And fortunately you need go no further than TFM to find out that you don't have to. Subscription is just an option. You can still buy outright if you want.

Some game developers might support Linux if it comes essentially for free - e.g., because they're developing using Unity, or the game just runs under Wine. But even then, with current adoption numbers of Linux for desktop, the cost of testing, packaging, retailing and supporting is going to be more than revenues for most publishers. Sure, Indie developers are loving Linux, but their costs and expectation of profit are far lower than the big studios.

It's worth looking at what's going on with the Mac. Around a quarter of university students are using Macs these days, yet the Steam store for mac is a pathetic shadow of the store for Windows.

I wouldn't throw away your Windows partition just yet.

Ok, you got me there. If you don't want to use Microsoft's services, you indeed don't get access to Microsoft's services.

If you want to have a subset of the 310GB of photos on your phone, you dump that subset in your Skydrive or Dropbox or put it up on Facebook or Flickr. Re mail - Windows Phone does support pop and imap as well as EAS. If none of those work for you, I'm afraid I'm going to call you an edge case.

Unfortunately, this is simply false. There is a Windows Phone Mac Connector program that allows syncing to the Mac. As a Mac user, I can attest it works great. This of course leaves Linux users in the cold, but it is not a Windows-only solution.

More to the point, there is less and less requirement to sync to a PC at all. Photos auto-sync via Skydrive. Email is all cloud-based. Podcasts are directly synched without requiring a PC to download them. Music comes directly from your Xbox Music Pass. Apps are directly downloaded. Files can be shared via dropbox or Skydrive.

There are obviously still cases where you would like to sync directly with a computer, but they are becoming really infrequent.

It's clearly just a matter of time until automomous cars are head and shoulders safer than those driven by people. Once this happens, adoption will be driven by the insurance companies. It will become prohibitively expensive to drive your own car.

I actually look forward to this, and wonder how it will change the interior design of cars. Will we turn the front seat around and go for a more social living room style arrangement? Will we dispense with the view from the front windshield in favour of an immersive large-screen TV? Beds for those long drives? Will we have refrigerators and microwaves so we can get breakfast on the morning commute? The possibilities are awesome.

Fair enough, and as I said above, it will earn them some extra money as it looks to be too much hassle to make them happy.

I'd say it would have taken about as much time as making half a dozen posts on Slashdot about the issue.

Hmm...

Lucky me, then! It definitely asked for a scanned proof of purchase. Maybe a US vs Canada difference?

Don't forget the step of finding your proof of purchase, scanning it and uploading it.

I agree, it's not hard in the sense that solving global warming is hard, but given that I bought it through work and have to track down whatever purchasing drone can provide proof of purchase, and then have to find a scanner, and then have to find (again) the link to that web page (where I already filled in the whole form before getting to the point where I discovered I needed the scan of the proof of purchase), it's looking awfully tempting just to hit the "buy" button and pay the 20 bucks.

Your time-vs-bucks tradeoff may be different from mine.

Possibly fewer than you'd think... Apple actually made claiming the free update hard enough that I'm considering just paying the $20.

Who says they will stop selling the 360 when this new console comes out? Remember that the PS2 outsold the PS3 for years after the PS3 was released.

They certainly won't stop releasing new games for the 360, since it's install base will be larger than the new console's for a long, long time.

Well, fair enough. But my point was really that the odds of having your data requested by the US government is vanishingly small compared to the risk of having that "server under the desk" hacked or physically stolen.

I work at a 2,000 person organization outside the US. The institution has formally adopted a policy that no sensitive data can be hosted in the US, precisely due to the Patriot Act.

Don't look for logic in this. They would rather we use a server sitting under some IT guy's desk than use, say, DropBox, which is based on encrypted S3 storage. But perceptions are everything.

Ok, since you asked, here is my anecdotal evidence. I have owned my Kindle for about a year. With daily use, it was worked flawlessly for all of that year, with three exceptions. In each of these cases, the reader froze, and had to be hard-reset and recharged.

All three happened while I was on trans-Atlantic flights.

It's a bit of a coincidence. I personally would not outright dismiss the possibility that there is something going on.

In my first job, I was responsible for developing a programming environment for a Pascal-like language that included a visual editor, interpreter and debugger. I remember my boss showing up in my office and showing me an ad he had cooked up, with big, bold lettering saying "Runs in 256 kB!"

As a young developer, it was one of the tougher moments in my life to admit that we were going to need a full 512 kB.

It was difficult living in a world where Turbo Pascal ran comfortably on a 64 kB machine.

Private academic publishers do extremely little for the exclusive copyright that they demand. Academics write the papers. Other academics peer-review them. Academics volunteer as editors and publicists. In most cases, none of these people are paid by the publisher for their work.

Increasingly, academic publications are digital only, meaning that literally the only service being provided by the publishers is to put the papers on a web site, behind a paywall.

Many academics that I know engage in "civil disobediance" and post their papers publicly anyway. Some publishers (notably the ACM) actually permit this. But most do not.

Princeton on its own won't be enough to change the system, but hopefully a few other big names will follow, and tip the balance.