Those kiosks have already been available in Canada at some Tim Hortons branches for years now. At least four or five years ago I used one to order my lunch in advance at a very busy downtown branch of the coffee chain in Toronto and it printed me a receipt, my number was called and I received my order before some people waiting in line.

Or Microsoft found out they must cede the battle to avoid losing the war. That doesn't mean Valve should get complacent, once you make a threat like that it'd better stay credible. If they back down too far Microsoft might try for a blitzkrieg shoving the Microsoft Store down users' throat before Valve has time to rekindle the SteamOS project. At the same time they don't want Steam to go mainstream to avoid making it a real enemy to Windows.

It's damaged (unusable by the user) until they get a tool from the people who damaged it. Sounds like extortion to me.

That's because you don't want to get between a land whale and his supersized Big Mac with extra cheese and bacon, double onion rings and bucket of Coke.

So what? Since there's no central authority to block transactions or seize funds they'll simply be passed around until any relation with the crime is meaningless with almost everybody in the transaction chain is blissfully unaware that somewhere they were stolen. Then what? If you find the person behind the wallet and seize the "stolen property", you introduce a massive transaction risk that totally undermines the cryptographic guarantee that the transaction is final and irreversible. Imagine the following scenario, you sell a car for bitcoins. The bitcoins come in, transaction is verified, you hand over the keys. Then you try to spend your bitcoins only to be told that they're stolen, we have the serial numbers and is returning them to their rightful owner. Now you have no bitcoins and no car and good luck recovering it.

Imagine if cash was that way, every time the grocery store tried to despoit money at the bank the bank would say "oh no, this and that bill came from a gas station robbery two years ago so we'll return it to the gas station and deduct it from your deposit. The system would crumble as cash couldn't be trusted to really have the cash value it says, even if it's a genuine bill. Everyone with money of questionable origin would pass it off to others who can't and won't verify their legitimity and let others pick up the tab. By all means, if the cops can uncover a whitewashing operation that's fine but once it's passed back into normal circulation again you can't suddenly take away that value.

In my fantasy world, you wouldn't defend a corporation for damaging people's hardware.

They're rendering your device unusable, which they may not do knowingly.

That is irrelevant. You cannot give yourself rights with shrinkwrap license. The law still wins.

If only one of them does it, they will have lost money over this.

Yes, if they did it by accident. If it can be shown that they did it on purpose, and that is almost certainly the case here, then it doesn't matter what they put in the license.

No, but there's 137 people who can each legitimately say "If I hadn't put my machine in the trash, I'd be $900k-ish richer". And I'm not sure how quick the value drops off but I doubt going from 63 to 200 machines (about 3x) would be worse than inverse square so (1/3)^2 * $900k = $100k/machine, that's also a nice chunk of cash.

utopia = ideal, perfect state
unicorn = magical, legendary creature

I think you'd roll your eyes too if Apple or Microsoft came out with OS X 10.10 "Magic Perfection" or Windows 10 "Magic Perfection", respectively. It's the kind of name that makes you go "Okaaaaaaaaay, are you overcompensating for something?"

Not a whole lot of people I knew and having your own hosting and domain costs a bit, most used third party blogs and forums anyway. And it all lacks authentication and aggregation. Sure, you could set up users and accounts and manage all that but people wouldn't bother to manage 100 separate accounts the way they have 100 friends on one Facebook login. And unless every site it set up with an RSS feed there's no easy way to aggregate lots of blogs and give you one dashboard of what your friends are doing. Nothing really unsolvable though, you could have self-hosted for yourself and third party hosted nodes for other people but there'd have to be a business model for the hosting companies. People generally won't pay when they can get a "free" account on Facebook so then most are really back to ads or data mining for most people anyway.

I think you mean "superior to", because "better than" is based on a judgement by others. You could make an objective judgement based on numbers of some sort, there.

It's GM's fault that they only have two or three cars worth buying, and that they're not selling an EV.

it means none of those things but storage cost. The insurance for the second vehicle is reduced, and often the insurance on your primary vehicle is reduced when you add another vehicle to your policy, even if you don't decrease the primary vehicle's mileage. And you get an older vehicle for the second car, and it costs you less to buy, less in depreciation, etc.

It still might not work out, but it doesn't cost twice as much.

Then they definitely get smacked down for dicking with interstate commerce.

in the short term, sure. But injecting refinery wastes into the ground was illegal before fracking for a reason, and that reason is that it's toxic waste.