Give artists/distributors the choice – their works can either be protected by copyright, or by DRM, but not both. If the DRM is effective then they won't need copyright protection. Plus it's illegal to break the lock. That said, if the lock is broken, the content is no longer protected and the public can do what they like with it (except the person that broke the lock – they're going to prison, if we can establish who they are...)

As I said when this came up and fell through a few years back, Cliff Richards' actions are those of petty greed and unbefitting his royal title. As such, he should publicly and without delay renounce his knighthood. http://www.petitiononline.com/cliffren/petition.html Unfortunately, only one person in the whole world felt strongly enough to show solidarity, but they did give a hearty "Hear hear!"

If you get it from an employer and it contains company emails, they normally insist (in such a way that you're not given an actual choice in the matter, even if it's your own personal phone) that it be passcoded and backups be encrypted. Given the choice of doing this, or having some vague opportunity to spy on where you've been at the risk of company secrets leaking, I wonder which they'd go for?

He used his massive fortune to buy new ones.

I would guess a lot of those people playing with iPhones have second phones as well. iPhone is still the second and third best selling phone in Japan at the moment (beaten from first only recently by an Android handset) so again, nothing like a failure. Source: http://www.analytica1st.com/2010/11/japan-best-selling-phones-apple-iphone.html The RFID enabled phones here do actually work quite well. They work on the train systems, convenience stores and news stands, some vending machines, an increasing number of restaurants, not to mention points cards at different stores etc. Additionally they can be used as coupons at places like McDonalds where you enter your discounted order onscreen then wave your phone over the sensor to order it. What makes it hard is that there isn't one universal card system that works everywhere; you have to install lots of different card type applications into the phone and activate each one individually. Thankfully the machines when you scan over them can broadly identify which card to charge, but if the same machine can access your suica card (for trains), your credit card and any of the several other payment option cards you have installed, you have to manually tell it which one to go for, after a bit of a while. You may as well have just gotten the right card out of your wallet in the first place. Oh, and with the exception of credit cards, putting money into the phone's RFID card for services such as Suica is a major hassle.

On an average commute (the times where you really get to see what phones everybody are using), I'd say anywhere from a third to half of the phones I see people with are iPhones. It's certainly not a failure here, though if it were to be, it wouldn't be the RFID payment thing (which most people don't use because it's damn near impossible to figure out unless you're the sort of person that regularly posts to Slashdot). It would be because it can't handle websites aimed at Japanese phones, by which I mean the vast majority of websites accessed via a QR code printed somewhere which actually go as far as to completely block access to all but regular phone browsers. These sites are a valuable source of games (very bad ones), discount coupons, postage stamp sized pictures of celebrities that you get to set as your background screen for free, and other such wonders which are fantastically important to the phone buying market.

When time travel eventually becomes possible, I'm quite sure we'll have progressed past hand-held mobile communicators of this sort (like we did a long time ago, and only use them now for convenience really), and any savvy time traveller would know not to use one in public anyway. So what has obviously happened here is that at some point in the future, there's some kind of Y2K type disaster waiting to happen and the only way they can avert it is to use a specific kind of technology only used in the original 1924 Siemens carbon amplifier. So the time traveller went back to 1928 (a few years after release so she could be sure there'd be sufficient availability), and wanted to test it to make sure it was working before bringing it back to the future. And that's when she was caught on film! In your face, time traveller!!

The drinks in the machine are predominantly unsweetened teas, coffees, juices and sports drinks like Gatorade.

> If you don't like the return policy then don't buy the product. That's exactly what people are currently doing, hence declining sales and an influx of downloads. The suggestion that content should have a returns policy is precisely to counter this; to bring a better balance to the scenario, potentially increase sales, and allow consumers voting with their wallets to be heard.

This is no more misleading than lens makers' claims of "macro" functionality. A true macro lens is able to reproduce an image of the object at actual 1:1 scale onto the film or image sensor, but some professional "macro" lenses can only reproduce at a scale of 1:2 or less, and the "macro" mode on compact cameras is so laughably far from macro (typically around 1:64) that I'm honestly surprised there hasn't been a lawsuit over it.

Phones are supposed to work in the subways but most of the time they don't. It seems to be limited to certain lines.

How about a built in bittorrent client? It would save me several clicks at least if I could simply click on a bittorrent link on a webpage and have the browser download the torrented file(s) for me to the default location. It would also help establish bittorrent as a standard protocol for legitimate downloads and reduce XIAA lawsuits and campaigns trying to stigmatise it as an agent of communism.