I've never owned a game console, but watching things it seemed to me that the reason the Playstation greatly outsold the Nintendo 64 was because the Playstation used crackable CDs while the N64 used cartridges. The weak DRM was a winner for Sony, while the game makers had their piracy losses offset by the bigger ecosystem.

However I don't think this is a good argument that content makers lose more than they gain from DRM. Weak DRM can be a net gain for publishers if some of the gains had by making piracy inconvenient is given back to users as lower prices or automatic updates.

Some combination of bad reviews, busyness, and the availability of better stuff can keep recordings from reaching the top of the priority queue.

Yes, I think this is a big part of the hate of the overweight. "They're getting to eat all the tasty food I'm denying myself, so I'll make them pay a social price."

One thing I haven't seen on either this or ASIMO is a back with lordosis. This is critical for our balance while walking, and may allow these robots to get rid of the knee bend.

Yes, I would have thought that serious terrorists and crooks would be using long-key one-time-pad encryption with random transmission and reception locations and devices so that no amount of surveillance can tell who's talking to who about what.

The truth, but not the whole truth. This is the sine qua non of advertising. Spin.

The most knowledgeable people will usually be professionals. But the ranks of these will thin If enough people don't want to pay them, either directly, by looking at their annoying and distracting ads, or by turning them into salespeople by using their affiliate links.

Amateurs can be a good substitute, particularly now we have online forums. But often the information from amateurs is either wrong, anecdotal (only useful in aggregate), or is second-hand information from the above threatened professionals.

But, like all advertising, your resume doesn't tell the whole truth. Not many will comprehensively list their faults.

It's possible to conceive of a world without job ads: all potential employees are interrogated by an independent employment assessment organization who then provides employers with the most suitable single candidate or group of candidates.

Of course this is mostly a fantasy, just like a world without ads for products is a fantasy, where we would rely entirely on product assessment organizations. In practice, product makers, like job seekers, will never be able to resist tilting the playing field in their favour with spin.

So given that ads will always be with us, let's just get rid of the most intrusive types: door-to-door, on-street, telemarketing, and ads that distract us from our media consumption. And find other ways to pay media professionals.

I wrote a embedded control system for a small company that has a webpage UI in which an invisible Java applet is embedded that controls both the webpage and the machine's devices. Will they now have to pony up $100/year for a cert, which would be a non-trivial drain on their resources, particularly if the certs need to be annually and manually re-installed at each location around the world where the machine is installed?

Decryptors epoxied with the speaker coils is the most effective way to plug the analog hole.

"Prove" is a strong word, applicable only in mathematics. Prove or disprove beyond reasonable doubt, no. Evidence and likelihoods, yes.

A God that is a regular animal that happens to fly and have pasta feathers wouldn't be able to create existence. So thinking about first cause does help us both define God and understand the nature of being.

I think it's useful to first pin down God solely by the properties required to make a first cause. That established can help those who wish to pin It down further through reference to media and personal experience.

There was once no time in our universe. Or if you're talking about any universe, you need something "out of time".

Isn't this spooky action at a distance a violation of General Relativity rather than causality?

As physics currently stands, that's right, the problem is under-constrained. So it can help to consider Occam's razor and religious literature that claims access to the supernatural.

Well unless physics comes up with something better, the first cause has to be eternal and powerfully instrumental. So God isn't B.O., but certainly an entity made of food could qualify.

The simulation argument is interesting, but what created the outermost level? I've tried, but I can't conceive of a pair of computational systems that can simulate each other.