$180 at launch. One assumes that it would be cheaper than that now for a variety of reasons.

I wish countries would use public money to produce some ebooks for their schools. They could distribute it free as an epub file and there would be no royalties or copyright to care about, no heavy schoolbags, or parents / schools who have to buy them. Just some epubs on the end of a link, free to download and use on any tablet or ereader that supports the format.

It seems beyond bizarre that countries are able to specify in exacting detail what content books should contain and are able to write examination papers that test those subjects but they outsource the actual production (and copyright) of textbooks to somebody else.

If I can buy a 7" tablet for $30 (and I can) then I'm not sure what Nintendo's excuse for their controller costing so much. I wouldn't put the bill of materials of their entire system to be more than $120. There should be at least some latitude to cut the price more than they have, particularly if the supply chain is filled with surplus stock.

I agree XB1 isn't exactly intuitive and perhaps there is some confusion. However both XBox and Playstation have gone through several iterations so consumers are more likely to get the distinction than the Wii and Wii U.

Even if Mario Kart 8 sold bucket loads, it would take 6-12 months for 3rd party games to turn up (what with all the porting, qa, marketing etc.) and sales could slump as fast in the meantime. Besides which I'm sure 3rd parties know as well as anyone that good sales of Mario Kart does not mean good sales of FIFA 15, AC V or whatever. After all the Wii had very impressive hardware sales and 3rd parties were still reduced to selling shovelware because the money wasn't in it to aim any higher.

When the Wii launched, people lost their collective minds trying to obtain one. Stock was extremely limited and it was sold out everywhere despite being a glorified Gamecube with a gimmick controller. That's the power of a good launch.

The Wii U landed with a thud which wasn't helped by requiring a day-0 5GB patch. It had about 6 months to turn things around before the next-gen hype train started and it couldn't do it. At this point nothing short of a massive price drop, heavy promotion and money hats to 3rd parties could reinvigorate the platform in the West. Perhaps they should focus their attentions elsewhere.

The Wii U has good games. The problem is there are few of them because 3rd parties are ignoring the platform. It hasn't sold enough to make games profitable, lacks much storage for DLC or other revenue generators and there is little love lost between them and Nintendo to begin with. I doubt Mario Kart 8 will turn things around either though it might allow them to clear some of their stock and stabilise things a bit.

The Wii U has lots of problems - it's underpowered, it's overpriced, it has a confusing name, it lacks 3rd party support and consumers have grown fed up with gimmicks. I expect a lot of people who already own a PS3 or 360 look at the Wii U and wonder what is the point of the thing for a handful of exclusive titles (and little else). Casuals probably think of the Wii gathering dust in the cupboard.

Nintendo have to change their strategy, e.g. focus on the likes of China / India / Brazil where potentially they could carve out a larger market share. Or try doing a few cross platform games with some of their IP and see if its a viable revenue stream, e.g. a Pokemon game on tablets, or even an officially sanctioned emulator & store.

... where all those pesky Thetans came from

Games have to work whether the device is there or not. In other words they have to function in the worst case. It'll only be if Microsoft delivers a firmware update that allows a game to completely turn off the Kinect and free up all reserved CPU, GPU and memory that they can be sure to make use of it.

Anyway it's not uncommon for consoles to be quite conservative and reserve more resources than they need (as a form of future proofing) and loosen up as the firmware matures. I'm sure Sony holds some CPU back too for stuff and might also have some slack it can give back.

EVs shove in a large number of batteries to extend the range to alleviate range anxiety. If the car has a backup battery for extended journeys then the number of rechargables can come down and so can the cost. This sounds like a good idea all round, provisos notwithstanding.

I've always thought that weight and expense was pure EV's biggest issue. I think hybrid solutions (including this battery) are a far more sensible.

I suppose it depends how environmentally friendly it is to make / recycle this aluminium battery, how safe it is, how reliable it is and how much dealers charge to replace one with another. But in principle it's a good idea.

I bet a lot of potential EV owners are put off range anxiety - that idea that every once in a while they'll have to do a really long trip and they can't because the battery won't take them far enough and will take hours to recharge. Probably the rest of the time they only need the battery power to do 30-100 miles between charges. If cars carried less batteries then they'd cost less, weigh less and be more efficient too. The backup might last some people years before it was fully used up but its there if they need it.

DRM & content providers realise that there is nothing to stop content being ripped with effort but that's doesn't mean they want to make it trivial to rip to either. They want to make it labour / compute expensive to extract decryption keys. They'll cycle keys every few seconds, use layers of obfuscation, utilise the GPU for decryption, use volatile memory and HDD to hide state, perform file and runtime integrity checks, utilise VMs for per-title protection (e.g. bd+), and basically throw as many hurdles to put in the way of the attacker. At some point the effort required to extract content is so high that it isn't worth the effort.

And yes there are HDCP strippers and capture devices but then they cost money. Then you have to play your movie in real time to rip it and that's a time sink. Then you have to waste more time reencoding it (or make do with crappy realtime encoding). And on top of that the content is probably watermarked either server side or by the video decoder with your account id / ip address and timestamp.

So it's a matter of how stringently Netflix are required to protect their content. Maybe content providers take the pragmatic view that most of the content up on the service is past its commercial sell by date and it's better to take a few pennies for each viewing rather than slavishly protect it from rippers who have other avenues to acquire the same content.

Of course you could build from source and probably Firefox will ship a DRM-less version too. I doubt the DRM component will ship as a removable component though since it makes it easier to isolate and hack on it. It's bound to be linked in and Firefox might have to strip symbols, run various integrity & bounds checks to trip up anybody attempting to debug it. And that's assuming it even appears on Linux.

No because even if you pretend to be a Mac, your browser would fall on its ass as soon as the HTML video object encountered encrypted content and had no idea what to do with it. Your browser would have to have a video tag which could handle encrypted content and call out to the JS to supply it with a decryption key in order to play it.

That presumably means Firefox or Chrome on Linux would have to ship as a binary blob containing code from one or more DRM vendors that the was linked into the multimedia framework (including whatever provider Netflix uses) so it could do the decryption. I could see that getting pretty hairy from a requirements / sign off perspective if the content / DRM vendors insist that everything from the browser to the display must be locked down to prevent screen / audio captures of the content as it goes through.