Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. Having something that is potentially dangerious unsecured, is the act of stupidity or recklessness.
Theres a reason why all guns have a saftey, just as theres reason why all pools should be gated.

In a world where you had pure freedoms to do what you like, it'd be acceptable. So would killing people outright for any or no reason at all.

Theres a compromise involved. If such a drowning did happen, i'd blame both parties involved. The parents for loosing track of their child, and the pool owner for having a pool so easy to access that a child managed to get in and drown.

There are so many threads attempting to justify copyright infringement that its just sickening.

If you "pirate" a game which you didn't pay for, you've done a bad thing.
Stop trying to justify your actions. You CAN"T

You broke the rights and wishes of the owners of the game, so you could profit.

End of story.

You can talk all about the ideas of DRM, or how you wouldn't of purchased it anyway, or how you advertise by word of mouth. But its all excuses.
You don't have a right to use anyones software without permission.

I have far more respect for people who purchase games, or refuse to buy when a publisher goes too far. ("I won't buy a game i can't install more then 3 times")
People who are at least honest about how they break the law often aren't too bad. ("I shouldn't of, but i couldn't afford it")

But people who think its their right to take what other people make for free are dicks. And people who then promote it as their right to "pirate", are scum. ("I'm only willing to pay $5, but since the publishers have no idea how to price, i'll just steal it $0)

Seems to me, the younger the person, the more likely they are to think anything on the internet is a free.

I think the end result of their DRM might hurt their sales more then help, but i still can't blame nintendo for doing what they feel is best. At least at the end of the day, their cartridges are drm free (at least how i'm concerned)

I'm not sure where that question came out of.
The real debate is how apple changed the developer EULA to effectively deny any possibility of a flash developed app running.

History lesson:
The first developer EULA prevented any apps from interperting code. So no emulators, or on the fly compliers. This meant that everything had to run as a native executable.
This denied flash or java from running on the system, in addition to preventing a potential backdoor to the apple shop. (Otherwise you could download a compiler type app (ie: java), and run any program you wished, instead of having your choices controled/taxed by apple's iStore)

Adobe worked around this EULA limitation, by allowing flash developers to create a native executable for the iphone. It was written using flash, but was an actual native execuitable for the iphone.
Apple still controled the iStore, but flash developers could now develop for the iPhone.

Lo and behold, our saviours of the internet, Apple, got around and changed the developer EULA, to explicitly fix that "loophole". Making it against the EULA to write a program that wasn't in objective C (or whatever language apple now demands, i forget)

The ONLY reason i can comprehend for that change to the EULA was to ban the native flash executables. Theres no other practical reason for it.

Adobe went out of their way to support the iPhone, and in return Apple pulled the rug out from under them and banned any use of their application for development/use on the iphone/ipad.
Thats a dick move by apple, the likes of which i haven't seen since Microsoft in the 90's

And to top it off, now they come out telling us how they are only doing whats best for the ipod/iphone. Well that's bloody obvious. Apple want to force as much vendor lockin as possible, and cross-platform tools are the bane to any company trying to force an OS lock-in. Lock-in is great for apple, the iphone, and ipad.
Its terrible for everyone and everything else, including the actual iphone consumers!

I haven't been given mod points in months...
Karam is excellent, i've got the abilitiy to disable advertising...
Just no mod points..

I'd love to know why

The signal in this case is just semi-random light. If that was enough for her to develop a problem, then she was a time-bomb waiting to go off.
If i was passing by, and i sneezed, and she "developed" her problem then, would I be libable for her problems.

Even if the scanner developed her problem (which i don't believe for even a second), i can't see how shes justified in persueing the store. Either learn to live with it, or seek help/aid via normal disabilitiy channels.

Houses, or at least the land they are built on, do increase in value. its a known fact.

As the population grows, the need for houses also grows.
Supply and demand.

Same supply with increased demands means higher prices.

Now although more houses get built to help keep demand in place. These new houses are normally built and developed in new suburbs with minimal cost/infrastructure/community.
Their desirability isn't as high as in an established zone

Properity, both the land and the house its built on (assuming maintance) increase in value as time goes on.
So much so that most goverments have a special tax in place to tax the increase in value from people who buy and sell property.
Here in New Zealand we don't have such a tax and its a concern, due to the fact that a lot of investment capital goes into property investment.

Going slightly off-topic, ubt its worth mentioniong
The problem with property investment is that investing in land does nothing inherntly useful. No new jobs are created, yet a huge amount of money is "invested" in something that generates nothing. The value such an investment "generates" is caused by the action of others who have invested into businesses that actually generate wealth.

As such most goverments have a tax systems in place to encourage development away from such dead-end investments
Anyway, since an artical this long demands a citation, heres wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_tax

sounds like it'd be a good example to use the Chewbacca defence

Because its an improvement.

I felt that should be bolded, its so god damned obvious to anyone who thinks.
Or would you rather have all the money funneled directly into just one "evil" company to funnel all their evil machinations.

I'd also rather not go into lengths on how monopolies work, so i'll try to keep this brief
If you feel like spouting the anti-google retoric, do it elsewhere, or at least be both more direct and informative about it.
Mindless posts like the one above should not be modded as informative, or even modded up.

Its weird how so much support is going towards the mac, that no one appreciates the simplicity of the laptop for what it is.

Its power efficient, and cheap.
And let me go into a bit more detail. The intel atom is a cpu designed by intel to run on as little power as possible.
The core 2 duo was not. It has power saving features, but its not designed with power being a primary factor.

The same things can be said for the chipsets.
I was unable to an exact comparison between the 2 chipsets since the details, but toms hardware did a match thats close enough.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-ion-atom,2153-10.html
The result is that the 945GC is up to 35% more power efficient. I expect its the same case with the intel core 2 duo vs the atom, if not, even more in favour.

The fact is that's a huge saving on power. Using the atom and 950gc you could get 3 hours batter life where the other only gets 2.

And laptops are meant to be portable. Anyone whos takes a laptop around with them, is well aware of the power concerns. That 1 hour can be the difference between moving with the laptop freely, and having to bring a power adapter and sit with it rooted to a power socket.

As i'm typing this post out, its on an atom netbook, its power consumption so low that its passively cooled. Try that with a core 2 duo and its matching gpu.

A few other things i'll touch on.
Its stupid to point out that for only 190 more euro you get a more powerful computer. But that's 50% more expensive then this laptop offering!

More memory isn't necessarily a good thing. At least on windows i can enter or leave hibernation mode in 26 seconds because i use 1gig of memory. If i had 3 gigs, it'd jump to about 45 seconds both ways. as well as draining more power, and increasing the price needlessly.

Its not a Mac. Seriously. Comparing Linux to mac, and talking about the mac favorably... I have to wonder where slashdot's culture is headed on threads like these.

If you want a top of the line gaming laptop, so be it. Just don't snub laptops that are aimed at a cheaper/work environment because it doesn't suit you.

Back in the 90's, i once coverted a 1 page Microsoft Word docuement into an html web page.

With all the hacks and IE compatability options office 97 did in the process, i think that was probably the easiest 10,000 lines of code i've ever had written.

Are the people vetting slashdot posts unable to fix the grammar from submited stories, or do they not care?
This post has multiple serious grammar issues.

Wow, how did that get marked up. I'm really starting to wonder about the moderation system.

There are so many examples in real life that contradict that.
Lets start off with the bios chip in computers. That was copyrighted.
They got around it simply by having 2 teams
Team A disected the chip, and wrote the specs of what it did, and how it operated.
Team B took the specs and had nothing else to do with team A, and using only those specs made a new bios chip that matched the specifications written.

The courts decided that copywright didn't come into play, because they didn't copy the chip. (They indeed made their own version)
If it was patented it would of been a different matter.

Theres also the matter of the magic key that allowed decoding of HD-DVDs. I don't believe copyright is able to do anything about that (Although the DMCA might say otherwise, i'm unsure since its DRM and DMCA changes the game with DRM)

You could also try talking to apple, about how their court case vs microsoft went when MS copied how apple looked.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microsoft_Corporation

I could go on, but in short you can't copywright the look and feel of software either.

So if the detailed innerworkings (or algorithms) aren't protected by copywright, and if the look and feel isn't protected either. What does copywright stop.
It stops outright ripoffs and direct copies, but it doesn't stop other companies producing compeating products.

Patents however do stop compeating products. (A little too effectivly some would argue)
If the bios chip was patented, it would of been illegal.
If it wasn't for the fact that the GUI had already been proven and demostrated by xerox before being handed over to apple. Apple could of patented the "look and feel".

So back to the orginal point.
Copywright Law protects you against people copying your software. It isn't very effective against people that DEVELOP compeating products. Patents are.

You can hate or love what patents are, but don't be confused about the differance. To discard what patents because [software] copywrite exists, defeats the purpose of patents themselves.
Reform is needed for both, but not an abolishment.

What i'm just wondering about is how it'll affect the power consumption on laptops.
Since currently browsers don't use it, it would be using its lowest powered rendering mode.

Now if you start getting IE to render using 2d acceleration, if the drivers aren't nice, its going to kick in full and start draining a lot more power.

Aero on vista was much the same. Pretty looks, faster power drain.

It'll be interesting to see how it works, if it can be disabled, and if it will drain more power on well written graphic drivers

sound low rent?
Look at their site, once you get past how "bling bling" it looks, its actually got very little content, and a hell of a lot of ads.

I also fail to picture why one would want to use an auction for this thing. You don't stay rich by squanding large sacks of money away on items you've not checked out.
Meeting in person would give you a far better idea of whats involved, as well as either talk the price down to something more resonable, or have it explained why its worth so much.

Thats the full description of a yacht with a minimum bid of 2.7 million dollars.
If that auction site was worth a damn, they'd actually either give pages of material about the product, or refuse to list it on such small infomation.
I'm done talking about the site, the fact that the site hit slashdot both gives credence to them, and lowers my perception of slashdot.
I just hope slashdot got a pile of cash for advertising it.