The real issue here is that NBC Universal started a contest in the schools, and created a "front" to divert everyone's attention from the fact that this is a corporately-sponsored contest, where the only winners will be those who agree with the corporation's goals.

That's dishonest and this is why this contest is seen as "evil." Presumably NBC Universal will benefit from a whole bunch of free Public Service Announcements made by these people who were duped into thinking this contest was honest.

With respect to piracy, the real danger to the studios is not in the home user burning a copy of a DVD. The real danger is from organized criminals who will literally pull up to a duplication facility loading dock with a semitrailer and steal the duplication apparatus to make copies from the original master disc. Or the Chinese government officials, sworn Party members all -- and "untouchable" because of that -- who reverse-engineer the original master and crank out millions of copies that can undersell the official studio version (because they're not paying the studio). Go down to Chinatown or Canal Street in NYC and you'll see these pirated copies all over. And these illegal copies often come out before the official release date from the studios.

But now, the studios see the writing on the wall. DVD player-recorders did not have "sufficient" copy protection built in, so home "piracy" was fairly simple. So the studios all refused to allow for a high definition system without "sufficient" "safeguards." And the studios were so intransigent that we did not have a standard for high-definition DVDs until very recently. Meanwhile, the Internet has gotten faster (despite the fact that cable and telco companies have done everything they can to not increase speeds in the United States because they like collecting money without needing to create better infrastructure) and most people will simply bypass the new Blu-Ray standard by acquiring their media through electronic delivery, instead of by buying some soon-to-be obsolete player and the media it plays.

So all of the studios' dreams of being able to lock down their content (with Blu-Ray) have been for naught. Home hard drives are big enough to contain many high-definition films and consumers can build their own libraries of the films they like without needing to rip (and bypass copy "protection" schemes) from discs. Delivery is now digital and over the Internet. DVD stores are going the way of the record store. And companies like Apple and Netflix will be the distribution channel and the studios don't control them. These studio executives all sit around their offices and meeting rooms and worry about Mom and Pop, Timmy and Mary sharing their movies with their friends who have not paid for the movie.

But the real threat is elsewhere. Right now, in Romania, Ukraine, Russia or China, there is an organized criminal who has hacked into their computer system where the unprotected film is sitting. And they are downloading everything on the computer they have hacked into. And I would not be surprised that the computer in question is actually editing the studio's film. This criminal will certainly be able to release the film as soon as it hits the theatres to consumers as pirated downloads.

So what NBC Universal is trying to do here is to find a way to get Mom, Pop, Timmy and Mary to not share their movies with Dick and Jane across the street.

Pathetic.

For what I am doing, some kind of data over cellular is a must. I build and support websites and sell to small businesses. Many of these small businesses simply don't have WiFi access, most have minimal computer knowledge. I find myself whipping out my iPad and showing them websites I have all ready delivered as proof-of-concept and so I can get a better handle on what their design sense is.

Personally, I would like something faster, and Sprint does have a 4G-based WiFi hot spot you can carry around with you and have up to five things tethered to that is really affordable. I do agree with those who don't like the fact that they have to pay a telco twice for, essentially, the same data.

For the plan I use, my business pays $15.00 monthly for the small amount of data I actually use in showing websites to clients as well as receiving and, occasionally, sending email from my iPad while not near a hot spot. It more than pays for itself in closed deals.

If you are using cellular data just for personal jollies or to "impress chix" it is a waste of funds that would better improve your life deposited in your 401(k) account. but for people who are in the field like I am, it closes deals and makes money.

I use a script for emailing the addresses of my clients and the script is server-side code. And since that does not load unless the form (for an email) is completely filled out, nobody can pre-look at my code and figure out anything.

Client's email address is in a lookup in an SQL database, so nobody can see that, either.

Solution is to capture then BLOCK the IP address of anyone sending spam through the form. So far, I have seen two messages from Belize and one from India. And now those people can no longer even load the websites they spammed. As their world gets smaller and smaller, maybe they will have so few people to email, they'll quit.

This may not work for someone as big as Google, but it certainly works for me and my website clients.

Mod this up!

And hopefully RIM will get a clue.

Their server technology is so secure that certain rather paranoid countries want them to give officials "back door" keys. And in this day of business espionage, that is a real plus.

In this war between Android and iPhone, the customer wins.

The "Droid Does" (multitasking) ad campaign spurred Apple to develop iOS 4.x, which allows multitasking. The first Droid smartphones got Apple off the dime with cut and paste. Customers continue to win here, no matter which phone they purchase

Personally I have an iPhone (4) and I like it. I had the original iPhone and retained it well past my contract with AT&T. I have a client who purchased a Droid Incredible and asked me to set up his email (from my server) on it. Took all of about a minute. I was very impressed by the phone and shall always retain that impression.

I think the real losers here are RIM with the Blackberry and the Palm WebOS smartphones. While Palm has innovated, they have been passed by and are now in a niche. RIM is trying to play "catch up" and the only real difference they offer in their phones is complete integration with secure Exchange Servers. They have lost utterly in the easy app purchase field.

Apple's biggest mistake so far in the United States has been the exclusivity contract with AT&T. Initially, it was a boon for Apple, but the Android smartphones are selling faster than the Apple smartphones because they are available on more networks. To the extent Apple stays with the phone company we all love to hate, they will lose market share versus the Android smartphones.

Fox is not apolitical and that is the problem with your statement. If you see that NYT, CNN, BBC and Fox are "random crap" you are completely deluded about what Google is doing.

The stories Google posts on their news site are the top hits for the particular stories listed. Choosing Fox over any other source gives them legitimacy in the eyes of Google—false legitimacy, because of Fox's rather nasty political agenda.

And I'm not saying that their right-wing sloganeering is nasty. The "nasty" issue with Fox is that they simply do not read, nor do they fact-check, nor do they error-correct for the purpose of informing viewership and readership. There isn't anyone sweating bullets about accuracy, double-checking name misspellings, making sure the geography is correct and trying—mightily—to not lie with statistics.

Having actually worked news gigs, these are things I did and did regularly, trying to do more than my job to make sure that what we reported was accurate—even to the point of risking my job by asking an anchorperson right before the news aired about the correctness of a tease he wrote to promote the show. Everyone in the real news media knows that, once you take a job with Fox, you're never going to be considered legitimate and you have blown any hint you may have had of integrity in reporting. And that's sad, because reporters seek for all of their working lives for that stamp of integrity and know that if they lose that, they have lost everything.

There is nothing random about the selection of Fox by Google. It is entirely based on the fact that people, not knowing that Fox does not check facts or even care about facts, click on the link because the source is topmost. And it's topmost because they sensationalize everything, rather than take the time to verify accuracy.

People are busy these days and do not always have enough time to take in enough news and current events to be properly educated about the facts around them. Those who chose faux news as their sole source of information will find themselves missing out entirely from facts that ought to inform the decisions they make in their lives.

My credentials? I worked for two of the three major news networks in the United States. For over ten years. And nobody at MSNBC or CNN limit their news intake to just faux news. This would be tantamount to never looking into any report about anything at all happening in the world. One would have come away from September 11, 2001 thinking that Saddam Hussein personally flew three planes into three buildings and followed that act up with ditching a plane in Pennsylvania -- and then lived to protest that he had no WMD, as he juggled three nuclear warheads while talking to the press.

CNN regularly and routinely aired the footage that the NBC Network produced from "Ground Zero" in New York (NBC's Rehema Ellis was the only reporter actually on the scene from any news agency and, to their shame, CNN used that footage to promote themselves as a news channel.

All of the news organizations' executives agreed to pool all footage from everywhere on that day and, for NBC, that was a very bad decision.

While working in news, I read three different news wires pretty much all of the time during the day, listened to NPR on my way in to work, read the New York Times, Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Daily Tribune. It wasn't enough. One newspaper I found important post-Clinton was the Cairo Journal, though the English version doesn't have the same "spin" as the Arabic and I would usually consult a translator at least two times a day.

I'm going to guess that the people who work at faux news read the Wall Street Journal as if that Murdoch-owned paper is a "newspaper of record." It is not. Prior to Murdoch's purchase, it was a newspaper that was full of corporate PR, hastily rewriting press releases churned out by the big corporations whose executives read it.

If you don't work in news, you should regularly read a "newspaper of record" (and none of the Murdoch-owned ones are) and you should alternate these sources. So if on Mondays, you read the New York Times, you should read the Chicago Tribune on Tuesdays, switch to the Washington Post on Wednesdays, read the Los Angeles Tribune on Thursdays and hit the BBC on Fridays. All of these outlets will be available on the Internet and all are pretty comprehensive. If you really like crosswords, you should pick the New York Times on the day you find it hardest -- but still possible, understanding that the easiest is published on Mondays, with the hardest on Fridays.

I don't think anyone is actually home any more for the 6:30 PM news on television.

Zenin's reply is perfect, but I will add this false news story that was heavily reported on faux news as yet another example of how they do no fact checking at all, preferring to sensationalize anything that fits their political aims.

As I said before, if faux news is the only "news" you take in, you will not understand the world around you. You will be regularly and routinely lied to and you will not comprehend correctly what is truly happening in the world.

The Royal Botanic Gardens is discovering a small minority of species are "discovered" more than once and genetic sequencing is helping to clear that up. Faux news is reporting that biodiversity is not important because most of the diversity is really false.

The difference here is spin. The Royal Botanic Garden will tend to prefer that we not destroy species. Murdoch and company would prefer that we pay no attention whatsoever to people who are saying that killing off massive quantities of our species from this planet could, in the long term, be very detrimental to life on earth.

I wholly disagree with your statement that what they report is rarely flat-out false and would refer you to any story originated by Breitbart as well as the above link to the Los Angeles Police jet pack purchase.

Here is what really happened.

A non-telephone company had a cascading problem with its ad-hoc peer-to-peer networking that provides telephony and video services at costs way below any telephone (or cable) company. The company is profitable enough to make its own way in this world.

This story was broadcast pretty-much worldwide by all media.

The non-telephone company was embarrased and released a statement to the media about how this happened as a means by which it might encourage everyone to download new, free software the will fix the problem and to cover for the public relations problem.

Skype is not a telephone company, but they allow you to provide telephony and video conferencing by using their software for free. And, for calls made to regular telephones, it's between 2.3 and 1.2 per minute anywhere in the world, offering a considerable savings over telephone companies and cable companies. When John Thomas Draper (AKA Captain Crunch) tried that with AT&T, he was convicted for wire fraud.

Five years ago, the only people who knew what Skype was were computer nerds. Today, as a result of the incredible savings people are receiving by making long-distance and international calls through Skype, almost everyone does. Five years ago, the only people who would have known of this outage were Slashdot users and a few other geeks. It would not have made news.

And that, dear reader, is the reason why this is important.

I don't plan to buy any stock in any phone company that doesn't do what Skype does.

Atilla, secession was the action that the states took well after the "nullification crisis." "Nullification" came into vogue during the Buchanan Presidency and the states that seceded did so as soon as they saw that Lincoln has been elected and they did not have the power to reverse gains in Congress made by the then-new Republican Party. James Madison was long dead by the time this was hashed out.

Your comment seems to have the father of our modern Constitution alive after the Civil War and then, what -- writing the Constitution and delivering it to the prior time line? Also, you confuse the Republicans or "Proto-Republicans," as you call them, whatever that is, with the Dred Scott decision, which says that property, once owned, remains property no matter what state it remains in or is taken to, the solution to which was proposed by Abolitionists (not Republicans) in emancipating all human property and outlawing the existence of slavery.

Republicans were created as a northern splinter of the Whig Party, which favored business and commerce and trade over the rights of individuals. Whigs splintered over the idea of secession as well as the idea at the federal government was the supreme law and that states had no right of "nullification." The new Republic-an party believed that the Republic should not be split between north and south and that any attempts to create such a split should not be allowed (hence the choice of name). The party was made up of former Whigs as well as Abolitionists, Free-Soilers and "Know-nothings," who had decided that the Union needed to be preserved. It was a pretty big tent, and Lincoln's rather fractious Cabinet reflected that.

I think he is confusing "Judicial Review" which was affirmed in Marbury v Madison In 1803, where the Supreme Court decided it had the power to declare laws unconstitutional through the process of adjudication, with "nullification," an unconstitutional exercise of "States Rights" that was settled by the end of the Civil War.

Readers of Slashdot would do well to remember the Reconstruction era, which settled this issue of "nullification" upon admitting those States "then in rebellion" back into the Union, extracting a promise that there would be no such unconstitutional nullification of federal law and federal powers and territory in the future United States. I note that today, there is a lot of rhetoric, mostly from Republicans (the party who once claimed federal power supreme in the US) and also Libertarian and "TEA Party" wing nuts that the States should exercise their "power" to "nullify" federal laws they do not like.

When Antebellum States did "nullify," it was generally done through the exercise of legislative power within those States and not judicial. States' legislatures passed laws to countermand federal laws not on the premise that those laws were unconstitutional, but on the premise that they were disliked. Disliking a law does not give states a legal leg to stand on.

This is why there is this confusion between Judicial Review (which adheres to the US Constitution) and "nullification" (which does not), Republicans are proposing it because, while a Minority power, they did not like what was happening and decided that the Constitution no longer needed to be adhered to (despite swearing to adhere to it and protect it) when they don't like what the Majority decides.

Let us be clear here: When Republicans hold a majority, they do not talk of nullification and even fight wars to affirm it's unconstitutionality. Whey they don't, they suddenly think it's a viable option and start telling everyone that it's an option worth exercising.

Microsoft is singling Google out here because Google is #1 in phone sales. Microsoft is chasing after Fortune 1000 companies with this comment, with an subtext here of "their stuff isn't going to work with your back office." Which is classic FUD misinformation from The Collective.

Meanwhile, in Reality World, which everyone outside of Redmond lives in, Microsoft's Windows Phone launch is seriously disappointing the company. So someone in Microsoft sales perked up and said, "Well Android phones can't possibly work as well with Enterprise as ours," completely forgetting that Android phones and iPhones have been banned from the Microsoft campus for so long that nobody knows how well the new smartphones work in the enterprise.

So this just looks like an ad-hominem attack, rather than what it is really aimed at.

Company data is company data. And if a personal smartphone is used and personal data and applications are wiped on termination or if the phone is lost or stolen, that's a good protection for the company.

What everyone's missing here is that the iPhone backs up all data every time you sync. I know, I have owned one since six months after the original one came out. and I went through three of those, as one thing or another would quit working (the last was a bad plastic lens on the camera). I did a sync, took the phone to the Genius bar at the Apple store, exchanged my phone under extended warranty, took the new phone home and restored all data -- including the last 50 emails -- from my computer.

At that point, and with those last 50 emails as long as you do not reconnect to the Exchange server you still have access to the last 50 company emails from the restore. You also have all of the rest of your data as well as all of your apps.

So, note to company managers: If you are going to violate the Employee Handbook or write or transmit something that violates employment law, make sure that those actions are taken more than 50 email messages before the Smartphone gets wiped, else you may have to defend against the undeniable proof of your misdeeds that remain in your former employee's cell phone.