I have to wonder about this. At first I thought "well, maybe people who prefer discrete cars are incredible audiophiles who hear minute details I cannot appreciate." However, I've never had an integrated card where I couldn't turn it up far louder than it needed to go.

oh, come on. The difference between really crappy cables and gold-plated ones is likely to be inaudible in a blind test. You'd have to be deaf to miss the improvement from decent speakers/phones over the crappy PC ones.

I second this. Youtube 320 looks surprisingly good now on videos with a decent source. I have to wonder if they're using better settings than in the past.

Many devices can output to TV. Say you have 1 mbps video; with x264 this might look reasonably close to DVD quality, with xVid it'll be blurry and nasty.

Different tastes for different people. Playing Mass Effect on my friend's Xbox gave me the impression it was a terrible game; I picked it up on a Steam sale on a whim and loved it. I gave up on Deadspace about 20% through because the artificially slowed controls were too aggravating. I desperately wanted to like it, but it's not fun for me.

Does anyone have reasonably current figures for Valve's revenue and income? A 2005 Forbes story claimed that Valve had an income of 70 million with an operating profit of 55 million. Other sources say that Gabe never accepted venture capital funding and bought out the company's cofounder... Given the relatively few number of employees, Gabe must be loaded.

The safe harbor provision seems to be extremely shaky (or the youtube-viacom case wouldn't be in doubt). I'm not a lawyer, but with the amount of control Apple exercises on their store..

Youtube is relying on the safe harbor protection. Intuition says that's not going to be applicable in this situation :-)

Are you sure? The wording of 401(d) visual works and 402(d) audio works regarding the notice is the same; the defendant must merely have "had access to" the work (as shown in Maverick v Harper, where the district court decided that this was fulfilled by publishing a notice with the work). Obviously, Maverick v Harper related to an audio work but I cannot see a functional difference between 401 and 402 regarding innocent infringement. The case: http://jgehrke.typepad.com/files/maverick-recording-co.-v.-harper.pdf See (d), innocent infringement defense 401 and 402: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode17/usc_sec_17_00000401----000-.html

What? Untrue. This would wreck prosecution of filesharing. You can't sue for statutory penalties unless the copyright is registered, that's all.

I can't distribute a popular (or even an unpopular) major movie and claim I don't know someone held the copyright to it. Ignorance of copyright law is not an excuse.

I think I'll stay away from Australia, thankyouverymuch :-)

That's weird to hear. PC games (even at the overinflated retail prices which are set to account for distribution, retail cut, promotion and advertising, physical product, etc.) are one of the cheapest things I can think of. Music, books, and movies are ridiculously overpriced to me, but games are dirt cheap. My logic: Music: I've got 20,000 songs I already like competing for attention. Unless your stuff is really extraordinary, it's never going to get much listening. Books: I read a book in a couple hours and rarely ever re-read. Pretty spendy. Getting a non-DRM'd digital version legitimately can be a pain, and I don't really want a physical copy. Movies: Watch once, rarely ever rewatch. Ridiculously spendy unless you Netflix. Have to transcode it into a format that doesn't suck (x264 rip) myself. By contrast, games (through Steam at least) are mostly buy and forget without ever having to worry about losing your copy or digitizing anything.

Just turn the resolution to 1024x600 or so (I think that's what the big console 720 titles are upconverted from) and leave the settings high. Almost anything will run well at that.

most of these games will run on virtually anything, and even "real" games like bioshock will run on $50 each cpu/mobo/vid card.