Parent (sopssa) most likely obtains 'legal' movies from scene releases, which come packed in ~40 MB rar files.

I agree, a performance comparison on flash plugins would help shed some light on these results.

Flash performance varies considerably from OS to OS, but I haven't heard much of a variance from browser to browser within the same OS, so I did assume that they would be more or less on par.

But the thing is, IE processing pages with ads and flash was *more* efficient and less demanding on the CPU than Firefox processing pages with no ads at all.

That comes to me as quite a shock, given that Flash is, in fact, a pig.

Yeah, it's like complaining to Microsoft that Visual Studio only runs in Windows.

Not really. No-one is claiming that the app was rejected due to its VoIP components.

Apple needs AT&T's permission to approve VoIP apps, but that's the final step of the process. Here, Apple claims that the Google Voice app doesn't meet its design guidelines / expected end user experience, so it wasn't approved (read: was rejected) before its VoIP component even being considered (and thus no need for contact between the two parties).

If Apple is indeed telling the truth, then if/once Google redesigns the application to fit Apple's requirements, Apple will inform AT&T of the existence of this voice app and ask for permission to publish.

... we, Homo Sapiens, become Homo Evolutis. By taking direct control over the evolution of other species (and of ourselves).

(see the thought-provoking Juan Enriquez shares mindboggling new science on this subject)

This can be spun both ways, that I agree. Although I did say that books should be cheaper, I agree with you in the fact that producing a good textbook is expensive (in more ways than just money) and time-consuming, and they should be valued accordingly.

I do believe, however, that it is more valuable for us as a society to have this sort of knowledge-disseminating piracy, than to strongly enforce textbook copyrights. You can argue that without the monetary reward, no good books would be written in the first place, but I disagree, I don't believe that most people who write textbooks do it for the money.

The point that those students are spending much more money elsewhere is moot. Textbooks are obviously not a basic necessity. Should a student sacrifice two month of his social life for the sake of purchasing a new textbook? Which of them will benefit him the most throughout his life? What is worth more that a textbook, and what is worth less?

This is all relative, of course. You say that anyone can ask for funding to buy textbooks. Where? In America? Me, I'm studying in Portugal, so I'll speak of what I know. We have good universities here, but there are no funds for buying books, and the 3-5 copies in the library are hardly enough for the dozens of students who procure them every year.

That would be because many here would laugh profusely at the notion that 'pirating' $80+ university textbooks is wrong because it discourages university teachers to write their own books.

What is wrong is to price knowledge so high and not subsidize it for students who can't afford $500 in textbooks.

I'm not offended when someone can't get the whole Britney Spears discography because it's too expensive, but it hurts me when many of my university colleagues want to study advanced physics or microelectronics and can't get the subject's textbooks because they're too bloody expensive. And it comforts me to know that they can 'pirate' the book, study and learn from it, and have the same opportunity to become great engineers as I, luckily, have.