reddit didn't say "pay what you want" for upgraded accounts. They said "hey, we really need some money", hinted that people might get something in return, and let them donate.

What they got was upgraded accounts, for a duration based on how much they had donated, and trophies saying that they were "charter members".

So there's a big difference there. For the Humble Indy Bundle, it's "pay what you want" and you get the same thing. For reddit, it was initially "pay what you want", with no indication as to what you were getting, and what you paid affected what you got.

From the scant details in the article and summary, it appears that the drives are encrypted, and the "wipe" consists of getting rid of the encryption key.

Calling that a "wipe" is rather misleading in my opinion. Toshiba's in for one hell of a liability issue if their encryption is ever cracked -- though I'm sure they'll take care of all that in the fine print.

If you're going to make a viral app as a satire of other apps, you should prepare your site to at least stand one slashdotting.

Correct, but you can't use the normal DLC with a pirated copy of the game, but you can use pirated DLC with a pirated copy. So you're "forcing" pirates to also pirate the DLC. The old "Cut off your nose to spite your face" strategy still doesn't work very well for downloaded content.

Yep, totally worked for Dragon Age, for example. You can't get the DLC if you have a pirated copy of the game, so you definitely can't download giant bundles of all the DLC that can be decrypted and plugged into the game. Said DLC isn't up on torrent sites 2 days after the release.

If you're going to release DLC with micro-payments, don't "punish" pirates by forcing them to also not pay for your DLC.

Only way to really combat piracy is to have an online element that only works with a valid CD key. That won't stop piracy, though; it'll just make it less useful.

While looking at encoder comparisons, keep in mind this post from a x264 developer about cheating on encoder comparisons. I'm not saying that these guys are cheating, just things to look out for.

====* -- Joke

    O
    \|/ --- You
    / \

His point was that the big feature for 10.1 was hardware acceleration for flash (and therefore h264), which Linux doesn't get. Linux gets nothing but downsides from this.

I'm not seeing much real time commentary on twitter, mostly dozens of people Re-Tweeting the same article. If you want to see the commentary, search #TurkeyCensorGoogle -"Access to certain Google services blocked from Turkey"

• If you're keeping track of code, use a code repository. Subversion, GIT, Bazaar, etc.
• If you're trying to keep config files, documents, pictures, etc synced, use DropBox.
• For bookmarks, use one of the numerous Firefox bookmark syncing extensions, or the Del.icio.us extension (or use DropBox to sync your .mozilla/firefox folder).
• For multi-GB files, use a portable hard drive, or rsync with a file server in your house/office

I wouldn't recommend using one tool for every purpose. I wouldn't want to store multi-GB files in SVN, and I wouldn't want to store all my code on an external hard drive. Maybe using DropBox, or rsyncing with a server somewhere would work.

This might get me some flak, but I've found that there are at least a few females in Ubuntu LoCo teams. LoCo teams in my experience do a wide range of things, from doing Install Fests, to having GeekNics, to having Linux LAN parties. I don't know if the California Team is active, but it might be worth a try.

Please only pursue joining the team if you actually give a frak about Ubuntu or doing Linux stuff, though. Women don't join Ubuntu groups to be hit on.

Even though blu-ray won, there were still tons of HD DVD players. They went somewhere, and it wasn't landfills. Stores had fire sales on HD DVD players, many selling them as upconverting DVD players.

Makes sense to me. Microsoft sees other companies making truckloads full of money (read: mostly VC funding) with their cool Web 2.0 names (Digg, Twitter, ZigZagZoodilyDoo). Microsoft goes where the money is.

Skype provides better rates to some places. That's not what I'd use it for.

I'd use it to talk to people that use Skype! If my mom uses skype, and I have Skype connected to my Asterisk system, she can call me and I can talk on my normal phone. If I have a call center using Asterisk, I can start offering support over Skype without changing our system at all. We have clients in third world countries who pay for great internet connections, but have terrible phone lines. They use skype for everything, so it would be much better to use skype to talk to them.

From everything I've read about this, it looks like they'd be setting it up similar to Gizmo's OpenSky. Skype would handle the bridging from Skype to SIP for you, and you just connect to them through SIP (as a SIP trunk, like you would with any SIP VOIP provider). So, while Skype is a huge pain to deal with in a corporate environment, you wouldn't have to. None of your apprehensions are necessary.

Now, Skype isn't doing this out of the goodness of their heart. They'll charge something for it -- either monthly or per minute. Look at the prices for OpenSky for an idea of what it might cost. Maybe they'll make calls to and from Skype users free. Maybe. If you don't want to be beholden to Skype for this, see my full comment below.

Now that I think about it more, I see one reason why Skype's SIP trunking might be better: the codec.

The codec for SIP/Skype calls is the same idea as codecs for music files: mp3, ogg, wma, etc. You take a drop in quality in exchange for less data. And if you convert from one to another, you take another drop in quality, because each codec strips out different things.

Any of the current solutions (SipToSis, OpenSky, etc) work by taking the output from Skype, converting it to PCM, and converting it to the codec of your choice. This works, but involves a drop in quality. Unlike music, you don't really care if you lose the sound quality of the lead guitarist, because it's a phone call. But if you're a stickler, the drop in quality may bother you.

When you sign up for Skype's beta, they specifically require you to be able to handle the G.729 codec (a common SIP codec). This means one of two things: either Skype is extremely lazy (I haven't ruled that out), or they have some efficient method of converting to and from G.729 and their own proprietary codec -- without converting to PCM, and without a large quality drop. It's possible, because they hold the keys. If that's the case, Skype for SIP or their (eventual) Asterisk channel driver may be worth it for you, if sound quality is a concern. I'd still say give SipToSis a try though.