But is there seriously no other company in the industry competent enough to step into a market and kick everyone in the ass in the way Apple has been doing?

Apparently not. From my reading of the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson, who appears to be a detached, more-or-less objective outsider with no dog in the fight, it appears that media industry executives really are the overpaid imbeciles that we've always suspected they were. Or, more accurately and less facetiously, they're the laziest fuckers this side of Mars.

On both the production and distribution side, the media companies are run by overgrown fratboys who could just as easily have gone into fast food franchising or insurance underwriting. Without some messianic figure to tell them where to go, what to do, how to do it, and how to zip their pants up when they're done, they really are completely hopeless. You can count on these people to behave self-destructively in the absence of adult supervision.

It apparently took every hand-waving, smoke-blowing, reality-distorting trick in Jobs's repertoire to get the music people on board with iTunes, and to keep Disney from destroying Pixar. Tim Cook is OK at the business of running Apple, but he is no Steve Jobs, and it's not clear who is going to pull the media companies' asses out of the fire this time.

For a while I thought Reed Hastings might be the one to step in and drive the necessary changes. But he's more like Steve the Grey than Steve the White. Jeff Bezos? Who knows.

I wouldn't count on anything to change soon.

How does that work? The MAFIAA will just subpoena the VPN provider to get your subscriber info, so you've only added one minor step to their legal workflow. Their "local jurisdiction" apparently ends at the border of the Oort cloud.

In fact, you may actually be saving them some work, if the VPN provider is hosting a lot of piratically-inclined users. One subpoena could get them n subscriber records in that case.

I hope you're right. However, Larry Ellison won't see it your way. He will see it more in terms of (legally speaking), "Oh, it's on now, bitches."

So we'll have to wait for the appeals process to run its course. I wouldn't be surprised if Ellison is at least as good at prolonging the inevitable as, say, Darl McBride.

It's useful if you want to sue people for stealing your patented copyrighted proprietary implementation of "if / elseif / else."

Beyond that, well....

So you are saying that industrial and other economic activity by rich economies isn't the major source of environmental degradation? Really?

You know how I can tell you're not very familiar with the former Soviet republics?

Some people seem to be expecting a low-cost general purpose device

Gee, I can't imagine where they could have gotten that impression.

This just in: Marketing is important. It should not be left as an afterthought or as a secondary task for developers, any more than product development should be done by marketdroids in their spare time. Ric Romero has more at 11.

I couldn't agree more. In fact, every "negative" review I've heard/read has come down to unrealistic expectations of what a device with these specs can do.

Maybe somebody should tell the Raspberry Pi people. As the author of the review repeatedly points out, he did nothing but evaluate the manufacturer's own claims.

To quasi-quote Obi-Wan Kenobi - Only an idiot deals in absolutes.

(Shrug) Hey, I'm not the one claiming any insight into the political preferences of the creator of the Universe.

Yes. Next question?

Welcome Europeans. You're now just like Americans - part of one gigantic whole rather than individual states.

Well, not just like Americans. Our founders had the sense not to attempt to create a fiscal union without an accompanying political one.