Actually in the case of Blizzard, all you gotta do is register your CD Key at Battle.net and then DL the installer. In effect you can make infinite DVD copies of the install disc, only costs you the bandwidth to DL it.

Yeah this was covered in a Star Trek Voyager episode (Year of Hell). Guy fucked his own race by removing an immunity to a disease by fucking with the timeline.

Agreed, this sounds like perfect expression of the Tyranny of the Majority. Thankfully they cannot organize into a political party, with all the problems that causes, ie Nazi Germany. Oh and Godwin

The former was/is true, because Sergey Brin had issues with it since he lived in the former Soviet Union. I imagine he is a driving force behind Google's current actions.

Well you could be a traveling businessman, have your work on a netbook, but be able to hook up to the conference room HD projector and show your HD Powerpoint (wonder if MS has made that pitch yet "PowerPoint IN HD!!!!). More likely an HD video preview of a product to customer?

Or I can just get an ION powered netbook, install Linux and use VDPAU, and play any HD without any issue. Why is this news?

Umm, hate to break it to you, but both creating and consuming power can't defy thermodynamics, specifically 2nd law.

No, the garbage collector detects that, and frees the memory accordingly. It keeps track whether an object can be reached my the main program or not.

Actually no it didn't, world war 2 started with the declarations of war by the British, the British Commonwealth, and France in response to the invasion of Poland by Germany. Remember that Germany had effectively already taken over Czechoslovakia and Austria with no resistance and it wasn't consider war at that point.

True, aircraft fight in 3 dimensions, but there are hard limits on the range of said aircraft on the z axis (the ground, and whatever air ceiling the aircraft is capable of), plus the physics with no drag from an atmosphere would certainly influence battle tactics. I'm not a pilot, but physics seem to limit what kind of approaches one can do in an atmospheric combat zone vs in space.

Then use Reader inside a VM or otherwise a throw away OS. Seems like a fairly secure* sandbox for such vulnerable applications. *Yes a VM itself can be exploited and broken out of, but that is way harder then the swiss cheese of Adobe Reader.

corporations and the wealthy *flaunt* the tax system

Like... walk it around town and show everyone how incredibly sexy it is? Or mayhap you meant flout? :)

Don't they do both?

Cool, I'll just do all the above steps on the Windows VM used for this purpose alone. Then never use said VM again.

Its not so much that people USE the 4 gigs. It's when Joe Sixpack buys the cheap HP from Office Depot that has 4GB of RAM, boots it up and only sees around 3.5 or less of it. It will get worse when the bottom barrel computer has 6 or 8 GB of RAM (probably in the next couple years or less).

Last time I checked, most software written is never sold, it's developed in-house as a custom solution. Thus copyright has almost no bearing on it, more likely would fall under trade secrets. See recent case of Goldman-Sachs coder getting arrested by FBI for example.