"Doctors say thousands have suffered permanent eye damage from looking at total solar eclipse":
http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health-fitness/doctors-say-thousands-have-suffered-permanent-eye-damage-from-looking-at-total-solar-eclipse/story-fneuzlbd-1226516924022

Well said! I was thinking more or less the same thing when I scrolled through the list of comments. Let's face it, when downloading a song or a video (i.e. copyright infringement - non commercial use) gets a person potentially more time in jail than for a violent crime (e.g. assault) or can potentially bankrupt a person, then society has its priorities all messed up.

It would be nice for everyone to step back and measure these things rationally, instead of getting caught up in the MAFIAA's rhetoric. But hey, it's Japan.. maybe we should be happy that the penalty is not hara-kiri, right?

...for starters, not alienating the developer community by refusing to release even a beta copy of the Windows Phone 8 SDK would be a good start. It's been released to a VERY select few thus far.

It's left a lot of developers in the dark, not knowing what the platform's going to look like and what kind of changes they might choose to make to their existing 7.x apps.

Talk is current generation apps will run on Win Phone 8, but obviously won't make full use of the Win Phone 8's capabilities (and who can rely on this until they've had a chance to run their 'now legacy' app in an emulator?).

What it boils down to is that very few apps which make use of the full featureset will be ready come the date that the actual handsets ship, that's got to be a negative net effect.

You misquoted me - I specifically mentioned WinRT. To make use of the new functionality offered by Windows Phone 8, developers will have to make major changes as many of the existing APIs (Silverlight, for example) will not be supported.

Perhaps... but I can't help feeling that Windows Phone (as a platform) is still very much a second-class citizen. For one thing, the Windows Phone 8 SDK is still not available (excluding the leaked copy) and we're only months away from Windows 8 (RTM) and a little later, (October??) the Windows Phone 8 handsets and Tablets come out. We haven't even seen a beta or RC of the SDK..

Worse still, given the amount of rework which devs will need to undertake to port their existing Windows Phone 7 apps to Windows Phone 8 (for the use of the WinRT API, for example). This is a baffling move, and given the history of the Windows Mobile line.... it's getting to be a bit rich.

Also, I disagree that the market place is mature. There's not nearly a large enough user base to make that statement, and hearing that Windows Phone 7 handsets won't support an upgrade to Windows Phone 8 may hurt.

I really like the Drobo range, great functionality and disk configuration options.. but found the pricing to be a bit too prohibitive. An alternative might be a Thecus (http://www.thecus.com/) which seem to be a fair bit cheaper but lack the innovative features of a Drobo. However I think they deliver a fairly solid platform of functionality for the price.

It's a wonder that the publishing company (Sansai Books) weren't issued some kind of ceast and desist letter first, considering the company did not break the law when the magazine was published *last year* (presumably well before the law was ammended). It sounds like they were probably selling back issues and may not have fully appreciated the situation.

The thing smells of trolling. I'm happy for people to 'call BS' on some of the garbage people say (by way of promoting) Agile practices, but honestly, who thinks 200 people is a wide enough sample range to denounce an entire methodlogy/ideology? Reads like a cheap shot.

The so called 'copyright clause' of the US constitution (Article I, Section 8, Clause 8) doesn't say that at all - it states "To promote the progress of science and useful arts". It mentions nothing making things profitable. It also mentions granting copyright for a *limited* time, which - given the continuing extensions to copyright term - is not being exercised in accordance with the US constitution.

By the way, the public domain exists for a reason too, and was intended 'to embiggen a vibrant and creative economy'. Take a look at what has happened to it in the past few decades.

Spend a little time in one of these companies to gain the prestige of having worked for them (that's probably one of the big draw cards of working at a company like Microsoft), then take that experience and "bank it" outside in a non-Fortune 500 company. If many people took this approach (and with some luck) the brain drain may cause these companies to rethink the stack ranking policy.

I totally agree with you about HTML/HTTP being (wrongly) moulded for applications, I guess we've sort of seen this coming for a while now with many intranet apps being pushed out (hey-- no installer!). It really breaks away from the premise of marking up and presenting content and allowing light functionality to sit on top of it.

It does create a new opportunity to invest in defining and building a platform-independent web-enabled framework for apps, but I doubt we'll see it.

>I dont think you have used an Xbox if your making that claim
I actually have both an xbox 360 and I've run both Windows 8 pre releases. The xbox dash is better, but IMHO they share very similar look and feel (and are both sandboxes which only run basic applications).

>metro is for smartphones and tablets
No it's not. It's the default mode Windows 8 boots into, regardless of whether you run a desktop PC, a tablet.. etc.