You should have clarified that. The Immortality Edition doesn't give people eternal life because of Apple being godlike, although they are, but because mobile providers find it a necessity with their eternal contracts.

Leopard was sold with several different licenses: Upgrade, Retail (full license) and Family Pack (3 or 5 licences of one of the aforementioned types, with additional software). The contents on the disc was the same for each. All versions since were upgrades, but you can do a clean installation on a supported system without ever reaching for a previous disc.

I know from experience that it isn't too picky about what you already had. There never was a serial for any version of OS X up to and including Snow Leopard, and from Lion on it checks your computer's serial number in some circumstances. I've also gone from Tiger to Snow Leopard, and the process did try to clean up old files (but not really that well). Clean installations are best, and every disk image lets you do that.

I wouldn't be surprised if this gained some popularity as the distribution format for digital cinema. It would be handier than shipping hard drives, provided the disc readers have enough bandwidth, or at least for copying to the theatre's drives. As a media for backup I imagine it would be very slow, but it would be great for archival use. Assured retrieval is more important than speed for that sort of thing.

I know at least MediaFire is being used by larger companies for legal purposes. A recently started company is using them as their main distribution method. Does the MAFIAA just want to shut down all competing digital distribution? What's next - Band Camp?

I know one of the accusations about Megaupload (which is very plausible, really) was that they simply removed the discovered links, not the actual files, when receiving a takedown notice. I doubt this is standard practice in the file hosting business, though. They should perhaps investigate WHY two users seem to have the same file, if they need to do anything special at all when two hashes match. Mostly they should just stay away from users' private files and nuke them from orbit if notified that the user doesn't have rights to distribute them. Use file servers with de-duplication if space is such a problem :)

We recently got a tax on downloads in my country. Well, we already had a tax on local products, but now foreign companies are supposed to add VAT to downloads according to the usual rates in the country. One problem is that this can't be enforced, and the government admits as much. Only big companies who want to play nice even care. I suspect they still pocket the extra money.

Apple add 25% to apps, music and books, but they really only pay 6% in Luxembourg and keep the rest. Amazon I'm not sure about; they do some calculations when you check out. I tend to stay under the limit so it's tax-free anyway.

These sort of taxes are supposed to "make it a fair market for local products". Except it of course doesn't. Downloadable books are now taxed at 25%, while physical books are duty-free! We also have no substitute for most popular authors.

It wouldn't be very usable in my country for long, because magnetic strip readers are being taken off the market (due to a large number of East-European criminals skimming cards). Smart cards have started to become a requirement, with legacy devices losing the functionality to read the strip. PayPal's solution is a bit too late to be that usable in Europe.

Yeah, and the Pogoplug isn't even the same class of device. The Pogoplug is a mini-server, while the Raspberry Pi is a client device with a decent mobile GPU. I wouldn't mind one of each. They'd be great together.

Or at least a YouTube video, which the appropriate extensions replace with your preferred video format if available! Embedded Flash self-hosted (or anywhere with only Flash as a video option) is a terrible idea these days.

Doesn't autoplay with the right browser extensions (using ClickToPlugin on Safari; similar should be available for other browsers). I recommend setting up your browser(s) to make avoiding work as painless and pleasant as possible :)

Hetzner seem better than LeaseWeb up to a point: http://www.hetzner.de/en/
LeaseWeb offer 100TB for relatively little, which is great, but Hetzner have better spec servers at 10TB/month. Multiple Hetzner servers might be better choice in *some* cases. Hetzner's servers are bog-standard consumer hardware for the most part, but they've recently added two Xeon offers with ECC RAM to the main range. I've used them for two years for all sorts of things, including bursts of high throughput. It's nice when you have the 1Gbit NIC option :)

That little asterisk next to LeaseWeb's two highest bandwidth options is a bit worrisome - it says "best effort". Hetzner give 10TB with all servers and have the data centre to back it up. Using more than the limit with them puts the speed down to 10Mbit/s, but each TB is 6.90 Euros monthly. That turns out cheaper than the top LeaseWeb server, so spreading 100TB/month across a number of Hetzner servers might turn out to be more reliable than LeaseWeb.

If gaming levels of latency aren't a requirement I'd always recommend European servers anyway. I'm not sure how Hetzner keep the prices so low, but I've heard it's because of the low cost of electricity. I've spent the past week trying to find a better option for me, but I've ended up back at Hetzner. Ordering an EX S4 soon, which will be nice when I'm only used to the old EQ range.