They'll work out a backroom deal of some kind, everybody will save face in some way, and life will go on.

This. Apple will pay a little bit of money (by their standards) and it'll all be over. "Cost of doing business," especially if you've got deep pockets, and Apple's pockets are the deepest. Any notion that Apple will have to pay anything near $1.6 billion is just fantasy.

He's lying. If he wants to see a hybrid that gets 50MPG all he needs to do is ride in my Prius. I have a 2010 Prius with about 29K miles on it. It gets 50+ MPG routinely. I keep it in the ECO setting 95% of the time, and I keep an eye on the real-time mileage display. Other than that I drive it like I've driven every other car I've owned. You're not going to set any speed records in a Prius in the ECO setting and you're not going to be able to cut in front of other cars, but you will get 50MPG with no special effort on the driver's part.

Cheezburger has 1000 domains. http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/22/cheezburgers-ben-huh-if-godaddy-supports-sopa-were-taking-our-1000-domains-elsewhere/

Here's a leaked excerpt from the next edition of Walt Mossberg's Wall Street Journal column, where he reports on a recent interview with Tim Cook, Apple's newly ascended CEO:

I asked Cook what he thought his biggest challenges were. "Clearly," he replied, "China is our next big challenge. After the U.S. it's our second-largest market. But we're doing well there. We have 6 Apple Stores in China now."

And after China? "Our biggest challenge in the U.S. is the Slashdot market," he said without hesitation. "We haven't executed successfully in that market. But it's a big market, vital to our success, and we're going to aggressively pursue it. I've asked Phil (Phil Schiller, Apples Senior VP of Worldwide Product Marketing) to sit down with John Frazier and figure out a way to get our products onto the ThinkGeek web site."

Cook can't explain why the Slashdot crowd won't buy Apple products. "I don't understand it. OS X is based on Unix. We've been big contributors to the open source movement. But they persist in calling our customers 'Appletards' and 'fanbois.'"

Cook is normally a low-key guy, but the more he thought about all the lost Slashdot sales the more agitated he got. "I want the Slashdot market. I will have it. Once I have the Slashdotters, the world will be mine! MINE I TELL YOU!"

At this point I had to terminate the interview.

Agreed. I'd rent from Redbox if they charged a fair price. Say $0.10 a movie, but only if I get to watch it first and then decide if it was good enough to pay for. All the movies I torrent suck.

Besides, if I had to pay for a movie I wouldn't so it's not like I'm stealing anything. I mean, the only movies I torrent are movies based on comic book characters, or movies made by indie filmmakers.

The movie distributors are ripping off the artist anyway. I'd pay $1.20 for a movie but only if I could pay it directly into the hands of the writer and actors and director and people who really make the movie.

I see what you did there.

I don't know about "most people" but I want to use my phone, not support it.

Precisely. Everybody has their own set of eccentricities and their own way of being an asshole. It's just that most of us don't have enough money and power to indulge those weaknesses.

I've been reading Slashdot long enough that I know to expect it, but still I'm saddened by the number of people using the occasion of Richie's death to take another gratuitous slam at Steve Jobs.

Honoring the dead is not a zero-sum game. We can pay tribute to the accomplishments of both Steve Jobs and Dennis Ritchie without subtracting from our respect for either man.

And if you don't like Steve Jobs, okay, but I think you show more respect for Ritchie by keeping your opinion of Jobs out of this particular discussion. This being Slashdot, there'll be plenty of opportunities for you to do that in the future.

Steve manages to commit his perfidious deeds from beyond the grave. What a fiend!