I'm definitely not a lawyer, but from a quick look at contracts by adhesion on Wikipedia it doesn't look like this would hold up. One of the components they mention is

If the term was outside of the reasonable expectations of the person who did not write the contract, and if the parties were contracting on an unequal basis, then it will not be enforceable

Since a typical user wouldn't expect a site without a paywall to sue them for viewing more than one page, and the user had no say in the terms of the agreement, it sounds like it would run afoul of that element of contracts by adhesion.

That's crap.

If you buy an Android phone you get a good, straightforward user experience without having to do any kind of hacking on it. You have an easy to use app market with lots of apps which is loosely monitored to make sure it doesn't have malware (without having draconian yet poorly defined rules about what's acceptable and what's not). It comes with some apps that almost everyone is going to want, and has a simple mechanism for finding more apps to fit your needs. The experience you get with an out of the box Android phone is similar to what you get with an out of the box iPhone.

If you're happy with that experience, you're in good shape. There's nothing else you need to do. With iOS, if you're unhappy with that experience you're pretty much out of luck. With Android, the operating system will step out of your way. You have the opportunity to screw things up, but you also have the ability to do things the phone manufacturer never imagined (or perhaps, doesn't approve of).

I don't buy the argument that additional freedom is a bad thing.

What are you talking about? And who modded this insightful?

We're not talking about a civil rights issue, we're talking about an option you can turn on or off in your browser. It's not a problem for most people, so they don't turn it off. It's there to be turned off if you like. We're not even talking about getting rid of that option, we're just discussing sane defaults.

Can you give a decent explanation of how this relates to police brutality?

For most TV networks, advertisers are their customers and viewers are their product. It appears to be a profitable business model, but I think consumers are starting to get sick of that mindset. This is one of the reasons I really like Netflix. They may not have every movie or TV show ever made on watch instantly yet, but they treat me like I'm their customer, rather than a product they're selling to someone else.

That was my thought. Microsoft can't very well indemnify against injunctive relief. If Windows mobile violates a patent, and the patent owner is granted an injunction, the manufacturers would still find themselves unable to ship phones with the OS.

But ripping discs isn't really the target here. There are already tools available which can rip BluRay discs in software, without having to read a disc and play them over the wire in real time. More practically, this is targeted at streaming video sources such as video from your cable company, or perhaps for ripping from your cable company's DVR. Those streams are seldom (never?) higher than 1080i or 720p at standard frame rates, so 30fps in real time gets the job done.

I'm not saying 720p at 59.94 is worthless, but 30fps would support the majority of use cases.

It may be a legacy format, but there's a lot of content still available for it, and I can't imagine the cost of supporting it is that high. I have a TV tuner which does on board DivX encoding, and I have about a terabyte of (legally recorded) TV shows. Even if most of the people who would take advantage of DivX decoding are pirates, why should the hardware manufacturer care if it helps sell units? As far as I'm concerned, any media center device which doesn't support such a common legacy format isn't worth considering.

The thing is, the horse hasn't really left the barn. At this point HDCP isn't really about preventing piracy - there are much better ways to rip most HD content. The value of HDCP to Intel is that it forces anyone who wants to build an HDMI compatible device to license HDCP if their users want to get the full HD experience. Thanks to the DMCA, the leaked master key doesn't mean much on that front. There may be some Chinese manufacturers putting out a few cheaper devices, but anything the average consumer will buy at Best Buy still has to license HDCP from Intel. In this statement, Intel is making it clear that they intend to use the DMCA to enforce licensing requirements against any manufacturers who might think this means they don't have to license HDCP anymore.

It takes no longer to write software that 1000 people use vs 10 people.

That's not completely true. I write software for clients with specific needs. It's rare that I could find two different customers with the same specific needs. I might find two customers with intersecting needs, in which case I could write one application that would meet the needs of both customers while having other aspects that would go unused by one client or the other.

Writing an application that meets the needs of 10 people probably wouldn't be as involved as writing an application that meets the needs of 1000 people. But in general, you're right. Once you've established a feature set and created an application, anyone whose needs are met by the application can use it without adding to the development costs.

From what I understand, Diaspora is designed to make this cycle impossible, or at least difficult. Diaspora is designed to be distributed, decentralized, and open source. The different nodes communicate with each other and share information, but I believe if you don't trust the node your account is hosted on you can trivially move to a different one (even one you host yourself).

Here's the thing: In the working world if you roll your own implementation and your implementation gets compromised then you can probably expect to be fired. If you use a widely deployed, standard implementation and that implementation gets compromised you not only have someone to blame, but your employer would have a hard time finding someone to replace you that wouldn't have made the same mistake.

But the games I've seen that use this model aren't particularly competitive games. Someone having different crops or larger fields in Farmville doesn't do much to inhibit someone else's enjoyment of the game. There isn't really a concept of winning or losing, just progress, and one person's progress in mostly unaffected by the progress of others.

There may be some games that use this monetization model with a win/lose paradigm, but I imagine they'd have a hard time keeping people who are unwilling to put up real money.

I agree that you shouldn't mod redundant to the first person who says "Get a lawyer" but about 50% of the comments here have no meaningful content other than "get a lawyer." They're contributing nothing to the thread, so "redundant" seems like a perfectly good assessment.

I'm getting tired of all this circle jerking about smart phones. There can be more than one smartphone operating system. There doesn't have to be a "victor" to have a successful smartphone OS. There's no reason that the success of Windows 7 phone (or whatever it's called, I don't really care) has to be predicated on the death of the iPhone. The two can coexist. Yes, they'll compete with each other, but there doesn't always have to be a winner and a loser.

I'm an android fan. My current phone is Android based, and my next phone will probably be android based. But if someone would prefer an iPhone, a Windows Mobile phone, a phone from Palm or Blackberry, I really don't care. The existence of competitors in no way reduces the utility of my own phone. In fact, the existence of competition probably leads to improvements for all of the phones.

It ultimately boils down to the Prisoner's Dilemma, just at a larger scale. For any individual, the best outcome happens when other parties cooperate but the individual defects. The best outcome overall is for all parties to cooperate, and the worst outcome overall is for all (or even most) parties to defect.