You can't say you're not using DRM if you sell over Steam.

That said, I wish everyone would just get on Steam. I don't know how good it is at preventing piracy, but the convenience can't be matched.

Not paying for cheap games like World of Goo is disgusting, by the way. I picked that up on Steam for next to nothing. These people are blurring the line between 'pirate' and 'complete jerk'.

I'm in China right now, and I assure you the very thought is ridiculous.

Not only does China not block movie downloads, China has so many highly-effective, free and high-quality download sites for everything, that even these "for profit" operations couldn't compete.

The average Chinese person, it seems, would balk at the idea of actually paying for anything that can be downloaded over the internet... and amusingly, since the Great Firewall often blocks the sites-of-origin, when searching for movies and the like in China it is not uncommon to ONLY get links for illegal download sites.

Who really even looks at what their government is spending money on, any more? Unless it's on the cover of TIME, just about no-one will notice.

Parents will cotton on when this does affect their child - junior gets fined $75,000 for downloading a CD, and suddenly Dad is real interested in ACTA... for what it's worth.

Sounds to me like you're just importing Oriental philosophy in place of their cut-price electrical goods.

They get their sale, either way.

Actually, there might be other reasons.

Personally, I've got my hard drive partitioned with a non-GUID partition scheme, meaning if I want to install Snow Leopard, I have to reformat my drive.

It's a big drive, so this is a major pain to get around to, and accounts for my not having upgraded yet.

There could be plenty of other little reasons like that. Frankly, I hope I can still run Steam without having to reformat my whole machine.

Mind you, I've already got it installed on my Windows partition and it runs just fine. Really, all this mac-specific business only saves me a reboot.

As other posters have noted, maybe it's in the iTunes terms of service you clicked through a couple of days ago so you could sync your iPhone.

Somewhere at the bottom, it says that Steve Jobs can shoot your dog if he wants.

What, you never read that part?

Due diligence, buddy - you SHOULD have.

For the time being, though, Steve gets off scot-free for putting a bullet in your doberman. Tough cookies.

So, by that reasoning, if a girl lets you see her breasts, she's free to later sue you for looking at them?

It's hard to see how privacy could be an inalienable right, since it only becomes an issue when there's something you don't want somebody else looking at. If you explicitly take someone into your confidence and agree to share certain information with them, you are by definition specifying that this item is no longer 'private' for that person.

I think it's more about whether you're making profit from the picture, and what about the image - precisely - you are monetizing.

If you sold your photo to a magazine for an iPhone-related article, you're in the clear because you are illustrating an existing product, and the value of the image lies in the skilful portrayal of the object in question.

If you sold the photo to Chinese bootleg manufacturers so they can replicate the UI, or started making money off your revolutionary new idea, which you call the "CoolPhone", and sending that photo to people as the appearance of an "early prototype CoolPhone", then you are likely infringing because you bring nothing to the table yourself, but rather are making money off of Apple's copyrighted product design.

You'd think an all-powerful God might have something to say about all that priest-killing...

What's the church's stance on God's inaction there, anyway? They had it coming?

Indeed. Just about all the music we hear today is run through something called "Auto-Tune", a piece of software which corrects any wrong notes sung by the performer, matching them automatically to the song's score.

There's a number of videos on YouTube showing before & after takes of incredibly bad singing turned into mainstream pop music (with perfect pitch).

It can be obvious, like Cher, or it can be nigh-undetectable, but either way it means the human 'soul' has left music long ago. If you can work the software, you can sound every bit as good as the best musicians of the past without a day of musical training.

Apparently, the computer can even compose your score, now, too.

Is that really such a huge loss, though? Take Auto-Tune for instance: the good performers will still put in the effort, so that they do not become reliant upon cheap software tricks - and, conversely, those people who might otherwise never have been able to perform music (because they were born partially deaf, for instance) now have the same opportunities as the rest of us. The field moves beyond mastering pitch and explores the deeper mysteries of music. Progress happens.

Same, too, with the composition of music. Software like this will help us to understand what it is that makes music 'tick', and lead to better music in the future. Maybe some asshole with a 'music interpretation' degree will lose his job because, as it turns out, his core thesis of "Mozart was magic" turns out to be false, and it turns out anyone can be Mozart if they, too, understand what he learned through long experience. So what, though? That guy should be happy that, if he puts in the effort, science has given him the opportunity to finally contribute to the field he's been leeching off for so long. Composing becomes easier to learn and teach. The field moves on. Progress happens.

Simple as that.