In essence, they just patented a concept of deciding that thin employees get paid more and fat employees get paid less, and indeed judging their personal lives? Sounds like they're cornering the supermodel engineer market.

This judgement delivered by JudgeBuddy for iPad. This is ridiculous. Singling out 5-10 patents which Apple Claims Samsung's infringing on, which are guaranteed to be covered by "prior art" with the hope of delaying a rival product until it's no longer saleable. Antitrust much?

iPhone is good. Android is also good, but much cheaper. Android market share > iPhone market share. Apple market share > any other smartphone vendor market share. One truly killer device = Apple in trouble.

Starbucks and McDonalds have the means and cause to defend themselves against such ludicrous litigation, and they'll make face while they're at it for not a whole lot of capital. The patent troll isn't going to dare take on anyone who can adequately defend themselves and have good reason to.

“Everybody knows that the Internet is the ultimate unkillable beast,” he said. (Walker)

That's pretty much the entertainment industry's view on the internet. It's this big scary beast which steals profit from them, and they should make no attempt to reconcile that by making property available at a rate which people will pay for. There's no good faith here, and there's no good will. Australia's the obvious target because the companies are smaller and the law is less geared towards the people. Nice little test site to set an international precedent, no?

Is anyone else missing the elephant in the room of these ipads being given out to improve low test scores in small children?

Seriously, this shit is getting ridiculous. Has anyone stopped to wonder if putting so much pressure on young children to perform at some standard designated by a bunch of people older and more obsessed with themselves might be contributing to the problem? I sure remember the moment I lost interest in reading: when it became a fucking chore.

Maybe instead of distributing expensive objects no-one in their right mind would trust a kindergartener with to kindergarteners, they should reach out and try to change their apparently-shitty teaching methods.

It probably helps to some extent that we're seeing something of a shift towards devices which join multiple technologies in the one object. Our phones are also our daily cameras, our music players, our portable gaming consoles, etc. Instead of charging a crapton of different things, we're charging one little smartphone. Same goes for TV's, especially as they're working on energy efficiency pretty heavily lately.

Uh, have you ever seen Anonymous? Attacking their own site seems exactly like something they'd do. That's one part of all this I've got no trouble with processing whatsoever.

In other news, fish swim, horses eat hay and I'm posting this comment through use of a computer. Or is it news when what we already knew about a case is proven to be totally correct?

I feel a great disturbance in the internets, as if millions of fanboys suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.

Don't get me wrong. I absolutely loathe the dungeon crawl that serves no purpose other than to increase a number, and by extension several other numbers. Fallout 3 and New Vegas were, in my mind, reasonable executions of the RPG genre because the games weren't just a tedious serious of crawls through a few caves. I'm more looking at Final Fantasy and the majority of WRPGs we're seeing these days, and how they're critiqued. It's a travesty that game developers feel the need to pad out good games with the conceptual diarrhea that is grinding, to give their products a longer play time. But for whatever reasons, games that aren't filled with that shit get torn to shreds. As far as RDR goes, I finished it. I played a fair bit of the side-quests, and it's the only Rockstar game I've ever finished, period. It's also the only one I'll ever finish in the conceivable future. I had too much time on my hands, and I got the game for free. Those are the only two excuses I have.

And immediately whatever game gets made like that gets a hugely negative rep for being too easy, and core gamers stay right away from it. We've been conditioned to grind in RPG's, and the distinct lack of trawling through a dungeon to make sure you're at the highest level you can tolerate to play to leaves us feeling as unsatisfied as our girlfriends on those weekend nights we're playing. Shooters, while they've never actually been my favourite, don't ever require a worthless grind but there remains a semblance of skill that leaves players satisfied. It's no wonder they dominate the market these days.

Or ponies. This is nothing new, Anonymous turns on itself on an hourly basis if not more frequently.

I tend to agree with this. There's quite a few problems with digital distribution that still need to be ironed out - not least of which is actual bandwidth consumption in non-US countries. Not everyone has an unlimited download connection, and with games getting larger and larger these days it does raise the concern that it'll cut into the ability to feasibly get it to potential consumers.

In Microsoft's case, their digital distribution of most games cost as much if not more than what it costs to buy the game in a store, with no potential for resale. They're pricing things all wrong, and it's a huge download. I can't say I know about what Sony and Steam are doing as far as that goes, but I am aware that there's been a few pretty large bungles as far as DRM has gone.

Until this kind of problem gets fixed, I'm all for keeping physical copies of my games.

I guess the only news here is that it kind of puts a dent in Nathan Fillion and co's plans to buy the rights to Firefly and distribute it online.

Though I guess with recentl-purchased IP comes the outside possiblity of another series.