Piracy, in Japan ? I've seen very little of it compared to other countries. However they have a large second hand market, which probably has a similar effect on sales.

As for Albums, they are almost collector items. The CDs and packaging are high price / high quality. For example, the bar code, price and other technical data are printed on a separated piece of cardboard (spine card / obi). This is partly to avoid messing with the cover art.
In fact we can argue that the album itself is merchandize.

Interesting point. But can we really call a place where sound doesn't exist "quiet". In the same way we can't call vacuum "cold" because there is no temperature.
The air in an anechoic chamber actually makes things stop vibrating whereas vacuum merely prevents the sound from propagating.

Ask Slashdot, they can tell you if a product will fail or not with 50% accuracy. If you use a time machine, you can go up to 90% : Slashdot is quite good as predicting the past.

Communities like Slashdot are good for many things but predictions is not one of them. Of course, we have to be right sometimes (like with Windows RT) because being 100% wrong is just as hard as being 100% right

You just said the second point I wanted to bring.
The Wii is marketed as a console for the living room and indeed, while we have several consoles at home, the Wii is the one that get the most time on the big screen. After all, party games and local multiplayer is where the Wii really shines. In the end, it makes the lack of HD even more noticeable.

Note that I don't think that it is a bad move from Nintendo. The Wii sold really well and was always profitable. I just said that, in my opinion, the Wii would have been much better with HD.

I have a Wii and I still rage about the lack of HD. Indeed the games are fun and that's why I rage instead of just forgetting about this crap piece of hardware. Good graphics won't turn a bad game into a good game but it certainly make things more enjoyable.
The WiiU is OK though, it may not be able to show scenes as complex as the competition (Xbox one, PS4, PC) but at least, it is not an aliased mess.

It's real. I have a Galaxy Note 2 and cheap long cables can't charge it correctly. These cables work fine on device requiring less charge current.
No amount of plugging and unplugging help, thin cables work 0% of the time, better cables (original or not) work 100%.

Hey, Facebook, make sure that no one else can use these techniques. That's your duty as a patent holder.

I don't consider it an idiotic reaction, assuming that he drove carefully after the impact. Pulling over is not without risks and the car nearly told him to continue driving. And considering the range of the Tesla, home was certainly not that far away.
When the car switched to a more alarming message he did pull over and left the car.
Maybe that it wasn't the best course of action but I think that is is reasonable for an emergency reaction (everything took less than 5 minutes).

And BTW, even if this guy is indeed an idiot, then it is a good argument for Tesla : in case of fire, even an idiot can survive.

Most certainly not.

With Chromium, disabling "local" extensions would mean blocking all extensions.
Chromium is a pure open source project, which isn't tied to the Google ecosystem. So blocking extensions from outside the Play Store would make no sense.

Even if we manage to solve chess, the game will still be interesting to non-perfect solvers such as humans.
A bit like rock-paper-scissors is still played by both humans and computers even though the optimal strategy (chose at random) is well known and simple. This strategy will guarantee a draw against any opponent but you won't be able to win. By using a good suboptimal strategy you will lose against perfect players, draw against pure-random players but at least, if your suboptimal strategy is better than your opponent's suboptimal strategy, you can win.

...and show me your sexy polygons in wireframe.

Not the best example but : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wooden_cannon

MRIs and other superconducting magnets are the biggest wasters of helium right now.
They work on an open circuit because right now, it is cheaper to waste helium rather than trying to recycle it.

Using helium for balloons is clearly a waste but it accounts for only 16% of total consumption. And that's for all kinds of balloons, including blimps.

If development machines can access the internet, then the source code is online.
It's possible to really work offline but the cost is so high that it is usually only done with classified programs. And it won't prevent a cracker from simply convincing a developer to steal the code using an USB stick.

It has been done many times.
There are countless articles and news on the subject, like this one : http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/05/google-recaptcha-brought-to-its-knees/