True, however if you can't do it, the carriers can't do it to you either. Apple's control had a lot to do with carrier bloatware. We can fix the abused android phones, but consumers would rather it be usable out the box.

If you are a business you HAVE to. From the start I made my mailing list completely opt-in. That doesn't stop AOL users from using the spam button instead of the prominent link at the top that gracefully removes them from the list. You can't have customers not receiving order confirmations or order updates or have business email blackholed because some webmail users decide they don't want your mail anymore.

I wonder how many of the "I can hear the difference" crowd are comparing old MP3s to lossless rips. I can hear the difference between my old MP3s and modern LAME encoded versions of the same source. Can I tell the difference between modern LAME high bitrate MP3s and FLAC? Only when I know ahead of time which is which!

While it might have been to encourage platform lock in/exclusives, and just to be evil in Sony tradition, it's possible to explain it from a technology standpoint.
Warning, pure speculation follows based on a very brief time working in the games industry.
The PS2 was notoriously difficult to utilise compared to the PS1 and the Dreamcast, but over time it managed to hold its own against the more powerful gamecube and xbox. At the risk of hugely oversimplifying what made the PS1 manage to hold on so long was that it had a dedicated vector processor which meant that the competition's (N64, Saturn) faster processors mattered much less. (The N64 used the main CPU for just about everything which made the 90-odd MHz MIPS much less impressive.) The PS2 architecture was an evolution of the PS1 by adding more dedicated vector units rather than going the T&L GPU route which was just about to hit the big time.

The PS3 swapped vector processors for the Cell which was an obvious choice considering. However all ATI and nVidia GPUs have their own vector processing capabilities and I'd imagine that the costs of developing a special PS3 GPU that gave proper emphasis to the Cell were HIGH rather than making a CHEAPER GPU which must have been the intention. So the Cell became half redundant. And with all the compromises that were made to get the costs down it wound up with too much power in one narrow field, no memory bandwidth and no unified memory and a weaker GPU than the 360.

The 360 used a plain architecture that could be leveraged relatively easily from the get go, but has a lower potential for hidden magic. The PS3 was designed to have the potential to blow it out the water but the reality is that no one has found any hidden stores of power. Much like the Itanium, it was only better in theory while in reality it was a struggle even to match the competition. The end result is that developers have to work harder to match the 360 excepting a small number of rendering effects which become easier on the PS3.

Also the default render size for the GPU plugins seems to be 1024x1024. When I ticked the box for Native resolution my framerate in FFX changed from 10fps to a solid 60. And that's on an old E8400 with GT240.

You can use Cmd-F9/10/11/12 to avoid the expose stuff. OS X sees that as a different combination so doesn't fire expose but VMware passes the F-key unmodified to the VM which seems like an oversight but has got me out of a number of jams. If not using vmware YMMV.

The default is to overscan on every TV I've seen, but the last few I've bought in recent years allow you to switch off the overscan from the TV menu. Sometimes it's called 1:1, sometimes Native, sometimes Full. Often it's simply listed in the same menu as the 4:3/16:9 widescreen menu thingy.

You'll find that all your HDMI sources like BR players, consoles, etc. will be running scaled up too though it's not so immediately obvious when there's no start menu on screen!

And how would your console determine it has been activated? By going online.

Up to a point, then you've got to make a choice. Keep the high level OOP constructs, or flatten it out to make the compiler's job easier.

THEN you have the next level of optimization, keep the readable code or do it the "clever" way that nets a 40% boost. And as any experienced coder will tell you, clever code is the antithesis of maintainable.

When you are installed on as large a number of computers as Microsoft's OS is, you have to be a little more responsible. Improve the security model to bring it closer to Linux, spectacular! Leave it so that writes to previously okay directories now fail? Terrible.

Maybe I'm over simplifying this, but to me it would seem trivial to remap writes to a user directory. Every time OpenFile is called on Program Files/blah/foo.cfg, open %USERDIR%/Local Settings/App Data/blah/foo.cfg if it exists, if not, copy the one from program files and then open it. Vista already has the compatibility options that correct for misapplications of win32 functions, for me at least my complaint was that their backwards compatibility was really half assed and they've shown no interest in updating it.

Which now that I think about it, seems to be their pattern (X360 Xbox compatibility has stalled, XP never did get a working soundblaster emulator)

It's actually worse than that. They take the digital masters and further filter it as there are certain patterns that a needle in a groove just can't do. If the bass gets too deep, it can leave the surface of the record so they lower it, high frequencies come out tinny, so they filter them too.

If you like the sound of vinyl, then nothing else will do, but from a purely technical standpoint, CD is better in every way it's possible to be better.

This is very true. I recently bought a pair of Shure SE210s and while not high end, they were so far beyond what I'd been using that I'm finding it more difficult to listen to some of my older MP3s from the pre-LAME days.

Clarious helpfully provided a decent link for what you asked, but perhaps a simpler way to demonstrate it is in storage capacity.

An 80min CDR can store just over 700MB, but 80min of audio. 80min at 44.1KHz 16bit Stereo works out around 820MB. Some of your data-CD space is eaten up file file system data, but not 120MB.

That extra space that audio uses for audio is used to store that error detection/correction and seek data I was referring to.

It's probably a lot to do with simply consolidating manufacturing. If they only need one set of equipment, I'd imagine that helps their bottom line. If they can get some marketing led sales out of it from gullible sorts then that's just gravy.

Different encoding scheme, more error correction and most importantly the data has a way to tell the drive where it is for accurate seeking, so a misread can be re-read. Whereas on an audio-cd programs have to do a hack where they guess the position based on the data they are receiving. Accurate rip software can basically never truly guarantee a bit for bit copy, and have to brute force it to get close. In practice however the end result is close enough that only a purist who doesn't care about the music so much as the warm fuzzy feeling of a accuracy will care.