Why do you say that? He's an established scientist and has a Bachelors in Physics and a Graduate/PH-D in Astrophysics. He's held positions at several universities and is the director of the Hayden Planetarium. Sure he goes on television more than your average physicist, but so did Carl Sagan. He's charismatic, and it works well for him. Nothing wrong with that.

Dr. Phil is a pool of waste that puts people on television and exposes their issues to millions of viewers, for the ratings and a fat pay check. He doesn't add anything to his profession, and his discussions on television don't enlighten anyone.

There's a huge difference.

I'm confused - What "exciting new techniques" did the candidates came up with? Using Twitter? Writing a blog? Campaigns and PACs soliciting donations or informing people of important dates through text messages, phone calls, emails or applications on phones?

Wow - What an age we live in...if you ignore that the underpinnings of these technologies have been around for years if not decades.

All they did was leverage what was there to spam everyone and rake in money for advertisements, travel, staff expenses and otherwise. The tools may be relatively new, but the "technique" is a century old.

What you said is not true - Do your homework. Origin was launched on June 3rd of 2011. Crysis was pulled on June 14th
      * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_(digital_distribution_platform)
      * http://kotaku.com/5811996/crysis-2-pulled-from-steam-now-only-on-eas-origin

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 was also on Steam, and only missed being the piracy top-dog by about 10%.
      > Whether that difference has to do with being available on digital download services, or just because people are attached to the online play for Black Ops over Crysis and needed legit copies to play, it's hard to tell.

Origin? It may not be your preferred platform for purchasing Crysis 2, but it was available on Origins at the time it was pulled from Steam.

Of course CD Projekt Red reported having 20-25% more piracy (4.5m) for their major title of the year (Witcher 2) than either Call of Duty or Crysis 2
    * http://www.gamespot.com/news/the-witcher-2-pirated-45-million-times-cd-projekt-6346876

If those numbers are correct, I have to wonder where the Witcher 2 devs got their figures.

"While most speculate that one of the Big Three are behind the purge–Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft"

Why even speculate which of the Big Three it was? The emulators were for:
  - Nintendo SNES
  - Nintendo Gameboy
  - Nintendo NES
  - Nintendo N64

Call me crazy, but if it wasn't pulled because of licensing issues, shouldn't it be obvious who would of had the beef with this guy?

Back in as early as '09, Google was stating that ChromeOS was not intended for tablet or solely-touchscreen devices; Only netbooks and other small laptops.
  - http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/google-not-focused-on-touchscreens-for-chrome-os-652656

'Imagine if you could marry the vast spaces of discs with the blazing fast speeds of solid state memory. Can you say "no more load times"?

Cartridges will result in somewhat lower load times, for sure, but the complete elimination? I highly doubt it - The terrains of games like Oblivion and Fallout still take massive amounts of time to render in memory, and then display on the screen...The bottleneck is not necessarily the time required to simply extract it off the DVD or Blu Ray disk it resides on.

As game creators push the limits further and further with the inevitable next generation of consoles, you'll find the limiting factor in how long it takes to get up-and-running has less and less to do with the choice of optical media vs. SSD.

I find it incredulous that they would throw money on the purchase of something such as this, given the fact their projected Q3 income for 2009 is just $400,000 with a staff of 75+ - Either they're paying ~$6000/year salaries, or just wasting the venture capital dollars they have on things which really can't improve the bottom line or resolve major issues their users truly have with their site.

Of course, they project $4 mil in sustained incoming for Q4 2009 and up to perhaps $1.5 billion by 2013 if you believe their estimates, though I have a hard time accepting that - Especially in a down economy like this which doesn't look to recover back to it's former pace for at least another year or two. Quite frankly, this has 1999 dot-com bust written all over it, complete complete with the ridiculous hype, overpriced acquisitions and no defined strategy for how to actually make money.

All we need now is an IPO

In United States legal system, all things are weighed within the context of their predominate actual use. You have no idea what you're talking about.

If I had the heart to continue this debate, I would. But since you have no interest in posting facts to support your arguments, I will leave it at this.

And your point is? It requires a rather narrow scope of vision to state that public-domain material constitutes a "substantial" amount of it's indexed torrents. The fact that there exists a non-copyrighted copy cannot justify the existence of a service if it is predominantly used for acquisition of illegally acquired materials.

Here's the Top 100 for The Pirate Bay:
  - http://thepiratebay.org/top/all ...Count them. How many non-copyrighted works can you find? And of those which are freely available, how many of those torrent seeders are really authorized to publish these materials? Or do you think it's an entitlement that you have quick, fast and free access to these materials?

I mean, it has the name THE PIRATE BAY, for god sakes. Courts and legal authorities can execute search warrants if they believe that an organization is assisting or enabling criminal acts if there is substantial indications of such - In modern courts, the name of an organization IS CONSIDERED an indication of intent (the same is true if a I opened a shop called "Bongs and Things").

As a software engineer who cannot bear to see his work stolen, I would tend to completely disagree - You assert that offering links to illegal materials submitted by users is not an offense; For the sake of argument, let's assume I agree.

What I do NOT agree with though, is that:
  - Being an accessory to a criminal act
  - Having intent to provide a forum for a criminal act
  - Being negligent in not removing infringing materials after the copyright holder has asked you to remove the material ...is not criminal - Because it is.

The fact that a minority (and don't kid yourself - They are a minority) share Ubuntu, PBS programs and other free material does not justify the actions of the larger community.

Culpability and liability are real words in real world courts - The difference between the mass of posters on this board, and the judge/jury in Sweden is that they realized this; You do not.

I will not defend the draconian practices of the MPAA and RIAA which are, quite honestly, disgusting. However, I cannot sympathize with 4 stupid Swedish software engineers who couldn't account for 3 years of contradictory statements, and couldn't hire a competent defense attorney.