Probably a tax dodge rather than a real indication of the cost. The store will buy it from a distributor which is another part of Best Buy, but is based in some tax-friendly territory quite possibly in another country. The distribution part makes all the real money and pays virtually no tax, the store part makes a token profit and pays normal corporate tax rates.

The most draconian DRM is on the consoles and it's extremely effective. Piracy rates on consoles are minuscule compared to the PC. DRM on consoles is also non-intrusive and gives you more freedom to resell and lend your games. The future is DRM baked into the hardware. As PC makers shied away from TPM the solution is obvious, and is already happening - just sell your games on platforms built around DRM: consoles. Many developers have stopped investing much money in developing for PCs, hence the console ports. Some games already aren't released for the PC. Soon even more developers will just stop developing for PCs all together, which will make people who want to play games buy consoles and buy the games.

EA own DICE but not Crytek, for whom they are just a publisher. I doubt there is that level of technology exchange between the two developers.

Since I got back into PC gaming last year I haven't pirated anything (games or otherwise) and I have bought several AA/AAA titles. I even bought a legit copy of Windows (the first time I've done that in my life).

The fact is, 15 years ago when installing Windows 95 and Quake 2 required nothing more than a keycode for full functionality I would never have considered paying for software and I never did pay for any. Why bother?

Now though, DRM makes pirating more hassle than it's worth and digital download services make legit purchases quick, simple and often very cheap. Torrenting is more effort than hitting a few buttons on Steam. Legit copies don't have nearly as much hassle with patching, getting online play working, worrying about viruses and trojans etc.

x86 is a a huge, complex instruction set. All else being equal. implementing it costs more silicon and more power than ARM architectures. Intel's great engineers and unmatched process can make up for this somewhat, but it would be a good effort for them just to achieve parity with ARM. To do so they're likely going to need to stay one process step ahead of the competition, which has cost implications.

People using Google search and Chrome aren't Google's customers, they are their product. Their real customers are advertisers.

If Google decide not to have you on their search engine they can pretty much destroy your online business. If Google decided that everyone had to have some special tags or use some particular technology on their site to be listed or to get preferential listing, people would do it because Google are sufficiently powerful that people wouldn't really have a viable alternative. For example, Google could kill Flash by refusing to list sites with Flash or take advertising from sites with Flash. Flash would be gone from the web in a couple of months because the vast majority of sites couldn't survive without a Google listing. That power, power which comes from their dominant market share, is what makes them a monopoly.

> How far am I really then because I'm only 0.005489685% the circumference of the Earth from my place of birth?

You know your place of birth accurate to the millimetre?

The EU is not a country.

> Not to mention that 3rd party browsers can report themselves as whatever the hell they want, while an iOS device has no option.

An iOS _device_ has no option? Safari on iOS may not have an option to spoof the user agent but 3rd party iOS browsers do.

People are handing out free samples of stuff all the time. We're not discussing them or the product they're giving away. We are discussing the machines dispensing Temptations by Jell-O.

They have 1) got us talking about it and 2) reinforced the notion that this is a product for adults. I can absolutely believe they spent time, effort and money developing this machine; it's a brilliant machine because it sells the product without you even needing to be near the machine. I'm not even in the same fucking country and I now know about this product - all because of that machine.

Persistent HTTP connections were tacked on to HTTP 1.0 years ago and are widely supported, but you still have the "can I have that bit now please?" overhead with the associated latency between retrieving each file on each connection. 100ms of latency multiplied by a dozen assets soon adds up. HTTP 1.1's pipelining means you can ask for many things at once so only suffer that hit once (or twice - page then assets), but in practice browser support for pipelining is poor.

You're implying there aren't better ways to clean shit off your body than using paper, but there are. Actually washing it off is vastly superior. If you had shit on your face would you just wipe it off with toilet paper? No, you wash it off with soap and water because otherwise your face would smell of shit.

Are engineers going to work out a way to get a couple of orders of magnitude more data in the frequencies they've already got? No, so we need more frequency bands to significantly increase capacity. Are Nokia are going to get Switzerland to change the frequencies their emergency services use so they can save $0.05 on the cost of making a phone? No, so we can't use the same frequency bands everywhere in the world because there just aren't that many big chunks of useful spectrum lying unused.

Either they don't care or can't afford an iPhone. People who don't care about having nice things don't spend money buying nice apps. People who can't afford a nice phone are less likely to buy apps. Either way a significant chunk of people who buy Android phones are not people developers want to target.

They turned off selective availability - the deliberate introduction of errors to the unencrypted signal - many years ago, but the encrypted P(Y) military code which provides greater accuracy than the unencrypted C/A code is still encrypted.

You can't spoof the P(Y) code without some pretty serious code breaking, but you could jam the P(Y) code and spoof the C/A code. If the GPS unit falls back to C/A when it can't get a lock on P(Y) you can spoof the position, but as part of the purpose of the P(Y) code is anti-spoofing you'd kinda hope that military receivers would only trust the position when they can get a P(Y) lock.

As for using an INS, the kind of lightweight old-tech INS they'd risk putting in a drone would have significant drift. If you can spoof the position you can drift the apparent GPS position slowly enough that the GPS and INS still agree to within the magin for error of the INS. Tricking a compass would be harder though - you need to be pretty close to do that.