Who the fuck are these astronauts that will study it?

They will probably be astronauts in the same sense that the guy who controls a drone is a "pilot". In other words, they will be in some NASA control center controlling some drone spacecraft with lasers and drills and mass spectrometers.

Well, when you are in business you try to stay in business. As more and more content becomes "deliver over network" and more and more is DLC with only one user able to access the required DLC (killing rental and resale), the physical disk business (for both GameFly and Netflix) is drying up. GameFly will go out of business, drastically downsize, or convert to another method of making money within a couple of years. They might as well try to grab as much capital as they can from their declining business so that they can fund new business development efforts and keep their people employed. If getting a lower postal rate helps them do that, then that is what they will try to do.

Rightsholders have to have *full time* people involved in policing sites like youtube.. something just isnt right about that.

Actually, they CHOOSE to have full time people do this. They also choose to have some inadequate software do it too. They don't have to do it. They have some fear (grounded or unfounded, brilliant or misguided) that "people will see our stuff and we won't profit from their eyeballs". This may be true. But it is their choice to produce stuff and their choice to limit distribution in the way that they do. If those choices then result in them choosing to try to put a genie back in a bottle and attempt technical and social engineering means to enforce artificial scarcity on the things they produce - well, that was all their choice. They don't "have to" do it.

I happen to agree with limited copyright protections (maybe 10 years, maybe 20 - there are good arguments on either side), and, as a rule, don't violate copyright and actively educate the minors in my household about respecting copyright laws. But that doesn't make me blind to the crazy choices that these distributors make in limiting distribution of content and then expecting people to not be criminals. Lots of people are criminals. Heck just look at all the red-light runners and speeders on the road. Look at all of the shoplifting that goes on. Then take copyright violation (which many people don't even consider to be immoral) and what would you expect to happen when you attempt to artificially limit the avenues by which content can be legally acquired? Yep. Violations. Lots of them. If hiring people to police web sites is the price of the business decisions they've made - well, sorry, but they made their bed. Now they get to sleep in it. And by artificially limiting distribution - here is what I mean summed up pretty well - http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones

You've nailed the key point. The fact of the matter is that the file (or copies of the file) should have no bearing on this case. The issue is the license (since you are licensing, not buying) and whether or not it should be transferable when it was likely specified in the fine print somewhere that it wasn't transferable. The whole "it isn't the same file when you transmit it to their server" is a red herring. I'd imagine the court case must have been brought against something pretty narrow in order for it to come down to a decision about the file (since the file should really be irrelevant to the use rights granted by the license). Maybe a higher court will need to figure this out and bring this out of the realm of technical issues and copies of files and get it back to the licensing of imaginary property.

It really depends on your usage pattern. Some people find it really annoying, others like it, whilst some are in between. I do find it really annoying on occasion. For example one of the things I like to do is watch a web cast while playing Free Cell. In Windows 7 this was simple enough. In Windows 8, the Free Cell game is a 200 MB download (instead of being built in like in Win 7), and it only plays in Metro - so it takes either the full screen or 80% of the screen if you snap it. Then you can't watch the web cast unless you have two monitors. Honestly whoever thought that it was a good idea to force apps to full screen on large monitors was a moron. Fortunately I do have two monitors so I can make this work. But it is annoying. Most other things are fine - as long as you avoid Metro style apps and make sure to set the system to not use the Metro apps for opening files.

Not being an "expert" in the field (if one actually exists), all I can offer is an anecdote. I think people need both types of work at different times. As a technical lead for my team - I need to be available to point people in the right direction, help them with issues, and decide on some of the correct technical choices. However, when I am in the office I ALWAYS have someone from either my team or one of our other infrastructure teams in my office. My solution is to work from home one day a week. Even though I am available via phone, instant message, email, and even video call I don't get bothered much at all when home and can crank out code or documentation or even build system images without interruption. On the other days, I don't plan on getting too much of my own work done - but then my position includes facilitating the other folks on the team to get their assignments done. This has worked really well for me for over 5 years.

Doomed to failure? No, not completely. But when you are this late to market and your competitors have entrenched and solid ecosystems, your stuff better kick some serious ass and be available on some seriously nice hardware and have a thriving app ecosystem ready to go. Otherwise? Yes, pretty much doomed. You end up struggling mightily like Microsoft is with Windows 8 Phone. It is actually a decent OS and the hardware is pretty much on par with other phones. But it doesn't come out and just blow the others in the market away and the app ecosystem is not really "there" yet (which is why I have an Android phone). So they languish unsold. A tablet competitor like Ubuntu would be the same way. Make it really rock out of the box and get some devs on it right now or it won't go very far very fast.

Not only are they expensive, they are also not sold. They are licensed. This removes the ability to use the provisions of the first sale doctrine. So you can buy a license to a book - but you can't transfer it. With a physical book I can sell it to a used book store, hand it to my wife or kids and let them read it, send it off to a friend in another state, donate it, etc. With an e-book I can't (legally) do any of that. I can't even let my wife read it on her e-reader (separate account). Since we are very limited in what we can do (again legally) with them, they don't have the same value to me as a consumer. Yet they charge the same (or higher) price. I had put my thoughts on this into a blog entry some months back. They still pertain now. http://gildude.blogspot.com/2012/03/have-you-bought-into-e-book-model.html

One of the things I'd like to see if the ability to transfer from one cloud service to another. Amazon has theirs, Google has theirs, other folks likewise have theirs. But I have no (legal) way to transfer an e-book out of say Amazon's service and into say Google's service if, for instance, I decide I want to use a different e-reader and move "my" licensed content. Can't do it. The only value I get out of e-books that is missing from physical books is the amount of books that can be stored on a small device and the ability to add more to that device from say a hotel room on a trip. However e-books have all the previously mentioned downsides - many of which people are very slowly becoming aware of.

Well since the files are encrypted, these 150 files are simply ones where the user shared the link and the key in the URL. This can also be done via mega-search.me. In fact, according to Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/01/wait-for-it-select-files-from-mega-now-indexed-on-third-party-site/, several people have shared copyrighted material using Mega as storage and mega-search.me as the locator. These files can easily be checked by the copyright holder.

I agree with you on that. I have one of these "Smart TVs" (in my case an LG). I've had it for 5 months now. It has gotten 4 "software updates" that nobody from LG will document or give a change log for so we have no idea what is being added, removed, or fixed. After 4 months, it began randomly rebooting. Sometimes it would work through most of a soccer or football game - other times it would reboot almost every 15 minutes. Had to have the main board replaced (under warranty thankfully). It does have some apps. It has Netflix. Now, I have the TV and the TiVo on wired networking. When I watch Netflix using the TV app, it is so laggy that it is unwatchable. It goes to pixelated crap all the time. Using the TiVo to watch Netflix works fine. So we don't use any of the "Smart" apps on the TV. We just run the silly updates when prompted. Other than that, we just use the HDMI inputs and once in awhile a VGA in. Quite frankly I'd rather it be a dumb display and just leave the "Smarts" to the devices connected to it.

You make it sound simple. It does, indeed, look simple. But when an app wants to "Read Phone State" - is that so that it can quickly get out of the way when the phone rings or is it so that it can send your phone number (and the numbers of the people who call you) to a remote server? Some actions that it could take by acting on "Phone State" data would be things users would want, other thing it could do would be things users definitely don't want. For example, a game I saw on TWiT.tv's show "All About Android" called "Flow Free" requires this:

READ PHONE STATE AND IDENTITY
Allows the app to access the phone features of the device. An app with this permission can determine the phone number and serial number of this phone, whether a call is active, the number that call is connected to and the like.

So is it going to store my phone number in a database somewhere? Is it simply going to avoid trying to send data if a phone call is active? We, as users, have no way of knowing. And, if they made the permissions even more granular, we would never be able to successfully wade through all of them. I need someone smarter than me to fix the design. But the design as it exists today is largely useless.

As sad as that is, it seems to be common. For example, how many times have we seen a new device / new version of iOS that immediately needs either a fix for busted WiFi or a fix for power issues? Apple and Microsoft both have had issues like this - in fact Windows 8 pro got a patch rollup a couple of weeks ago - before the product officially shipped! (Although to be fair it shipped to corporate customers in August). I remember my first Android phone - the original Motorola Droid. I got it the first day of availability and two weeks later it got an update from 2.0 to 2.01. It seems everyone ships something a bit busted and fixes it later (if at all) these days.

You are absolutely right. In fact, supporting these myriad operating systems and configurations is going to be so hard (things like domain join, security, etc., not to mention versions of productivity software not working due to the plethora of conflicts), that IT isn't going to go in for the BYOD in the way people think. They will just punt and provide VDI sessions for people who BYOD - and that session will be all that is supported.

Actually I think it is worse than that. We all have things we like to do. Many people have things that they like to do that they really don't want others to know about. It might be that shoe fetish you mentioned. It could be gambling. As soon as people realize that they are being tracked on these activities and lists are being sold saying that they engage in them, they may modify their behavior. And while this may seem a net good for gambling or jailbait or something - it may eventually extend to things like "votes libertarian" or "is an atheist" or even "hindu, but frequents burger king" or whatever. I really don't want to see us get so far as to have people consciously having to modify their normal (legal) behaviors simply because they are being reported, tracked, and shipped to anyone with some money. You never know when that information will get out and you don't know who will see it. Let's label it "do not want" and see if we can prevent this "behavior modification through tracking everything" dystopia from becoming a reality.

Add to the items you list EMET - http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=29851. This is a free download from Microsoft that allows you to protect processes (such as IE and Java) from well known exploit techniques (such as heap spray, etc.). As an example, it protected against this latest IE zero day "execCommand Use After Free Vulnerability - CVE-2012-4969". We (large enterprise) had no worries at all about that vulnerability since we have EMET deployed and configured. Here's the MS02-063 bulletin - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms12-063. If you expand the execCommand node and look at the mitigations you'll see you would have been protected. Often times Adobe Flash bulletins mention that EMET was a mitigation for the plethora of vulnerabilities that Adobe Flash code contains.