Given that Sony simply imported the data from one "child" company to another I don't expect that the owner of the company matters. It interests me that by closing the service on one company and opening it on another (along with a completely new TOS), would clauses regarding forcing a customer to use arbitration then be rendered void? The EULA is a legal document which supposedly forms a contract between one party and another; by failing to continue to provide service on the original company sony has breached that contract.

What of the millions (of 77+ I'm sure there's a few) who have yet to agree to the new EULA. Even in the case that one or both EULAs contain requirements that users handle disputes through arbitration I'd expect many individuals would not be held to these requirements at all.

Any lawyers care to correct me?

I'm pretty sure I saw two buttons on the galaxy i9000...

If only there was some way we convince those third-world political forces to respect our "IP" authority. We face a greater ethical dilemma; is it right to enforce IP protection by military power? I think most americans would say no, but what alternative do we have? Once the cat is out of the box there's little that can be done to right it, and from what I understand the developing world (our manufacturing outsource channel of choice) continues to build 1960's car designs from both GM and VW. These designs don't sell in developed countries (likely only due to trade embargos), but with trade balance against us, that type of problem will be minimized for the "pirates" of these corporate machine countries. Is it time that our annual trillion+ dollar defense budget brought some sort of return on investment?

I see you've never had to use an unsigned driver. Unless you're a bootloader or certificate authority guru (yeah, neither of the related tasks are simple), you're going to have trouble.

I'd agree that blueboxes are a step above jailbreaking in that you are actually using infrastructure instead of just your own device; I wouldn't call it theft in the case of "Ma Bell" though. The infrastructure was paid for by the people, should they not be allowed to use it without paying a corporation with no investment again?

Adobe certainly has their load of responsibility for this problem but did you really expect to have a smooth operation running a combination of two OS's and two architectures?

You're conveniently forgetting about the cd checks that also included rootkit installations...

Are you an intel shill? Did you not hear about the 1156 burnt pads? To answer your question they won't be moving to pads, AM3+ will retain compatibility with previous processors by retaining the same basic socket as AM2 chips.

After the tragedy/comedy combination that was April Fool's Day, it's nice to see someone taking a joke and turning it into someone useful. As a poster mentioned earlier yesterday, it would be quite nice to give Outlook the finger and have a sad face or a pouting puppy popup on your computer. That would take a large amount of the users' and tech support's rage out.

I am by no means in favor of a Minority Report-style interface for everyday computing, but it would be useful in certain situations. To release this software in a day is something that I would have expected only from the collegiate level, particularly from MIT, Carnegie Mellon, or Berkley. Keep the good work up, USC.

About the same thing happened with me. I recently moved back to China and thus did not have my ID card yet. My little brother went and got us both into an Internet gaming place with no questions asked. Of course, it seems that most of the people there did nothing more than to play Counterstrike, World of Warcraft, or little puzzle games all day, and I'm well over 21, but I don't really consider this a big deal. It reminds me of going to R rated movies back in the days where you knew your friends working at the box office and no one really cared as long as the theatre got their money. I haven't heard of anyone playing Everquest for 72 hours straight and getting themselves killed here in China yet, and we have larger issues to deal with like the economy and providing medical care for everyone.

As a Chinese American, I'm glad to see China using their own technology, but it's hardly any sign of world domination, especially when the Chinese chips aren't anywhere close to Nehalem, Fusion, or Sandy Bridge. China has already forced Microsoft to hand over the source code to Windows previously, and being aware of exactly what you're getting from a foreign company or agency is a wise move for any developing nation. Remember the big debate over the NSA_KEY variable a while back?

Besides, when it comes to spying, I would take Mossad over Intel or AMD anyday.

Try the Oxford English Dictionary. The definition it cites is:

3. a. A person or company who reproduces or uses the work of another (as a book, recording, computer program, etc.) without authority and esp. in contravention of patent or copyright; a plagiarist. Also: a thing reproduced or used in this way.

The first quote it provides is from 1608. It also provides quotes from 1668, 1703, 1758, 1822, 1887, 1928, and 1996. I would consider a word in use for over 400 years to be "old", but that's just me.

Are you implying that there are more zip files floating around in workplace environments than there are rar files floating around bittorrent and other file sharing worlds? Honestly, considering the feature set I wouldn't even consider winzip to be a contiguous archive format. It was intended to compress small collections of files in the early days and true "archive" features like multi-part files or archives larger than 4GB have only been added to select programs outside of specifications.

I will concede that if you consider popularity strictly from the perspective of public knowledge zip (weather or not it's a true archive) would easily win. If we were to look at the number of files or size of files stored and transmitted nothing will come close to RAR.

There's a reason why RAR is the most popular archive format, it provides small files and sound performance, especially on multi-core systems. As long as you're not doing anything illegal the severity of encryption isn't an issue, the DMCA makes snooping encrypted files or communications punishable with extreme repercussions.