The Swiss also have an obligation to do military training, so it's not quite the same situation, as the population could easily be defined as a militia. But these kind of events might become less common in the US if their citizens had the same responsibilities to go with gun ownership.

Is it really though? Considering how the pharmaceutical industry is already quite good at misusing patents. I'd rather see them lose patent protection completely and come up with a more effective way of funding drugs research.

We could undo that. "How about a nice game of chess?"

You've got it upside down, the recipient of the proprietary fork has been deprived of the ability to change the code and/or redistribute. It's not the original coder that's been deprived of anything, it's the recipients of the closed version that have lost out.

The pretty much is the model in the UK, new games come out at £40-50, most apart from the biggest titles move quickly down to £30. Quite a few people wait until middle tier games drop to £20 a few months after release before buying them. Over time they drop down towards £10 and even as low as £6.

Even that varies some games release at £30 and others are down to £10 / £20 a few weeks after release. It really depends on how well the game has done.

So I guess the real question: why doesn't that happen in the US?

Me either, I've bought a few humble bundle titles but for the most part I've given up on PC gaming completely as I'm not interested in running multiple operating systems on my PC. I did my bit for PC gaming back in the DOS era, have bought a few boxed Linux titles that interest me since then (from Tux Games and LGP apart from a few exceptions), but these days get my gaming fix elsewhere.

I still buy a lot of games, just very few of them are on PC any more.

Where do the Humble Bundle stats fit in with your assertions?

If it's worth buying I'll normally get it on blu ray now once it's cheap enough, £5-£10, and watch it on the PS3. If it's something I'm likely to watch once I'll just watch a low quality streamed version via iPlayer or Lovefilm. If it's a series I'll still buy the DVD boxset. So streaming has basically replaced my cheap DVD purchases, which quite frankly were just taking up space, and blu ray fills the films I want to keep niche.

1) You don't need to, but anyway, it's been a long time since I've seen boxed PC software in the wild. Online there's plenty of software you can buy for it.
2) Humble Bundle. But that said, I game on PC a lot less than I used to, the Windows only policy of a lot of PC game developers drove me to console gaming.
3) Which decade did you last use Linux? I don't think I've even got emacs installed.
4) Given the tone of your post, I'm not surprised, but in my experience that's inaccurate.
5) Gibberish.

I gave it a go recently when it was mentioned as a way to escape the search bubble and eliminating the bias of a search engine knowing too much about you. Was then surprised how on a search for ubuntu it quite prominently gave a link about how ubuntu was an imperfect alternative to windows. It took me back to "get the facts".

But I thought nuclear was the clean green solution to global warming? Replacing dirty old oil.

I'm not sure I'd trust opinion articles from LinuxInsider to be anything other than anti-linux trolling. Weren't they constantly talking up SCO during that whole debacle years ago?

There's a setting in the power management section to get the controllers to switch themselves off after a period of inactivity.

That worked for them with netbooks.

Other operating systems have been doing that for much longer than Windows, when Windows Vista/7 started doing that it was just catching up with the status quo.