Good thing you're such a flagrant moron that we shouldn't have to worry about you reproducing.

Hobbyist support my ass.
As a lawyer he's thinking "Ooh! 100,000 people banned, that's a big target to profit from!"

As a hobbyist, if I want to run whatever software, I pay: $100 for a motherboard, $130 for a small case and power supply, $50 for a hard drive, $30 for an optical drive, $0-200 for an operating system, $50 for a wireless keyboard and mouse, $80 for a wireless gaming controller, $15 for a DVI cable.

Anybody guess what I bought to run homebrew software? A fecking computer!
An xBox is not a computer, and if you want to change that, Microsoft is well within their rights to say they don't want xbox-like computers on Live!

There are three reasons to mod your Xbox:
1. Turn it into a cheap PC

2. Play homebrew software (basically #1)

3. Steal games.

All of these rely on the same method: replace or disable protections on the OS or base firmware. It's in the quick start guide(the thing that tells you what is and isn't included) that if you mod your xbox, you will not be able to play Live! and may not be able to play the games you own.
So why the hell is anyone surprised about the ban?
And why the hell is anyone even angry about the ban? They expected it!

No. But the _expected_ target audience of Nintendo owners are children, so those are the most heavily advertised for Wii. They somehow didn't notice that we original NES owners GREW UP. We got old, but never stopped enjoying games. I have tried half a dozen games on the Wii, two of them Final Fantasy games, and I would probably enjoy the mechanics a lot more if they didn't plaster CHILD all over the screen with baby this and baby that. Enough of the baby bullshit, just give me a game!

I'm an adult now, please stop advertising to me-20-years-ago.

(Almost kept Star Wars: Force Unleashed, but while it was a mature theme, the mechanics relied on childish button mashing....)

I'm not the only one who thought 'mature' as in older games, but the article is referring to Mature rated games, which is to say games that you have to be mature to not imitate.

Although sometimes I really want to...

Seriously, when my shoe got wedged between the dash and accelerator, the FIRST thing I did was hit the clutch, the second thing I did was shift into neutral so I could slow down, and the third thing I did was unwedge my damned shoe!
I think there was an itch on the top of my foot or something, but I learned to be more careful of where my feet were in that car.

I'd been a manual transmission driver for 5 years at the time. Did I waste time thinking about it? NO! My instinct when I need emergency slowdown is hit the clutch. My instinct when I need precise braking is to go into neutral. I don't need to think about those anymore because I spent enough time thinking about them so I could drive at all.

Mine is a custom construct case, but any atx-based case will do for the old Gateway flexATX or similar ITX boards.
I had a 900Mhz PIII on a reclaimed Gateway flexatx with 512sdRAM and a sata controller with 5400rpm 500GB drive, with an old dell sff power supply, 50 watts.
I have not metered the rebuild(1u server PSU, itx board, 1.2Ghz) but I imagine it's around the same power.

IOW: Don't forget the old low-power hardware can still max out 100Mb networks.

Seriously, that's the first thing this made me think of, when combined with the 'sensing' robot designs.

It looks like we'll have Star Wars-universe limbs well before we have the energy weapons and light-speed travel.

Because patents have a very limited lifetime.

Why, would you prefer they be protected by copyright?

Your question lost its legitimacy when it wasn't about open standards(if the standard is supposed to be free, the tech behind it can't be monopolized.)