If there are a lot of buyer's remorse/'gifting fail' models floating around, that could seriously change the equation... The delta between sticker prices isn't worth it; but the fleabay/craigslist price hit could easily knock the Kindle right down into impulse territory...

Given the quite modest price delta between the Kindle Fire and the Nexus 7(especially given the latter's slightly punchier specs), how much is your time not worth if you buy the former and do a bunch of messing around to get a only-somewhat-crippled Android 4.0-oddball device when you could get a 'clean' 4.2 device?

I can see doing it once the cyanogenmod, or similar, matures(assuming the bootloader crack holds out), since that should be a fairly swift nuke-and-pave operation that will bring you up to a version of Android that isn't Amazon's listlessly maintained Amazon Consumption Platform edition; but just incremental poking at the stock OS?

"And because they're exclusive, it would be a breach of contract for a film's copyright owner to allow anybody but that distributor to distribute copies of the film in that market."

If the price difference is large enough, the film's copyright owner doesn't have to 'allow' anything, they just have to not have any recourse when somebody in country A buys a containerload of cheap DVDs and ships them to country B. First sale, no unauthorized copies made, etc.

Most organisms of nontrivial size in Australia are virulently venomous. Adobe is quite used to dealing with toothless legislators(and, indeed, found that the Australian ones were no more toothy than their counterparts elsewhere); but there are a number of venom-injecting structures found in nature that are not classified as 'teeth'. Lobbyist boot-camp doesn't train you on how to respond when a parliamentary committee starts making clicking noises and waving their palps at you.

I strongly suspect that the US cc helps a great deal.

It isn't this way across the board(obviously, for 'free'/ad-supported services your credit card won't save you at all, and some retailers enforce geographic shipping restrictions); but it is often possible to purchase as an American, so long as you have a US issued cc, even if your IP at that moment suggests that you are abroad. Unless it absolutely can't be avoided(because of some regional licensing deal or something), why would a merchant who sells to Americans want to piss off American business travellers or Americans with the means to travel for pleasure? Both are likely to be better-than-average customers.

It is rather ironic that the places that more or less invented political science as a discipline in the west(Greece) and reasonably competent large-scale administration(Rome) are now so feckless about it; but they are.

If it were a 'socialism' thing, you'd really expect much of northwestern europe to be living in corrupt, dystopian hellholes and bribing one another with bags of dried herring passed under the table. Apparently, that hasn't panned out...

The trouble is that the properties that make a DRM system actually useful(ie. some degree of robustness, enough information about their environment to 'rights manage' in some granular way, and so on) require fairly extraordinary powers over the client system.

The 'Encrypted Media Extension' itself doesn't; because it defines almost nothing(one 'baseline' encryption mechanism that is little more than a toy obfuscation system, along with standardization of some interfaces for asking the non-joke DRM module questions); but it is designed to plug into DRM systems that do, which is the only reason that it has any support at all.

Consider, for example, the BBC's little request list:

Unless it is 'sufficiently secure that there would be the possibility of legal action in the event of bypassing it.', no go.

Unless it 'securely identifies a type of device', no go(browser UA is explicitly noted as not being good enough)

Unless it allows 'identification of the context in which the content appears', no go.

And 'The ability to pass further restrictions to the graphics rendering path if available'.

A set of requirements like that is both a fairly stock summary of what a DRM system should be capable of to be worthy of the name and a set of demands that certainly aren't going to be met in any non-tivoized OSS implementation, and wouldn't even be particularly easy to meet on something that isn't a closed box.

Essentially, once the pointless little baseline case is immediately ignored by anybody who would ever actually use the system(since, if you don't want DRM, you won't want the hassle, and if you do, the baseline is far to pitiful to be worth anything), EME is a 'standard' for 'how to use javascript to talk to an entire black-box video rendering mechanism, upon which there will be enough demands that it will almost certainly be platform specific'. Pretty much exactly the same situation as having the video player stuck in a blob of Silverlight or Flash, except that (because this is HTML5, man) the wicked 'browser plugin' has been renamed a 'content decryption module'(which, as the spec notes, 'CDM implementations may return decrypted frames or render them directly, and 'CDM may use or defer to platform capabilities'). In all but name, it's the definition of a few javascript APIs for interacting with a black-box video path more or less identical(if not worse, given the more robust support for invoking the hardware-protected 'platform capabilities' now present on a lot of consumer gear, which something like Flash was always too dubiously competent to do in any serious way) to the plugin-based video player arrangements of the past.

One does have to wonder if the folks at Games Workshop just hang out with their legal department for a bit whenever they need to release some new flavor material for the Ordo Hereticus...

Are you sure that silver bullets don't work against management? They work on most meat-based targets, as well as werewolves...

Even if you can't justify a full rocking-it-old-school-with-our-own-private-leased-lines-from-everywhere-to-everywhere, you'd still hope that(given the truly deplorable state of the various devices in important places), you could spring for a logically isolated network running on top of your cheap internet connection.

VPNs and such add additional complexity, and aren't invulnerable by any means; but there is a middle ground between 'physically private network' and 'on the internet', which at least allows you to reduce the number of externally visible devices(and make it so that the externally visible devices are dedicated network security gear, ideally built by people who know about network security, rather than dedicated industrial control devices built by people who know about industrial controls and...less... about security).

'G-shock', eh? Concerned about the effects of explosive overpressure on your timepieces are we? Now, how about you come with me and we'll have a little talk about why that might be...

What I like is that they are fighting over something that is purely a creation of ICANN: there is nothing magic about DNS that makes domain names globally authoritative(and, unlike with fiat currency, it isn't even legally troublesome to make your own, if you can get anybody to accept them), ICANN just runs the nameservers that people give a damn about.

If they wanted to take this out to the marketplace and settle it like men, they could just each provide an IP and let their respective supporters modify their hosts files or local DNS records according to their preferences, as consumers, about which ronpaul.com offered a superior ronpaul.com product and/or service.

It's like watching two gold-bugs fighting over a $100 'federal reserve note'...

"Back in 2007 we put our lives on hold for you, Ron, and we invested close to 10,000 hours of tears, sweat and hard work into this site at great personal sacrifice."(emphasis mine).

They are actually quite honest: they invested in him(after all, altruism would have been unethical), and now they want their ROI. This isn't a 'friendship' thing, this is a 'VCs fighting with their start-up's CEO over stock options' thing.

Being a libertarian is like being a Highlander. There Can Be Only One.

In the case of a trademark dispute, the disputants are brought to the 'marketplace of ideas' where they compete until only one is left alive, at which point he absorbs the market share of the others.

It's pretty fucking epic, actually.

Everyone(except the courageous souls at VHEMT) wants to defy birth trends:

Across more or less the whole of the first world, birth rates are at or below replacement levels. Even in some of the less fucked 'developing' nations it turns out that 'not breeding like animals until you die' is a fairly popular lifestyle choice among people who have sufficient autonomy and access to medical resources to be able to make it. Shocking, I know.

However, the world isn't exactly overflowing with economic plans for downsizing gracefully. Whether it's an ad-hoc social arrangement(children caring for elderly parents because it's their Filial Duty) or a state administered program(Medicare), most plans for keeping old people from being ground up for soylent green involve having young workers around, ideally in larger numbers than the old people.

Since domestic birth rates make that...problematic... this leads to a certain amount of pressure to keep the working population up by other means.

If we want to go with your (arguably somewhat crass and reductionistic) characterization, it goes like this:

1. Democrats favor immigration because immigrants skew more democratic than wrinkly reactionary old people do.

2. Retiring boomers don't have a whole lot of choice; because their parents fucked like bunnies; but they didn't, so if they want to keep the death panels away, they either need to really squeeze their children, or find a substitute for the ones that they didn't have. They don't have to like it(and many don't); but them's the breaks.