Replace that with "your 'phone' docked to a station providing a more comfortable keyboard and larger screen" and you're probably more correct.

If tablets become an important form factor there will be a dock for those too.

('phone' is in quotes because using these things for point-to-point speech communication is going to become a secondary feature of the device. For some people it already is.)

This. Without an argument for why your personal machine should be on a sensitive network we can't help you.

I'm slightly disturbed that there's a hospital out there that apparently allows employees unfettered access to their network from their personal machines, actually.

Actually, despite the credulousness of the summary poster, if you click through to the abstract you also get this bit:

To circumvent this kind of monitoring, BitTorrent users are increasingly using anonymizing networks such as Tor to hide their IP address from the tracker and, possibly, from other peers. However, we showed that it is possible to retrieve the IP address for more than 70% of BitTorrent users on top of Tor [LMC_POST10]. Moreover, once the IP address of a peer is retrieved, it is possible to link to the IP address other applications used by this peer on top of Tor.

Perhaps I'm exposing my own ignorance (because I've never felt the need to use Tor myself) but that strikes me as surprising if it's true. And something that even savvy internet users might not think about.

[CITATION NEEDED]

It's a game. It's ALWAYS about fun.

Not every player is a simulationist. I'd imagine that quite a few players would rank "This game is fun to play" above "This game implements a realistic simulation of a world" in their scale of "things worth paying a monthly subscription fee for".

Except for the one story posted about Sony announcing the end of floppy drive production.

When I think of parody the first thing that comes to mind is Weird Al, and I can't really recall any of his songs commenting on the original work itself.

Many of his songs actually do - "This Song Is Just Six Words Long" and "Smells Like Nirvana" both come to mind right off the top of my head.

But that doesn't matter from a legal perspective because Yankovic and his label don't rely on legal definitions of Fair Use for his work. He actually goes out and gets permission from the rights holders before making a parody of their work. So you can't use what he does as an example of what you can do with Fair Use protections for parody works.

If you believe this you haven't been keeping up on the latest data mining research.

Even with fake info in your profile, the connections you have in that profile are already providing them with profitable data. They quite likely know more about you than you think.

Yes. For a few reasons. Some people aren't going to pirate the game anyway, so buying it now rather than later won't change how much they're going to pay.

Even for people who have fewer ethics than that, don't underestimate the power of instant gratification. Many people out there want things NOW NOW NOW! And they're willing to pay extra to have them NOW. It's why some people buy hardcover novels and then sell them off to a used bookstore rather than waiting for the paperback (or even cheaper - putting their names on the waitlist at the local library). Or why some folks bought Avatar this week knowing that they're going to shell out money again in a few months when the disc with the "special features" comes out. The longer they can make people wait for the pirate version of the game, the more people in that tail who are impatient and just won't wait they'll pull money from. And if that's their thinking -- that they're looking at a DRM model that involves inconveniencing the impatient for long enough to squeeze money of them, rather than an unbreakable model that will lock their content up tight forever -- then this might not have been a bad investment for them. It'll depend on what those sales figures end up looking like.

Wait - what? The server returns the same responses for everyone? This was their "unbreakable" DRM? Was it at least encrypted or something?

Broadcast TV is only dead for people who can afford cable/high speed internet and have access to it in there area.

There are a LOT of people out there still served by rabbit ears over the air - especially in rural areas.

Or start dropping channels to cut costs. Something would give that's for sure.

You pay a hundred bucks a month for cable?

Just for cable? Without internet, or phone or anything else?

Wow. I'm glad I don't live in your market. I don't even pay that much with Internet service bundled in.

The humor in this comment is so subtle that I'm trying to figure out if it's intentional or unintentional.

First of all, who do you mean by "we" exactly. I don't let Apple "get away" with anything because, well, how the heck could I stop them. I don't buy their stuff anymore, but that's not exactly going to bother them that much.

Second of all - Microsoft was a big bad bogeyman mostly because they had the corporate desktop market and the home personal computer market under their thumbs. That made for a lot of people who were worried about Microsoft's actions and eventually led to an anti-trust suit. Apple, OTOH, is generally a consumer electronics company at this point and their control affects people the same way that Sony's control over the Playstation or Nintendo's control over the Wii affects them. Sure there are some companies affected - mostly software development companies and media conglomerates - but there aren't the large financial institutions, military, industrial and other companies who were concerned about Microsoft's monopoly practices. As long as Apple sticks to the consumer electronics market and doesn't make their products mission critical to companies with more money, clout and leverage than they have, they'll be fine. Apple's big misstep could come if they start looking like they could become a monopoly over media distribution - if they overstep in that direction the media companies will come down on them like a ton of bricks because they won't want Apple to have so much control over their business. As long as they don't go that far, they'll be fine.

I fully expect Google to get smacked down long before Apple does. Google is becoming far too important to far too many parts of the economy, and there's going to be a lot of corporate pressure to keep Google in check over the next decade.