Assuming you have a good product, the best way to deter pirates is to set a reasonable price so that people feel they are getting value for their money. The lower the price, the less people will want or need to evade the cost. There are studies showing the price points where you tend to meet increasing resistence, although I don't think they have much data on the sub-$10 field.

Having a free trial period with limited time or limited features would probably help to ensure people can feel good about spending their money.
Offering support would help also.
Free updates would also be a plus.

Any sort of serious DRM will turn people off for low cost products, but some sort of protection (serial number tied to user name?) will be necessary if you offer a free trial.

You might not want to. However, some of us have a different lifestyle and may have different concerns. It would be an ideal car for people who spend most of their time in their car commuting and can charge it every night. Given the large reduction in fuel and pollution costs some might consider that worthwhile.

In my case I have 48 solar panels on top of my house and the ability to charge an electric vehicle for free. Yes, I will be getting an EV when costs of being at the bleeding edge of development are reduced.

Almost certainly the guy who posed the video is being used by someone who passed him the tape.

The real whistle blower is probably a higher level functionary who wanted the tape released to discredit a political enemy and able to protect this guy, for now. How long the poster will continue to be protected is anyone's guess.

The newly minted Standing Committee of the Politburu (the 9 folks who rule China) have made it clear that corruption is a major issue. However, previous Standing Committees have said the same and even started efforts to tackle it. These efforts haven't lasted long enough to make a small dent in the problem, never mind eradicate it.

The problem is that all levels of politicians and bureaucrats benefit greatly from corruption. Lower level bureaucrats want to become rich, higher level bureaucrats and they have no reason to rock the boat for themselves or their bureaucratic and political superiors.

I wonder how long these sorts of grass roots efforts will be tolerated. China has repeatedly shown that they can bury anything on their portion of the internet given sufficient incentive.

As a counter argument, about a year ago a bystander with a gun killed an off-duty ATF agent who was struggling with a pharmacy robbery suspect who had a gun. The bystander thought he was shooting the bad guy, but he shot and killed a 20-year Federal agent who had a wife and two kids and was at the pharmacy to pick up cancer drugs for his dad. Then a cop killed the suspect.

Intervening After Robbery, an Off-Duty A.T.F. Agent Is Killed

It's a long way from introducing a bill to getting it through Congress and signed by the President.

This was my second cancer. After the first one I became unable to get insurance that would cover cancer. No insurance company wants to take that sort of risk with a disease that often reappears some years later and requires very expensive treatment.

Just to make it clear, I did have health insurance. But after my first bout with cancer the insurance company decided that cancer (of any type) would not be covered in the future, and almost tripled my premium for coverage of everything else. No other company would would give me coverage at a reasonable cost - one well known company quoted $1,900 per month if I paid the first $100,000 of claims per year.

My understanding of Obamacare is that premiums cannot be raised because of preexisting conditions. Hence my comment about wishing it was around.

Four years ago I was in chemotherapy after my second bout with cancer (first was seven years ago). Things were looking grim. I couldn't work, I felt like crap because of all the drugs, and I was paying my medical bills out of savings.

Today I'm in good health, I married in February and we have twins due in December, I have an interesting job that pays well, and we just paid cash for a new minivan. Short of winning the lottery, I don't think life could be better.

I just wish that Obamacare had been around when I needed it. I would have $400k more than I have now. USA badly needs medical insurance reform and the Republicans certainly don't want to help.

Anonymous claims to be a bunch people with like aims and no leadership. So this may be just some person who happened to get hold of the info and published it claiming to be Anonymous or Anti-sec or whomever. The claim that the data came from the FBI is unsupported - proof would be some additional data from the same system such as logs, etc. which have not been produced.

My personal guess is that the most likely source is some social networking site and the guy is saying it's the FBI as some sort of disinformation. It's possible but unlikely that both Apple and the FBI are outright lying about the source. There are all sorts of other possibilities.

Jobs allowed Xerox to buy 100,000 Apple shares for one million dollars in exchange for the rights to use the IP developed at Xerox PARC. This was a year before Apple's IPO. Xerox would have made a large profit as Apple's shares jumped to $75 each on the first day of trading. Turning $1m into $7.5m in a year isn't a terrible investment, especially as Xerox had no plans to use their IP anyway.

I guess it all depends on your definition of a ripoff.

A neighbor had a similar problem several years ago - but that was with her bank account. Someone convinced the online support person to help her and as a result she lost the contents of her checking and savings accounts. No, the bank did not refund the money.

All this shows is that if a hacker knows enough about you to convince someone else that they are you, you can lose a great deal. This guy should count himself lucky.

It's a very fine line between providing good customer support and helping them, and being hard-nosed and losing a customer. When I was pick-pocketed in Paris it was a major issue getting a new American Express card to pay my hotel bill - the AMEX agent apologized for the incredible amount the fact checking that was needed, but they did provide superb help when I did manage to pass their validation checks.

The Samsung designs cannot be introduced because Samsung produced them too late in the discovery process. The concern is that they were late because they wanted to prevent Apple from doing additional discovery around the newly revealed designs. Only Samsung knows why the designs were not revealed earlier, but they effectively managed to prevent Apple from examining the evidence around the designs. Perhaps Apple believes this is because Samsung can't produce evidence that these designs were generated when they claim they were done, but were actually produced later.

The magistrate judge in charge of discovery took notice when Apple complained. Samsung appealed several times to the trial judge but she backed up the magistrate judge.

Now the judge is concerned that Samsung are trying to influence the jury by getting their undiscovered evidence to jury members by a different route.

Why exactly should Apple be doing a security scan for non-Apple malware? If the various app stores are responsible for checking for non-executable viruses on all platforms then Google Play should be looking for malware applicable to Windows, Apple or Linux. And by this logic the Windows store (when it appears) should be checking for malware on all platforms also.

It's hard enough to stay on top of malware for your own platform, why should vendors be on top of malware aimed at other platforms? Especially as the malware files would never be executed on those platforms as they are inside non-executable containers, and the OS would have no reason to look inside those containers.

It's not likely that anything will be done to harden the US infrastructure without legislation. The necessary work requires money to be spent and neither public nor private organizations will do that unless there is some sort of legal requirement that they do so.

People who think the president was "over the top" have little imagination - I'm quite certain there are some very bright people in various countries working to create a series of Stuxnet type products to attack the infrastructure of Western nations. Be in no doubt, no nation has a monopoly on brains or computer technology. Access to details of of Western infrastructure is either openly available or have already been stolen. Figuring out the weak spots and how to attack them probably isn't that hard.

However, it's not obvious exactly how to solve the problem. It's not obvious that the current cybersecurity bill will help. The sad fact is that it's been written by lawyers and politicians who have no idea about the technological challenges and how to resolve them, so they are doing what they know - add bureaucracy. Until computer scientists and engineers are taking the lead nothing worthwhile will be done.