Personally, I feel like the Kinect on the whole is pretty gimmicky. Not to say that its a bad piece of hardware as there are some truly incredible Kinect hacks out there. But it just doesn't make sense as a controller, for games or otherwise. Gaming and computing in general require a fairly high degree of accuracy with your controllers. On the PC, FPS players will pay quite a bit of money to get a more accurate mouse, and MMO players are always looking for easier access to as many buttons as possible. Kinect went the opposite direction, less accuracy and gestures. Sure its cool as a novelty, but eventually the games all start to feel the same, and for everything else its just slow and clunky.

At this point you are going into the territory of who exactly owns your device.

You didn't agree to view the ads when you purchased it, you just agreed to purchase a product that had advertisements on it. Personally I think its fair for you to modify something you own. The same way I think its fair for someone to hack their PS3 to enable OtherOS. Once you buy it you own it, and are free to modify your property. On the flip side I also believe it's fair for the service provider to deny access to their services (e.g. Sony denying hacked PS3's from connecting to their network).

How in the world did you come up with an additional $200 per user per ad-driven kindle?

I'm using Facebook as a metric, since their advertising bidding process is readily accessible. Now for this type of advertising I would assume more of a Cost Per Metric than a Cost Per Click bid. On Facebook, their Cost Per Metric bids for around $0.44-0.77 USD per 1000 Impressions. Its a bit harder to measure impressions with a Kindle, because it is not always connected to the network, and its an item that you are going to have over a long period of time. That being said let's assume that you read your Kindle 5 times a day, and each time you read it you get 2 impressions: the impression on the home screen and the impression on screensaver. That would be 10 impressions per day or 3650 impressions per year if you were an avid reader. In which case the revenue from your impressions for Amazon would be less than $3. At this rate it would take more than 8 years for amazon to make up for your $25 discount. Now I'm not trying to say that these are the actual advertising rates for the Kindle, just trying to point out that $200 seems a bit unrealistic.

Amazon Link

The ads are actually pretty unobtrusive. You can see them at the link above, about half way down the page.
They do have the ads on the hibernation screen (which are most likely 'un-clickable'), as well as ads on your homepage (which are probably clickable). I agree that $25 does seem a bit slim for the discount, but still worth it, after all how long will it be until a few clever people will probably figure out how to re-write the memory so that you have the full version.

I'm assuming you are in the United Kingdom? It seems to still be ok in the U.S. I bought a few Dungeness Crabs wrapped in Newspaper in Seattle last week.

So far the only people here saying that this has anything to do with 'The Mark of the Beast' are people that are mocking Christians. Is this irony or just bigotry?

Oh, and as an aside, the Control Units are linux based :)

I don't have any experience with the 710 Warrior, but I have used the 510 packbot, and it’s quite neat. It is easy for just about anyone to control, and with a little bit of practice you can do some pretty cool maneuvers. The claw and arm are fairly strong (5-15lbs depending on how far the arm is extended), but they are designed more for probing than doing any heavy lifting. My biggest concern is that we always used these robots in pretty close proximity to the operator. They were made for handling hazardous materials and unexploded ordinance, so the operator was close but in a protected area. Radiation is a whole different beast. The 510 I used couldn't go too far beyond a hundred meters before you begin to lose control and video feed.

The decision for this case was written in 2000, and I believe that the concept of digital media has significantly changed since then. One of the primary points made by the Judge was that making digital copies of music purchased on CD was not covered by fair use, and that the Record Company maintains the right to licence digital copies of their work. Fast-forwarding to 2011, most users of the service would be uploading digital copies of their music instead of 'copying' from CD. As long as the user has rights to a digital copy that can be transfered to several devices (e.g. DRM free digital copies), then I think the service should be legitimate. Amazon could probably protect itself with some terms of service language making that a condition of use.

The Legal Decision:
http://www.law.uh.edu/faculty/cjoyce/copyright/release10/UGM.html

First off in response to the person that responded to your post I'm a independent not a Republican, now as for facts:
So what if the President's top contributors only added up at $14m, add up the list of McCain's 'Top Contributors' and the number is much smaller. It really doesn't have any bearing on my argument. Instead lets look at some other statistics from that same webpage:

Agribusiness:
M: $3,289,774
O: $2,265,258

Communications/Electronics:
M: $4,607,216
O: $25,487,934

Construction:
M: $5,496,922
O: $5,465,083

Defense:
M: $694,148
O: $1,034,697

Energy & Natural Resources:
M: $4,090,435
O: $2,782,904

Finance, Insurance & Real Estate:
M: $29,005,313
O: $39,663,073

Health:
M: $7,409,123
O: $19,507,812

Lawyers & Lobbyists:
M: $11,153,996
O: $43,755,917

Transportation:
M: $2,690,078
O: $1,672,242

Misc Business:
M: $16,052,729
O: $37,006,524

Labor:
M: $34,500
O: $534,711

Ideological/Single-Issue:
M: $10,093,442
O: $23,521,118

Other:
M: $37,739,674
O: $82,250,231

From this list you'll notice a few industries contributing significantly more to McCain than to President Obama. Most noticeably Energy (read Oil). Transportation, and Agriculture. However Finance, Communications, Health, Labor, and 'Misc' Business were all heavily backing the President. Clearly both Candidates were heavily supported by "Big Business." And I would tend to say the President was more so than Senator McCain.

Take a quick look at the campaign finances of President Obama and see if you can still make this comment with a straight face. He raised more than three times as much money as Senator McCain in 2008, including rather large contributions from: Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, Google, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Time Warner, General Electric, Morgan Stanley, and IBM. Granted I wouldn't call some of these new companies the 'Old Guard' but there are plenty on that list that fit the bill.

Source: http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php?cycle=2008&cid=n00009638

True irony would be if the above post was made from a mobile device.

I can't agree with you that he would have been 'covering up' or 'protecting' the crimes of his government. He actively sought out this information because he had a grudge against his command. If he had instead observed his leadership commit war crimes or give illegal orders and he reported on those events I would call him a whistle blower and support him. All he did was try to get 'revenge' on the Military in general.

These are the nefarious tactics of the PsyOps I know. Certainly not anything that could be compared to:

"t's no different than if a soldier pointed his rifle at a visiting politician and said, "Senator, vote for the new defense appropriations bill or I'll blow your head off."

Thank you for an actually informative post.

Technically the Hatch act doesn't apply to these Soldiers either. Based on the link above, they follow DoDD 1344.10 instead, which basically says you can't force your subordinates to vote for something, and you can't officially endorse a candidate in your role as an Officer. Either way id doesn't apply to whats going on in the article.