcoming stock reports will tell. I mention that in contrast to Valve, which constantly displays its playerbase for games on its Steam stats page. Blizzard kept a lot of restrictions on their trials, and as it's mentioned several times above, it really crimps the social, or massively multiplayer, aspect of the genre.

Free to play seems to have been a good business call for TF2, and players appear to like it. WoW? Anyone's guess, but I'd wager it's just staunched the bleeding for a few weeks or months at best.

I love typos. I was asking myself if this is a real rights issue, or whether it's just a contract we agree to bind ourselves with.

Since US ISP's apparently are too glad to turn over name and address information when confronted with an *IAA letter, perhaps they can take it a step further: hand over the billing details.

When this cozy integration goes through, since they're already operating on guesses and the whim of 'investigators' as to your pirating, perhaps they should take the liberty of automatically debiting or tacking on to your bill the cost of the IP they think you got for free.

May as well go for the DP if you're gonna rape customers' rights (is this a rthis hard.

Is this really any different than trying to deliver an insurgency some form of weapons or armaments? I don't think this lets the US keep its hands any cleaner when interfering.

I'm more curious to see which is more effective - arming the equivalent of some mujahideen or rebels or even just citizens, versus getting them on Facebook. I think we've seen the blowback arming groups can result in. Could spreading rogue Internet connections be a mistake the somehow US regrets in the future? I mean other than roaming data charges.

Dunno, man. 16GB/3G models are $200 cheaper than their Apple counterparts (429 vs 629 @ BestBuy). Do you think there's enough margin to go any lower without a Microsoft-style flooding the market at a loss?

I'll admit I'm waiting for the leapfrogging of models to slow down and to see if the tablet market will crash before jumping in myself.

-A survey.
-A remote survey on a computer. Oh, oops. A "two-way interaction".

Damn. Are these real patents?

They're just...vague ideas. I'll admit I'm new to reading patents, but I guess I was under the impression you needed an actual implementation of something to get a patent. Why not just dream everything you could ever think of, and lie in wait for someone to actually do it, then pounce?

Oh. It seems that's exactly what they did, nevermind.

Maybe it's just an "um" detector.

ATM: "Do you have liens against your property, unpaid bills or any other credit problems?"
Dumbass: "Um...uh...err, no?!"
ATM: "DENIED!"

I think it'd work at least as well as a polygraph machine.

- Conservative/puritanical powers-that-be dying off or being squeezed out of power in the US.
- Decriminalization of drugs, and the start of a legal narcotic industry.
- Destruction (economical or literal) of the drug cartels.

Can the Mexican people really effect much change in the cartels? They can resist, but they (presumably) aren't lawless gunmen willing to do whatever it takes. I also don't think the US is going to invade any country on this continent anytime soon.

I don't know enough to say if the Mexican government is playing softball with these cartels, or whether they're just holding back the military from treating them like a formal, invading army and wiping them out. It's hard to believe an industrialized nation's military could be stopped by drug runners, unless they hamstrung themselves with strict rules of engagement. Surely they're holding back in the interest of rule of law, and not out of lack of ability?

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.