Why don't the automakers just seek refuge under the DMCA from all those evil automobile hackers? Clearly, figuring out how your car works is a direct attack on the very hard work and property of those automakers.

Time to pass a bill state by state. I'm the sure the invisible hand of the free market will line all the right politicians' pockets to rush those through. Hopefully someday we won't be able to own our cars and we can go back to the Ma Bell days when every phone was rented.

Ex 1980's taxi driver here, public holidays are dead times, surge times used to be called Friday and Saturday night, but the price didn't change.

Well crap, I got the wrong make :(

You regard being called 'human' denigrating?

The sides of the trench are tectonic plates, both plates are diving into the crust, in 2000yrs the drums will be absorbed into the crust.

There's enough space junk whizzing around Earth now, why pollute the space around other planets if it can be avoided? There's also the possibility of doing "last minute" science as the probe descends that cannot be done from orbit, eg: atmospheric sampling.

How to piss off an Aussie

AFAIK the only thing that is censored in an R18 rated game/movie is explicit sexual violence (rape porn), CP, explicit beastiality, etc. For a long while there was no R18 rating for games, they were assumed to be for children so the highest rating was MA16. Game studios would deliberately get a "banned" for publicity reasons, but unrated games have always been legally available on the net.

We don't have a 'viable [domestic] market' for big budget movies/games because of our tiny population, nothing to do with our movie rating system which is far more permissive than most of our neighbours in SE Asia. Hollywood movies are typically shot on location in AU/NZ because it's cheaper than making them in the Hollywood.

Oh, wait, MS bought Minecraft, no wonder they didn't include it.

NVidia have freely available, user hardened, linux drivers for all of their hardware, and a large scientific/gaming community that uses them. Same deal for NVidia's windows drivers.

...because...
- They will flush 50% or more of their own revenue down the toilet.
- It sounds too much like extortion/ant-trust, and is probably illegal.
- NVidia already comply with their stated goal.

IMO Steam is a glorified shopping cart that invades your PC and "manages" your purchases, they don't "own" anything, they are middlemen. I prefer to go directly to the vendor, if it's exclusive to steam I won't buy it because I refuse to install their malware gateway on my PCs. IMO the freemium model used by game studios such as wargaming.net is much more consumer friendly, just register, d/l, scan, hit install, and you done. From a business POV, wargaming.net has proved beyond doubt that a talented game studio combined with a player friendly freemium model can make you very rich, very quickly.

It's important that players who subscribe to a freemium game only gain a meta-game advantage, for example in WoT nothing you can buy in-game for real cash will give you a significant advantage on the battlefield. However a "wallet warrior" (me) will climb the tech/skill ladder ~1.5X faster than a "welfare warrior", a "wallet warrior" is able to extend the size of their garage/barracks, recycle expensive tank add-ons, paint their tank, etc.

Freemium models that significantly handicap a "welfare warriors" ability to compete with "wallet warriors" simply won't get enough players to attract a profitable community of paying customers, and the game will die. Note that the freemium model also applies to some traditional games (on a computer), such as internet bridge clubs who make money hosting tournaments, hosting bridge holidays on a cruise ship, selling/advertising advanced lessons, etc.

NVidia - I have found them to be a developer friendly company (CUDA, etc). NVidia have a large linux user community for scientific applications, their linux driver works, Yes, it would be nice if they could find a way to open source everything and there's no harm politely asking/reminding them, but hurling abuse at them for choosing not to is the act of a spoilt child. I for one, don't want OSS devs to be associated with spoilt children.

Disclaimer: Buying video games since I dropped my pocket money into a pong machine at mum & dad's local pub, circa 1970.

I got a 404...

hemp grows quickly

So once again, based on false evidence, the United States decided to risk war by forcing down another countries Presidents airplane, just so the USA could check to see if a fugitive was on it.

While it's possible Snowden paid a part in this, it was the USA choice to risk war by forcing the Bolivian plane. Snowden isn't the bad guy here, the USA still is.