They probably won't sue you but they've been threatening to sue providers of YouTube download sites and software for years.

Not really. The W3C hasn't standardized the interface between the browser plugin and the browser, and in fact browsers aren't required to have any API that allows plugins to register new CDMs at all and probably won't in most cases.

All the CDMs so far are tied to a particular OS and browser combination, and I don't think any of the browsers so far support any way of installing additional CDMs, nor does the spec require them to ever allow this. Right now ChromeOS only supports Google's Widevine DRM and nothing else, the beta version of IE support's Microsoft's PlayReady DRM and nothing else, presumably if Apple ever support it they'll use their own PlayFair DRM and nothing else...No two vendors have any DRM scheme in common, nor is there any reason to expect they ever will. This "standard" (pah!) is way more fragmented, proprietary and incompatible than Flash ever was.

Nokia's new Asha 501 isn't a smartphone, it's a featurephone with a touch screen. Apps for it are written in J2ME with a bunch of Nokia-proprietary extensions - basically a slightly improved descendant of what your old Nokia 3330 supported. Apparently it doesn't even support 3G unlike newer featurephones.

They're a profit-maximising company that's heavily subsidised by the Chinese government. From what I can remember, the main companies who were affected by this were other Chinese manufacturers of ARM SoCs though; Allwinner aren't really playing in the same market as companies like Qualcomm and Intel.

Most people don't change the firmware on their router either.

With HTML5 EME, every platform will still do it seperately, so you'll still have Apple DRM, Google DRM, Amazon DRM etc, and some content providers will probably still enter into exclusive deals with some platform providers. The entire point of EME is to provide a way to access platform-specific DRM/CDM modules - it only specifies the API that web applications can hand encrypted keying information and encrypted media to them, not what happens after that. In fact, this is already happening; Google Chromebooks and development versions of IE11 both support HTML5 EME, but the Chromebooks only support Google's Widevine DRM and IE11 only supports Microsoft's PlayReady DRM, neither of which is compatible with the other.

The CDM isn't necessarily even a plugin; it can be integrated into the browser. So for instance Microsoft could decide that Internet Explorer will have a built-in implementation of their PlayReady DRM as the only CDM it supports and that they won't allow other browsers to use that CDM or other CDM implementations in their browsers, and that'd be entirely compliant with the HTML5 ECE specification. It'd also be entirely non-interoperable with any non-Microsoft browser or platform.

I hear the next generation of the Cubieboard (not released yet) should have both SATA and gigabit Ethernet.

At the consumer level, there are enough users of most apps that at least one is probably a developer who can take over development if needs be. For example, there's an open source IRC app called XChat that's quite popular but no longer maintained by its developers, so someone forked it and released a new version HexChat.

Allegedly the Bitcoin exchange was being used to launder funds stolen by phishing from people's online banking accounts, which seems to be the usual way that these things die.

And yet, a comment about how it would be no big deal if you swallowed them all at once has been voted up to +5, Insightful on a site supposedly full of smart people. Gee, I wonder why the CPSC felt the need to try and recall them, given how good everyone's understanding of the risks resulting from swallowing them is.

Nope, the problem is that people are idiots, even smart people. On one of the previous /. discussions there were a surprising number of people who posted comments talking about how they'd swallowed all kinds of metal objects as kids, many of which were sharp, and swallowing something round like Buckyballs is no big deal - it's just the nanny state kicking up a fuss about nothing. They did this in response to an article which described, in fairly graphic detail, exactly why swallowing strong magnets was more dangerous than other small metal objects and the actual injuries that had resulted from it.

Would you be willing check, every time, that every single magnet went back in the case even if it took you several days to find the ones that went missing? Because if not, there's a good chance that you'd be a danger to kids if you got your hands on a set of these magnets - even if you don't have kids of your own, it just takes a visiting kid finding a couple and eating them, or them getting trapped in the tread of your shoe and deposited somewhere where kids could eat them, or... They don't look obviously dangerous and all the warnings are on the box. Hell, I think some people on here have been building desk sculptures from them, and they're dangers to kids too even if they don't realise it.

From what I remember, Microsoft has discontinued support for all the APIs you've just listed, so you should really be using alternatives to them anyway...