I said "here's what I think". I didn't say I had researched the agreements and could offer a contractual way to accomplish it. I believe a clause to enforce updates for a certain period (12 or 18 months, was it?) has already been added. I don't feel it's inconceivable that the manufacturers might also open their phones up at end-of-life. Come to think of it, doesn't HTC already offer a way to unlock their _new_ phones? Last I heard it was supposed to launch in the Aug/Sep time frame.

Enforce a policy where handset manufacturers are required to offer a convenient way to optionally install vanilla Android. Problem solved, as far as I'm concerned. When "primary" support is ended, I get the option of buying a newer device to get the manufacturer added bells and whistles, or going with vanilla Android until the hardware just can't handle it.

What did you think I meant with "configurable", if not exactly that?

I'm Norwegian. 80% of the posts I see are in Norwegian. Yet I prefer to run Facebook in English. Unless I can configure this thing, 80% of the posts I see will have a needless translate button cluttering things up. Not the end of the world, but sure to annoy.

As others have mentioned, there's a difference between multiplayer and singleplayer. To anyone only interested in single player (or willing to have separate single and multiplayer characters), this is simply draconian DRM at its finest. And, as with the history of DRM before it, it will be cracked and the only ones suffering will be the legitimate customers when they wish to play somewhere that has no internet connectivity.

Torchlight 2 just became a lot more interesting. I loved D1, skipped D2, was looking forward to D3. But this constant connection requirement for single player just needs to go away. I'll never buy a game with that sort of DRM. Luckily, there are literally tens of thousands of games to choose from that do not require an always-on internet connection whenever I want to play.

Blizzard will still sell truckloads, of course. Plenty of people don't care.

There's principle, and then there's reality. In principle, I agree with you. But in reality, I can see how apps might either not be possible to implement in html5, or it might not be time efficient to go that route compared to creating a native app. Remember, we're not necessarily talking about just the equivalent of displaying a web page here. It could be a tad more fancy, like optical recognition of which painting you are looking at, with interactive bits overlaid in augmented reality fashion (painting was probably a bad example, but you get the idea).

"Will be possible soon", TFA says. How is any of this not possible now? Local wi-fi can happily direct you to an internal web page for app download. Wifi/BT signal strength can determine position within the given building/area.

The entire article reads like something a visionary might have said a few decades ago. Saying it today, just shows you don't actually have anything interesting to talk about.

I don't really see a problem. The word has several meanings. Robbing ships, copyright infringement, trademark infringement (counterfeit apparel). It pretty much boils down to 1) Robbing ships and 2) Everything else.

What I'm getting at is that there isn't really a lot of room for confusion when used in context. Nobody's going to think you boarded a ship if you "bought a pair of pirate Nike shoes", or "pirated Angry Birds". A lot of people won't even think of the pirates of old (the salty kind) if you mention piracy. They have no other frame of reference than copyright infringement for the word.

If I'm wrong, and a large percentage of people in the "western world" actually do associate "piracy" in the context of applications/media with "killing people" rather than "not respecting intellectual property rights", I'd agree with you. But that does not seem to me to be the case.

I have much bigger issues with cracker/hacker. Those words used to mean distinct things. That they have blended into sharing the original meaning of "cracker" is a royal pain, since no new word has really taken the place of "hacker". So today you have to explain how a hacker is not a cracker whenever you use it in a sentence. Now *that* is a royal pain. Pirate? Not so much. People know what I mean when I use that word.

You missed the point. "Quite a few people" does not equal "crashes and burns" or "has disappeared from the Internet" or "worldwide outage".

Been connected to Skype, and chatting, all day. No issues. www.skype.com working just fine.

With statements like "has disappeared from the Internet" and "worldwide outage", I would expect to have... you know.. have noticed something?

So, let's rephrase TFS to something more like: "Some users/areas experiencing issues reaching Skype servers and services"

There are tons of articles if you do a google. From what I've seen, it boils down to: Chernobyl rating, but not Chernobyl bad.

I bought a new wireless router earlier this year. I didn't even consider checking for IPv6 support. I just assumed no networking component today would be shipping without it. I mean, we've been reading "running out of IPv4 - switch to v6!" for what, a decade now? And we've been messing about with NAT and port forwarding due to limited IPs for even longer. It's not like they didn't know this was coming.

Needless to say, mentioned router did not include IPv6. But at least there's unofficial firmware for it that does. And, one never knows, the manufacturer might by some miracle decide to support the product even...

I seem to recall there being scientists back then arguing "CFC or no CFC, this will fix itself given a few decades, no reason to panic". By your logic, should we now believe whatever those people state?

The point I'm trying to make, as others have: correlation != causality.