Have you been to either of these countries? Cameras litter the streets of Britain, many have claimed they are more of a police state than the U.S. is now. Israel has security checkpoints with metal detectors at shopping malls (I've been through them, and the guards aren't much more charming than TSA agents). Make no mistake, this isn't an American problem, this is a progression in Western society in general.

I'm not sure this is a fair statement to make. By pirating media you are boycotting the media companies; by not partaking in that media at all, you are boycotting both the media companies and the artists who perform the work. This is not to suggest that you are not hurting the artists by doing either; in both cases, lower revenue will hurt artists as much as the production companies (both directly and indirectly). But a boycott is a concept, and in that sense, the act of pirating media (for the media pirate in question) is a boycott of the payment, not the art which the payment is for. Your analogy fails to acknowledge this distinction. An alternative would be if saying you are going to protest the ridiculous pricing of Mars bars by stealing the recipe and making them yourself. And in this way, you may hurt Mars all the same (well, slightly less so because they aren't out any manufactured goods at all) but you aren't saying anything negative about the food itself, just the pricing/corporate policies/etc.

I don't think that anyone debates how easy it is to steal a bunch of pamphlets. I think it's more about the price of losing a bunch of pamphlets versus losing a tablet.

If only I still had mod points... so true.

I appreciate the idea of searching for extraterrestrial artifacts, but the moon does not seem a logical place for aliens to drop off their stuff. If anything, it seems far more likely that the earth would be such a place, seeing as it has life already (and has been far more active over the course of its history) so if it makes sense to search anywhere, it's here. I'm not sure what could really be accomplished by scouring the moon...

What are you talking about? There's no such thing as two.

Honestly, I have no idea what you're talking about. If you wanted to build a rig capable of playing Xbox 360 ports with graphics on-par with the console, you wouldn't need to spend more than $50 on a video card, if that. The whole computer would probably run you less than the Xbox 360, AND it would be capable of upgrades, not to mention a real operating system with real programs. If you really prefer the console controller, you can hook that up to your PC. If you really prefer playing on a TV, get a cheap HDMI cable, or place your PC by your TV. Besides exclusive games (which is entirely a marketing issue), there is no reason to use a console, certainly one like the Xbox 360, over a PC.

1.21 Gigapixels

Wow, at that resolution, you can practically see back in time...

I'll hold out for the social enhancement chip. Could use some pheromones right about now...

When I saw the headline, I thought Apache was going to warn retailers about selling HP touchpads...

When you're talking about books being phased out in a few generations, nitpicking about current OCR is irrelevant. OCR technology will improve, industrial design will improve, and it probably won't take more than a decade before all of the "kinks" are worked out of digital literature. And at that point, new generations will be born into it. I think it is a given that digital text will overtake print; it is merely a question of how long.

Okay, so they claim that the memory is denser than NAND, and cheap to boot. That's great. But TFA makes no mention of its performance. How does the read/write speed compare to that of NAND, or magnetic drives? Could the 3D architecture potentially slow read/write times? I'm not trying to make any claims here, but it's a little disconcerting that there is no mention of it at all within the article.

You're assuming that most of the youth will actually realize that their rights are being taken away, or be in any way aware of how serious the situation is. It is unfortunate that many of the younger voters who flocked to Obama did so because of his celebrity status, because people want to be part of something big (first black president), etc. The youth vote went to Obama for many of the wrong reasons, and most of them won't notice the danger of losing network neutrality until it's too late. I'm a youth voter in a city that votes strongly dem.

I thought infrastructure support was supposed to be the job of tax dollars? And we would have to pay them even if we weren't connected to an energy grid.