Their wanting to call it "peak travel" is clearly just an attempt to make it seem dramatic like peak oil. It's like calling every attempt to hide something X-gate.

Between games and hardware I spend over $100/month on gaming, of which Ubisoft has seen $0 this year.

Amazing, that's how much I've spent this year on electricity, Internet service, groceries, and rent!

The invisible hand of the market says that the buyers just don't care about having N different chargers. They claim to care, but their actions show otherwise.

Hmm... provided you could build some capacitance into the die,

Capacitance definitely makes it more interesting, because the device can store energy for a period, and then use it in a short burst. The instantaneous current can be greater than supplied by the cell, so it could transmit things etc.

It could be good for a pre-amp on a sensor signal which absolutely must be as isolated as possible... eliminating noise on the power line.

If the light it was powered by had any brightness modulation, it would pick that up as power supply noise as well, so you need a filter on the power supply regardless. Common examples of modulated light are LED and fluorescent, which are quite common.

It's not ego-centrism to be wary of reducing the barrier between having your rights respected and having them violated, without any ability of recourse. That you read this as being ego-centric suggests that you're an ego-centric person who imagines that others are as well.

If the company doesn't release the source, you're less-likely to get user improvements (think OpenWRT for example), or product life extension after the company abandons it. The GPL is useful even to non-programmers, because they can still benefit from what programmers do and share with everyone using the device.

i think that would be covered by "...to give anyone who possesses the object code..."

if you distribute the object code, you're obligated to give it to ANYONE who posessess the object code, no matter how they obtained it.

But... isn't it the obligation of the person who gave YOU the code to provide the source? So if a company sells tablet to X, with offer for source, then X gives object code to Y, it seems it's X's obligation to give Y the source code, not the company. At the very least, the company may not have the resources to give it to everyone X gives the object code to, only to X.

He defrauded the copyright holder for certain.

Fraud involves deception. He didn't even contact the copyright holders, so how could he have deceived them?

Duplicating copyrighted material is both counterfeiting and infringing.

A counterfeit is something made to fool people into believing it's the real thing. If his sales showed pictures of DVD-Rs with Sharpie writing on them, for example, it would be clear that they were not the originals, and thus they would not be counterfeits. If, on the other hand, he printed the CDs to look like the originals, and printed up cases/boxes, and described then on his auction page as the real thing, then they would be counterfeit. It's all about whether the buyer knows that they are not official.

Agreed, infringement a crime is ridiculous, but if this guy sold counterfeit goods, I'm more apt to call it a crime, since he was defrauding everyone he sold to. If this is the case, then they thought they were getting a legal copy of the program, with whatever support the publisher provides, but then ended up with an illegitimate copy that they couldn't even resell legally.

The exposure was my first thought as well, but from an electrical standpoint. A solar cell is just a diode with a large junction area, as I understand it, and most semiconductors are light-sensitive, so it didn't seem you'd want them exposed to intense light that causes currents to be generated throughout the circuit. But here they put the traditional circuitry on a layer below the solar cell. Still, as you note, the solar panel is so small that it generates very little power. If you increased its area, you'd increase the area of the underlying layer as well, which seems it'd increase its cost. Sure, it wouldn't have circuitry in the entire area, so the defect rate wouldn't scale as badly as it does for normal large chips, but it still seems it'd be cheaper to just use a separate solar panel of whatever size is needed. Maybe this would have a really specialized use.

Why do corporate apologists keep saying this crap? Censorship does not mean "action by the government," it just means that materials deemed inappropriate are not allowed to be published.

Who other than the government (or other entity who can use force) can prevent something from getting published? Oh, you didn't mean that it couldn't be published at all, just by a particular publisher. That waters it down quite a bit, doesn't it?

[governments] have the power to enforce that censorship by throwing your body into jail, or sucking money out of your wallet (fines). Neither amazon nor any other corporation has that kind of power.

Exactly. The latter can merely prevent you from accessing said material really conveniently using the services they provide.

Just wait, one way you'll not only be able to load 10 items on a page, but it'll scroll if they don't all fit on screen! I can't wait until that's possible.

I'd sure as hell not pay for the privilege of being babysat. Good thing one can sit in on classes. I guess it's not ironic that doing so is free, since they aren't having to hire people to babysit you in that case.