"A flat rectangle with a touch screen is not a patentable design."

I shudder to think what, say, the musical instrument market would look like today if the designs of cellos, violins, classical guitars, grand pianos, and countless other instruments with roughly equivalent shapes were similarly protected.

If they refuse to restore your content after you respond, "No this doesn't infringe," then they are committing a federal criminal act under the DMCA.

I don't think so. All the DMCA does is hold ISPs harmless for the removal of content under the DMCA, provided they restore that content between 10 to 14 days after receiving a counter-notice. It is not a criminal act under the DMCA to refuse to restore such content, nor would they necessarily be held liable for the removal should the case end up in civil court.

Here's the text of the DMCA:

(g) Replacement of Removed or Disabled Material and Limitation on Other Liability.—

(1) No liability for taking down generally.— Subject to paragraph (2), a service provider shall not be liable to any person for any claim based on the service provider’s good faith disabling of access to, or removal of, material or activity claimed to be infringing or based on facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent, regardless of whether the material or activity is ultimately determined to be infringing.

(2) Exception.— Paragraph (1) shall not apply with respect to material residing at the direction of a subscriber of the service provider on a system or network controlled or operated by or for the service provider that is removed, or to which access is disabled by the service provider, pursuant to a notice provided under subsection (c)(1)(C), unless the service provider—

(A) takes reasonable steps promptly to notify the subscriber that it has removed or disabled access to the material;

(B) upon receipt of a counter notification described in paragraph (3), promptly provides the person who provided the notification under subsection (c)(1)(C) with a copy of the counter notification, and informs that person that it will replace the removed material or cease disabling access to it in 10 business days; and

(C) replaces the removed material and ceases disabling access to it not less than 10, nor more than 14, business days following receipt of the counter notice, unless its designated agent first receives notice from the person who submitted the notification under subsection (c)(1)(C) that such person has filed an action seeking a court order to restrain the subscriber from engaging in infringing activity relating to the material on the service provider’s system or network.

The only decent part of the DMCA is that it advocates the idea that the website itself shouldn't be responsible.

It would be if it didn't amount to an imposition of liability in disguise. Rather like the Mafia protecting you from harm so long as you do as they say.

Correction: "You reply with 'no it doesn't' and your uploaded content is restored [after 10 to 14 days, and only if the service provider feels like it.]."

a small but not to small fees keeps out abuse and let's small Rights holders have there say.

Is $25 not considered a small fee, especially when taking into account the losses being claimed as owing to infringement?

Conversely, if the fee is too high for "small rights holders" then how much money are they really losing from infringement rather than plain old lack of success?

The very next day after the article was published, I noticed something interesting when I was using BitTorrent--aside from request overhead, I was uploading zero data. I'm currently watching a 3.1GB torrent--1.79 GB downloaded and 0.0 uploaded. And no, it isn't my client settings. I have checked them several times, nor did I change them any from when I was uploading normally. Seeding a completed torrent does nothing--it just sits there with no activity.

Hasn't Comcast been doing something similar for several years prior to that article being published?

I'm not at all unsympathetic, but that's what you get when you develop for a "curated" platform.

That seems low for when someone steals music. Shouldn't that be more like â100,000,000 by the MAFIAA calculating ways?

No. Such high damages are only appropriate in cases involving non-commercial infringement.

The six strikes system is officially helmed by an industry coalition called the Center for Copyright Information (CCI)...

CCI being the product of an agreement between the media cartels and major ISPs, under pressure from the Obama Administration (otherwise, why would ISPs agree to a plan that could cost them a bunch of customers). Unlike regulatory bodies established through real legislation, CCI is answerable to neither the courts nor the public. Even if the rules were "consumer friendly" today, who's to say they'll be fair tomorrow? Rather frightening when you think about it.

Can games made for OUYA be distributed outside the OUYA store for users to play on non-rooted consoles, or is it more like iOS and XBox Live Arcade which -- unmodified, out of the box -- will only run games that are sold through the platform's official store? According to the FAQ on their Kickstarter page, it looks like it's going to be the latter:

As with every platform, though, we have to balance openness with a quality user experience. So we'll have a standard user interface. We'll curate your games in our storefront so they're easy for everyone to get to. And we’ll require that all games we put in our store include a free experience. If you don’t like our choices, root the device and make it your own.

Given the widespread adoption of 3D computing hardware at home, how does it benefit consumers to take all that power and move it onto the cloud? It seems like such a waste of bandwidth, not to mention an unnecessary concentration of computing power onto a few cloud-gaming sites.

With ... Microsoft's move from Silverlight to Metro ... We are on the verge of a purely HTML/JavaScript client world.

Windows Metro is HTML5 based but depends on a bunch of Windows-specific code, so calling it pure HTML/JavaScript is quite misleading.

It's not really a thin client if most of the heavy processing takes place client-side. All it is is a different way of representing and delivering the same code.

Calling it a tax break is not very honest when said tax break involves the purchase of a particular product. It's a mandate with a penalty for non-compliance. To pretend it's anything else than that is no better than a lie.

Yes, especially when the government (AKA "we the people") wants you to stop freeloading on the health insurance system we're paying for.

It's not freeloading if you pay all your medical bills yourself.

Obamacare is a gift to private insurance companies. If we're going to have socialized health care, let's have real socialized health care instead of making insurance companies richer by forcing citizens to do business with them.

religious organizations who oppose are exempt

Why is opposition on religious grounds treated differently than opposition on moral grounds?