You're probably not in violation of any law unless there's some bat shit crazy laws about conspiracy to commit tax fraud. Your friend though might be in trouble, depending on how often he provides a "taxi" service to other people. In our tax system the condition (translated) is:

"A sustained activity which is likely to provide net income and operated by the taxpayer at its own expense and risk."

The key points here is
a) Sustained, one-offs or highly irregular activities don't count
b) Provide net income, activities that are mostly a loss are generally not deductible
c) You're not in an employment relationship, you make your own business

This has been applied broadly, if you're a prostitute and make a living from it you're committing tax fraud by not reporting it. Professional poker players have been hit with back taxes. You might say it's crude and after-the-fact but if you lose money it's a hobby, if you make money it's a business. Just like Al Capone they don't need to prove you did anything illegal, only that you failed to pay your income taxes.

Or the TL;DR version: Embrace, extend, extinguish. Companies are not your friends, they're temporary allies as the underdog seeks to become top dog but will abandon you when they no longer need your support. They make more money that way.

Which is why more and more of the essential code goes to live on their servers, not your client. Photos, audio and video are "trivial" in the sense that if you capture the output you're done. Applications and games? It's a cat and mouse game but if "always online single player" wins I think DRM does too.

Most of the new Internet users are now mobile, people get smartphones before they get computers, the cheapest Android phone I could find around here now is $40 with a 240x320 crap screen and they'd still need a cell phone. I don't know and I've never bothered to find out what my IP address is when I'm on the phone. So I figure the Internet will continue to grow, you'll probably pay another $1/month if you want an IPv4 address and a lot of people won't bother. A lot of people don't run servers or host games or use P2P, for example I don't think my parents would notice if they no longer had a public IPv4. As long as they can browse the web and pay their bills and check their email they're happy. And don't forget how many are now using "the cloud", all their own devices are just clients that run client-to-server not peer-to-peer.

Sure, with a $5 monkey wrench you can make someone implement a backdoor, but if the developer never made one and doesn't know of any exploits to produce one then beating him to a pulp won't help him find one. Sure I can't guarantee that I haven't made any big oopsies in my code, but if I did I'm not aware of them and if I found one it'd be patched immediately. I'd never knowingly sit around with an unpatched way to backdoor the system, it can only "extract" things you actually know how to do.

These cards exists because they make them for the compute/workstation/enterprise market, why not rebrand and sell for some insane amount of money? Just like Intel's $999 processors wouldn't exist without the Xeon line. You get plenty bang for the buck for $150-250 with the "normal" enthusiast cards topping out at $500-700, which I assume is not that much more after inflation. Of course if you insist on playing Crysis in UltraHD with everything dialed up to max nothing will be enough, but many games the last years have been console ports that'll run on any half-decent gaming PC.

First of all, they said TrueCrypt has unfixed critical bugs not that it was compromised. It wouldn't really make a lot of sense either, if it was compromised back in 2012 and you wanted to be a whistleblower why wait well over 2 years to do it? It's not like NSA or whomever would let that sort of gag order expire. And if they're under any kind of pressure now, it would be to discredit the software they made years ago that doesn't contain any backdoors. Which brings us over to the next issue, they claim there's critical bugs but they won't tell anyone where they are so others can fix them nor fix them themselves. I mean they don't just want to shut down their project, they want tarnish the name, burn it to the ground and salt the earth after them and you really have to ask: Why?

I don't think and you probably also don't think that it's because XP support has ended and we should now all go use Bitlocker, so they're lying to us now. Why are they lying to us? I don't know, either they're pressured to it or working for commercial alternatives or threw a hand grenade to start conspiracy theories and get everyone reviewing the code or just went plain nuts I don't know. But there's no reason for any agency to kill off a version that has a backdoor and if there really was a government backdoor wouldn't the best way to be a whistleblower be to point it out? Why this ominous yet vague FUD? The answer that makes the most sense is that they're lying about everything. The developers don't know of any critical issues with 7.1a, but they're being pressured to or want to kill it.

That doesn't mean TrueCrypt is bug free, of course it may have bigger and smaller issues. But I think they're lying about knowingly withholding anything, that they're not working on the code and not maintaining it isn't the same as deliberately avoiding fixing issues. If they had said nothing at all and TrueCrypt had stayed at versjon 7.1a for another few years I'd still use it and despite what looks to me like a best effort they can't go back in time and sabotage their old release. So while I wouldn't trust anything they do from now on, the older code looks good. Why else would they go through so much effort to get rid of it? Somebody badly wants TrueCrypt 7.1a to disappear and be abandoned, the question is who and why.

And who'd go around remembering that Twinings is British, Sony is Japanese, Audi is German and so on? If it's sold here, I expect a localized version of their website in my country's domain (even if it's just a redirect to $brand.com/countrycode, as so many do), the country of origin is only marginally interesting. It makes guessing the correct domain harder without the use of Google, not easier.

Let's forbid anyone doing anything about domain squatting. And won't this be massive fun during mergers, acquisitions and spinoffs.

The world and their dog already has a dotcom no matter what, you're trying to clean a pool that has more piss than water in it.

Stop the madness, just accept globalization as a fact and move the whole .com to become root domains at reasonable prices and that's that. Google is just "google", Twinings Tea is just "twinings" and let Apple the computer company and Apple the music company and Apple the produce company fight over who's "apple", absolutely nobody wants their domain name to be some kind of unique categorization down a tree, it's "google" not "google.searchengine". Reserve the two-letter domains as special cases for nations and let the free market settle the rest. Practically there's no problem, are you Tesla building cars? Get teslamotors.com and the whole thing is solved with 99% less drama.

As long as it has regular front doors it's not that big a deal, open it the traditional way, grab snow brush/ice scrape, wipe off rest of car and then open the gull wings. If it was all gull wing, it'd be different as you could get a lot of snow blowing into the opening as it falls off the opening door or from the rest of the roof. It's not a good winter feature, but it's not a killer problem either assuming they can keep the seals closed and the doors don't freeze in the winter.

Those things go mostly hand in hand, either you can increase performance or reduce power usage. Things get a little more complicated as you approach SoC power levels, but in general the one with the highest performing chips also can scale them down to the lowest consuming chips. There's a reason Intel can sell $500-1000 mobile chips, in that power envelope AMD doesn't have a match on performance so Intel is free to set the price at will.

But it'll keep the little people being crushed under the jackboot of tyranny from pulling the plug, the robots do not desert, do not rebel, do not refuse to follow orders, do not have compassion or empathy or morality, do not fear hostility or retaliation. At best you can disable or destroy a few, but so what? No lives will be lost, nobody is crippled - on their side at least - so if they can keep them coming off the assembly line fast enough they have infinite respawns and you don't. And if you do cause some low level operators to desert well the higher ups probably have kill switches to render the robots they control inert or self-destruct. If a small ruling caste can control the vast masses of the population they'll have vast power, riches, luxuries and a working class to cater to their every whim. No matter how high the standard of living becomes this will always be attractive and there'll never be enough fine champagne and beluga caviar for everyone.

You don't need to go there, being able to defend itself with lethal force and seek out and neutralize enemies will be part of its programming. The enemy tank isn't a threat now, but it might become a threat so find it and preemptively destroy it before it becomes a threat. Those civilians aren't a threat now, but they could put on uniforms and carry guns, so let's waste them now before they become a threat. In computer logic it's very easy to end up at such absolute conclusions like that if we kill everyone, there'll be no resistance so it's a perfect victory. Play Civilization or Risk and the AI will keep on killing until you're utterly annihilated. The current "drive by wire" system where they only shoot at what the operator tells them to shoot will eventually go away in favor of more autonomous systems.

I think you're forgetting how much of a gap there used to be between phones - mostly feature phones - drawing <1W for the entire package on idle and even "ultra-portable" laptops that drew 10W for the CPU alone. The early Microsoft tablets had flopped, there was no middle ground asking for anything in between. I had some of the crappy early implementations of JavaME games, WAP surfing and it sucked real bad, that phones could be really useful wasn't very obvious until the iPhone in 2007. And back then Intel was very busy trying to beat back AMD with their Core processors, while AMD was trying to follow up the Athlons with their K10 arch.

Intel did bring out the Atoms in 2008, which were generally hated for performing so poorly but caught AMD between a rock and a hard place by undercutting their value offering and yet still were far, far too power hungry for mobile. With the cheap netbooks Intel probably thought they had Apple contained, besides Apple never went for the low end market right? Except Apple decided to sell a high-end botique tablet and despite costing as much as a laptop the iPad sold and sold big. So around 2010 some Intel execs go "uh-oh" and in 2012 the first Atom SoCs start showing up, that's roughly the lead time you need to bring up such a product.

Yes, in hindsight it's easy but back then... no, I thought the iPhone would be like iPod + phone, a decent music player that could do calls and texts that could kill off some phone manufacturers but that was it. I mean there were apps before the iPhone but they were expensive, crap and not very user friendly and I never expected that to become a big selling point. That an overgrown phone with 10" screen would become popular was also not on my radar. And even if I was an Intel exec and suspected, hitting those power levels, SoC design, mW idle states so early I wouldn't be playing catch-up to ARM would be near impossible.

That said, I don't think Intel is too late... there's been a few nice tablet/laptop hybrids that let you use the screen as a tablet or dock it to have a laptop, to me that kind of dual purpose is rather nice because for going mobile flexibility is also rather important, if I can cover both needs with one device there's less trade-off. I don't want a Microsoft phone though, but hey... I didn't think I'd ever want an Apple phone either but hell didn't freeze over so who knows what the future might bring.

I think you can spin that any way you like it, on the one side they're a many headed beast for Intel to deal with but on the other side they're also in pretty intense competition with each other so they're not willing to share their secret sauce either. You pool resources but you are also at the mercy of a third party which may have interests that aren't exactly aligned with yours. The saying is "divide and conquer", not "spread yourself thin and attack from all sides".

I also wouldn't underestimate the amount of cash and brainpower freed up by AMDs inability to compete at the high end, they're basically printing money in the server and enthusiast market now. Margins and prices are two entirely different things, selling i7-4790K/177mm^2 for $339 makes a bundle and a single Xeon 8800 can set you back up to $6841, I bet Intel pockets thousands on each.

Personally I'm sitting on an i7-860 from 2009, I'm thinking it's soon time to upgrade and while the FX-8350 is barely better it's not really enough to justify the upgrade. So my choices seem like Intel, Intel or Intel.... get an i7-4790K? Wait for Haswell-E? Wait for Broadwell? Either way Intel is going to get my money it's only a matter of how. That's a good position for Intel, not so good for me but ARM is fighting a company with lots and lots of money to burn.

In recent history there was WDDM 1.0 (Vista, 2006) 1.1 (Win7, 2009) 1.2 (Win8, 2012) and 1.3 (Win8.1, 2013) and as far as I can tell they're backwards compatible - if your graphics card has a WDDM 1.0 driver you can still run Win8.1, however it'll also cap your DirectX level. Unless I'm mistaken that's 8 years of a stable (but expanding) ABI, it seems like DirectX 12 will require WDDM 2.0 which may be the next clean break but we won't know until Win9 is out. But I agree that the market share helps Microsoft a lot, particularly the market share of gamers despite Steam now being on Linux - according to their May 2014 survey 95.5% run Steam on Windows. Also for all those pointing to Distrowatch, at least 0.64% of the 1.10% running Linux use Ubuntu with only 0.08% verified as Mint...

Desktop environments are not "done", true my desktop might on the surface resemble Win95, but a lot has happened under the hood on system management tools. Yes, a lot of that is happening deep down in a driver stack but very often it involves exposing new functionality or removing old functionality in control panels, system settings, control applets or whatever. That's just boring maintenance work though, the problem is the UI coders want to do something cool and innovative - they're mostly volunteers after all, not paid to tweak old code based to accommodate changes in other software. I think it's the exact opposite problem, it's work that doesn't get done unless you pay them to do it not busywork done to justify the paycheck. What you have is exactly what you get when people only do the parts of the job they like.