Don't forget hardware-accelerated H.264 playback. Particularly mobile devices have media playback hardware of this sort.

My father told me how he had just bought an HDTV and a new DVD player with a built-in surround system and needed help setting it up with the cable box and his VCR. When I went over to set it up, I was fully prepared to spend hours getting everything in something resembling a workable state and then explaining how it was all configured to my parents. I was particularly fearful of how the audio would be set up, considering that the sound system was literally built into the DVD player. Imagine my surprise (and relief) upon discovering that both the TV and DVD player support some sort of HDMI communication protocol. I hooked up the DVD player and the cable box to the TV by HDMI, and the VCR by component cable and somehow it all works seamlessly. As soon as you do something on one of the boxes, the TV input switches automatically and the audio is routed through the DVD player's amplifier. Adding an AppleTV a couple months ago was just a matter of plugging another HDMI cable into the TV, audio is handled automatically.

What about magnet links then? Magnet links can be used to load a torrent into a client without the user downloading the torrent themselves. They're pretty much a link to a link, so are those OK?

That reminds me of a scene from one of my favorite south park episodes, about a game called Heroin Hero.

Indeed. The UI hack that things like Photoshop and Word have used on Windows, making a huge window with a menu bar and a gigantic empty space in the middle for where your documents show up is just awful. With the global menubar and applications persisting after last window closed means that the user is mentally separating "close" from "quit". On Windows, closing a window could do one of a few things (close window and put in tray, close and quit, close and go back to empty space MDI) but for most applications on a Mac, closing a window is just closing a window and quitting the Application is an entirely different action.

The professional-oriented retailer I used to work at got a huge shipment of FCP boxes from Apple as soon as FCX came out, yet we're still on backorder with production houses. Apple has promised one *last* shipment of FCP before they discontinue it entirely, licensed copies of it are already starting to get rare.

They undoubtedly killed of the Xserve because the cost of developing and supporting it was higher than the returns from relatively weak sales. If the professional Mac line starts to falter, they'd probably give the expensive-to-engineer Mac Pro line the axe too.

You can also disable the location access for each app individually in the global device settings page.

It's not legal in many countries to make them. To "legally" make a DVD player (that doesn't violate the US DMCA or another country's similar laws) you have to get a license from the DVD Forum that include the CSS decryption key. They will not give you a license if your player does not respect parts of the standard, e.g. the "skipping isn't allowed" sections. Since CSS has been cracked it's perfectly feasible to create a non-licensed player (such as VLC) but technically those players are illegal in the US since they include software for circumventing copy-protection measures (CSS). Also they can't have the DVD logo or anything like that on them due to trademark violation. Same thing in regards to region-locked players.

Actually, when it comes to Mac OS X the replacing of libraries that Psystar or any other hackintosh-er had to do is in fact illegal. Major components of the OS (i.e. the Finder application binary) are encrypted and signed. For the system to be usable those binaries need to be decrypted during load with the help of the kernel extension "Don't Steal Mac OS X.kext." That extension does the tests to ensure that the system is running on Apple hardware and will only decrypt the binaries if it checks out. To get around that, the hackintosh community have come up with "decrypter" extensions that decrypt the system binaries themselves. As it happens, using one of those is a DMCA violation (reverse-engineering and bypassing DRM, effectively). On a related note, when Psystar started selling their machines much of the hackintosh community was pretty annoyed, as they were selling community-made tools (boot-132 loader and efi v8 emulator, if I remember correctly - boot-132 is APSL but PsyStar didn't release the source and pc_efi v8 is forbidden for use commercially).

Indeed, the arguments against open source browsers using system frameworks or codecs for non-free formats just don't hold water. I feel the main reason Mozilla refuses to allow this is politically motivated. Same for Google, although they're pushing their own format. Neither of them want to see H.264 or any other commercial format become the de-facto standard because the folks at Mozilla don't believe people have the right to choose non-free software and the folks at Google want the world to use their shit. I love H.264 because it gives me awesome quality in small files and it "just works" across a myriad of my devices. My iPad cannot play VP8 or Theora and VLC on my Macs don't play OGG files very well. Hell I even tried using VLC on my jailbroken iPad. If VP8 or another "free" format had the hardware and software support of H.264 then I would have no problem using it.

Hah. So true. I had thought that credit card purchases were reasonably secure, until I was hired to write drivers for a credit card swiper. I've been told by people who know more about the system than I do that there's a whole criminal business of generating random credit card numbers. When working numbers are found, dozens of counterfeit plastic cards are run off with that number and sold to people who want to use them at stores.

Yeah I've got a Mini G4 for a web host and a Power Mac G4 serving up files. My work laptop is an almost four year old MacBook Pro. Unfortunately my experience with more recently Apple hardware has been less than stellar.

Due to the immense backlog of applications, it's been the USPTO's standard procedure to grant the patent without doing a search for prior art. If there actually is prior art then it's supposed to be the job of the court to invalidate the patent. Of course, that means that if someone gets sued over a bullshit patent, they have to be willing and able to take it all the way through court for it to get invalidated.

Couple things... 1) Have you played Portal 2? Any other recent Valve game? Source is doing pretty damn well for them, Portal 2 is absolutely beautiful. I still play my favorite parts of the Half Life 2 games from time to time and they look pretty sweet too. 2) In the four years that I have been playing Team Fortress 2, I can count on one hand the number of actual hackers that I have encountered. In all cases they were banned pretty quickly by an admin on the server I was playing on.