What you describe is probably inevitable; we are certainly moving in that direction now. But I think people will eventually stop putting up with it. Either there will be a "peaceful revolution," where people start diverting their money to companies willing to provide entertainment and culture on more reasonable terms, or an "arms race" of stronger and stronger DRM and higher and higher prices on the one hand, and more and more widespread piracy on the other. Either way, unless we also move into a completely totalitarian society, the DRM-lovers can't win.

In cell phones.

While I have little to no personal knowledge of Australian politics, friends and acquaintances tell me it's largely a game of copycatting/catching up with big brother (literally) USA. "Oh look, they're becoming a police state. Let's do that, too. Why? Just because. No worries, mate."

Yeah. Like Slashdot.

Well... I agree that the only reasonable conclusion is that there are just too fucking many of us. If we don't bring the population down ourselves, somehow (as, of course, we won't), the system will self-regulate and do it for us, somehow (most likely in some way we won't much care for, like a cataclysmic natural disaster or a global pandemic).

An interesting question is how we could possibly bring the population down in a reasonably palatable way. Massive emigration to colonies in space? We just don't have the technology for that. Birth control? As someone else said, this would pretty soon cause enormous social problems with growing numbers of elderly relying on shrinking numbers of younger people for support (a very mild version of this problem can already be seen in countries like Japan). Something else? If so, what?

Who cares about games? I used to have a Zaurus, and it was (mostly) great for note-taking, calendaring, web surfing, MP3 playing, even casual video viewing. Plus, it ran Linux, was pretty hackable and had a terminal. And it fit nicely in a pocket, although it was a tad heavy. My Symbian smartphone sorta kinda does (most of) the same things, but not quite as well and it doesn't have a proper keyboard.

I want a pocket computer, but nobody makes those anymore now that everything, for some reason, has to look like a damn Iphone. The Pandora looks very interesting. If only they hadn't wasted so much space on those game controller thingies and instead made the keyboard a little bit bigger.

I'm not railing on you. I'm just saying that some things, no matter how useful*, are not for everyone.

* The usefulness of juggling with chainsaws can be debated. This is not career advice.

It's also not guaranteed that a peer in the swam is downloading or uploading. The only way to be 99% sure is to send/receive to/from a given peer. But, if you don't send/receive 100% of the content to/from that single peer, it would be hard to claim copyright infringement, as you couldn't prove a full copy had been shared by that IP address.

Sure, but do the courts know that?

...did anyone think it was a good idea to give Facebook your webmail password, as they are constantly pestering you to do? "We won't store your password." Yeah right.

And your example is flawed in other ways too. For example, Hitler didn't pick Jews arbitrarily; he picked them because they were the terrorists/commies/witches of their time, widely believed to be trying to destroy Western civilization for some vague nefarious ideological reasons. It was easy for Hitler to fan that fear, and to convince people the Jews were trying to destroy their lifestyle and would never stop, so the people needed to give him the power to deal with the problem; in other words, exactly the same shit as we are having nowadays.

Just for that, I'd mod you up if I had mod points. Thank you.

According to TFA, analysts expect Youtube to turn a profit this year. And, while it's not entirely clear, it appears that these analysts made this prediction before news of video rentals came out.

Whatever happened to Google Losing Up To $1.65M a Day On YouTube? And where is their revenue coming from, anyway? Can they really make that much from the relatively few ads they have, or is Google engaging in a little creative bookkeeping to make it appear that Youtube is doing great? Why would they do that?

You're proving the very point you're arguing against. Those countries were indeed properly conquered by the US, who then responsibly and honorably proceeded to help them rebuild their infrastructure, adopt democracy, and subsequently regain independence. However... Notice how there are no recent examples in the list? Remember how the US has acted in similar cases recently? Usually, they have gone in, screwed things up even worse than they were before, and then left. Iraq may yet turn out to be different -- probably because they have oil.