Players have discovered that there's a cap on how much money you can carry in the game. Apparently that amount is 214,748 gold, 36 silver, 48 copper. After you reach that lofty sum, you'll no longer be able to receive money from any source in the game. While some responses to the original posts claim that this exact limit had previously been theorized to exist, there have been no reports of anyone in the game actually achieving this amount via legal means.

If you visit a lot of bars and restaurants, you've likely crossed paths with drivers license scanners — machines that supposedly verify that your license is valid. In actuality, many of these scanners are designed to record your license information in addition to verifying them, and those that authenticate against a remote database are creating a record of when and where you buy alcohol.

Collecting our driver's license information is one thing, but collecting data about our personal drinking habits is not only a violation of, according to the ACLU representative quoted in the article, privacy and civil liberties, but this 'drinking record' could also create problems for people in civil and criminal lawsuits as proof of alcohol purchases in DUI cases or evidence of alcoholism in divorce lawsuits.

Last year was the worst ever for data losses in the UK, with almost 37 million people having their private data compromised.

The government's loss of 25 million child benefit records was the largest single screw-up, but other government departments and private companies played their part too.

"There is simply no way that any democratic government can expect an unwilling public to accept having their precious personal data cropped and stored in the world's largest database when they aren't confident that database will be safe."

In total, 36,989,300 people in the UK have had their private records compromised.

The last major label will throw in the towel on digital rights management and prepare to fight Apple for valuable download revenues

In a move that would mark the end of a digital music era, Sony BMG Music Entertainment is finalizing plans to sell songs without the copyright protection software that has long restricted the use of music downloaded from the Internet, BusinessWeek.com has learned.

Labels used DRM software in an effort to prevent illegal sharing of songs on peer-to-peer networks, such as Gnutella. Instead, the restrictions served mainly to frustrate paying customers, forcing them to degrade the quality of music by first burning it to a CD before uploading it for play on the device of their choosing.

Hollywood isn't quite as thrilled about my new HD Media Dream Machine and they've decided to punish me by revoking my Watch Now privileges from Netflix.

The minute I saw "this will potentially remove playback licenses from your computer, including those from companies other than Netflix or Microsoft" I knew better than to hit continue.

In order to access the Watch Now service, I had to give Microsoft's DRM sniffing program access to all of the files on my hard drive. If the software found any non-Netflix video files, it would revoke my rights to the content and invalidate the DRM. This means that I would lose all the movies that I've purchased from Amazon's Unbox, just to troubleshoot the issue.

Because my computer allows me to send an unrestricted HDTV feed to my monitor, Hollywood has decided to revoke my ability to stream 480 resolution video files from Netflix.

The irony in all of this, is that the DRM that Hollywood is so much in love with, is really only harming their paying customers. When you do a DRM reset, it's not your pirated files that get revoked, it's the ones that you already paid for that are at risk.

It's as if the studios want their digital strategies to fail.

Marc Fisher, a Post columnist, wrote on Sunday that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) asserted in a legal brief that anyone who copies music from a CD onto their computer is a thief. The document, filed last month, was part of the RIAA's copyright suit against Jeffrey Howell, an Arizona resident accused of illegal file sharing.

The problem with Fisher's story is that nowhere in the RIAA's brief does the group call someone a criminal for simply copying music to a computer. Throughout the 21-page brief, the recording industry defines what it considers to be illegal behavior and it boils down to this: creating digital recordings from CDs and then uploading them to file-sharing networks.

This was in the early 1950s. He was still Josef Engressia then, born in Richmond, Va., and phones were solid objects.

"Lots of scary sounds and stuff at night," he'd say, years later. "Sometimes I'd hug my phone up close and listen to the dial tone, the soft hum of the dial tone that was always there."

At 7, with his perfectly pitched ear, he heard through the receiver the tone that controlled long-distance connections, 2,600 cycles per second. "I started whistling along with it," he said, "and all of a sudden the circuit cut off, and I did it again, and it cut off again. And gradually... I figured out - back in the mid-'50s - just how to do it."

In 1971, Ron Rosenbaum, in his landmark Esquire article, called him "the original granddaddy phone phreak," though he was only 22.

Children love telephones. Joybubbles, who was 5 years old when he died this year, and 5 years old the year before that, 5 years old for almost 20 years, was no exception.

When Joybubbles died, Steven Gibb arranged a telephone memorial, a sort of Quaker service over phone lines, a conference call four hours long with 50 people telling stories.

Shares of Apple Inc. hit the $200 mark for the first time Wednesday, as investor confidence in the company continued rising near the end of what has been a strong year for the iPod and computer maker.

Apple released a refreshed line of iPods during the year, updating its flash-based Nano model to one that can play videos, and introducing a device called the iPod Touch which is much like an iPhone without cellular calling capabilities.

"Looks like their business is strong even though retail sales growth in general appears to be weaker than in prior years," Seyrafi said.

A 17-year old died just hours after her health insurance company reversed its decision not to pay for a liver transplant that doctors said the girl needed.

Doctors at UCLA determined she needed a transplant and sent a letter to CIGNA Healthcare on Dec. 11. The Philadelphia-based health insurance company denied payment for the transplant.

On Thursday, about 150 teenagers and nurses protested outside CIGNA's office in Glendale. As the protesters rallied, the company reversed its decision and said it would approve the transplant.

Despite the reversal, CIGNA said in an e-mail statement before she died that there was a lack of medical evidence showing the procedure would work in Nataline's case.

Colorado's top election official decertified electronic voting machines used in some of the state's largest counties on Monday, including Denver, Arapahoe and Jefferson.

Coffman said the system had a 1 percent error rate when counting ballots. "So for every 100 ballots we tested, we found there was an error with one of those ballots," Coffman said.

He said at the time that the four electronic voting systems used in all 64 Colorado counties would have to apply for recertification. The four systems are manufactured by Hart InterCivic, Premier Election Solutions -- formerly known as Diebold Election Systems -- Sequoia Voting Systems and Election Systems and Software.