It won't be a separate model. It will be the standard model, just like Google and Gmail. The ads will be unobtrusive to the majority of consumers, but still valuable to advertisers. Google will no more offer this without personal data collection and advertising than they do Google and Gmail. Sure, they'll give you some privacy options, but they won't give you options that have a meaningful negative impact on the value of their services to advertisers.

If you run AdBlock, you are a minority. This isn't the phone for you. Since Google will control the hardware and the software, you'd have a heck of a time running AdBlock even if you wanted to. That's the point.

If only there was some sort of equilibrium. A "balancing point" if you will between the perceived value to the consumer and the price of a good or service. The only way to fix this is with more laws! Congress get on this fast!

Add some noise or crank up the gain right before the commercial airs.
That silent staredown would suddenly have a hash of white noise/crickets a tenth of a second before the commercial.

How exactly is that? Too much shovelware and the gaming crash dragon gets woken up and destroys the bank accounts of game makers? The 1983 shovelware-related crash occurred because the entire market was casual gamers. It would have been hard to describe yourself as a serious gamer before the atari. The current casual gaming market could easily crash because of shovelware, mom buys a wii, likes wii sports, buys wii fit, likes it, gets tired of both, buys something like "ninjabread man" hates it as all sane people would, doesn't buy any more games, wii collects dust on the shelf.

Today though, in addition to the casual market, there is a sizeable group of gamers who won't be turned away from shovelware. As long as I've been gaming, there has been shovelware, I'm immune to it because I learned long ago to not buy it in the first place, and in the off chance that I do end up with shovelware, I see it for what it is and realize that not all games are that crappy.

So maybe nintendo will be stung a little by too much shovelware, but I don't see amount of shovelware being capable of crashing the industry this time. If the number of good games stays constant, but you increase the shovelware by a hundredfold, that might strain gamestop, but most of us still aren't going to buy the crap, it won't affect anything.

DomU works, and should continue to work for the foreseeable future; DomU paravirt ops is upstream, so unless debian goes through extra effort to break xen DomU support, it should Just Work.

I already posted a lengthy reply below, but I worked as a game reviewer for over a decade, and I can tell you that the numbers you have posted there actually show the complete opposite of what you think. The only game in that list supporting the console market as a whole is GTA. The rest except for a small amount of bleed over with SMB and Kart, are casual games that do not require a "console" proper or involve a handheld. With the current super high costs of game development and marketing that list solidifies the death of console gaming. The "hardcore" market is a sham perpetuated by the industry and has been for a number of years now to keep things afloat, I saw the writing on the walls 5-6 years ago, as did many in the field and the bottom is falling out. Handhelds are being replaced by media players, and derivative and complex games are on the way out. It's sad but true, and the numbers you see there are proof positive.

Gimme a break. I didn't realise the police were clergy! What law was this guy breaking by sending sexually explicit messages? As for the issue of using police equipment for personal messages, if this was permitted at the time, again what's the problem? If he was breaking a law why isn't this what we're hearing about rather than the fact that he liked to talk dirty?

Unfortunately, it's a lot further off than you think. To accelerate to near the speed of light, regardless of the method, requires an enormous level of energy: for comparison, the space shuttle (68,000 kg) going at half the speed of light will have a kinetic energy of 9.455x10^20 joules. Again, for comparison, the total solar flux of the earth is about 1.75x10^17 watts, while total human power consumption is around 16x10^12 watts.

What the hell, I have karma to burn: It doesn't sound as nice when I put it that way, does it?

Granted, (before I get 20 responses telling me just how many ways the SFLC is different than the RIAA), I acknowledge that the tactics that the SFLC is using are actually sane and civil. The point remains, however: all the pirate supporters on this website don't like it when you shove their arguments back in their face. If there were no copyright, or if copyright were limited to 2 years, then Linux 2.6.15 would be in the public domain by now and anyone could put it into any product they wanted without giving back to the people that created it.

I'm shocked...

Well this will just come back to haunt them. Google has wisely realised that you don't pick on disabilities, it makes you look, bad, like a bully. At the end of the day if I understand correctly, this is just move to make books more accessible to the blind, it's not about the blind stealing their precious content. These guys better wise up the world is changing around them. Perhaps as individuals it's time we boycotted and voted with our choices. Horrible.

Honestly, this is exactly what I think we should do. And if it turns into a mess for the rest of the world, that's their problem. Before WWII, we weren't that powerful militarily, and we didn't have nukes. Now we do. We should just concentrate on defending ourselves, and that's it, and let everyone else deal with their own problems. If they get another Hitler, well too bad. As long as we're strong enough, we don't have to worry about him invading us, and if he does, we can unleash the nuclear arsenal.

I'm really getting sick of the rest of the world whining that America is taking advantage of them, but then complaining if America doesn't do enough to "help" them. There's less than 300 million of us, and 6.7 billion of them. They need to take responsibility for themselves and stop looking at us to be their protector and whining when we use the situation to our advantage.

From all the responses to my previous post that the other countries need to tell the USA's government to shove it when it tries to convince them to pass stupid laws, I'm really beginning to think the reason this situation exists is basically because most of the rest of the world is pussies, and they refuse to stand up for themselves. If you're too much of a pussy to stand up for yourself and take care of yourself, then you deserve to be someone else's bitch. Especially if you're too stupid to ally yourself with others and stand up as a group to the bully.

I work in south LA and in my experience, there are just as many people talking directly on their handset and checking their Blackberry, if not more. I just don't think it's being enforced. But really, it seems nearly impossible to enforce that law with any sort of efficacy. Just another useless law brought on by populist politicians...

anyone think that if cameras should have caught a record of the events, and there should be tapes, and those tapes should be in the control of the police, and the tapes are missing, there should be a presumption that they contained unequivocal proof in support of the defence?

Don't expect too much.