I can perfectly do Google checkout payments from here in Holland. It is not US only, but not yet supported everywhere.

But how much of those pirated copies are actually a lost sale? Most people that pirate software do not intend to buy the game if they are not able to get a pirated copy. The irony is that most pirated copies actually work better due to the removal of the obtrusive DRM. For a lot of legally bought games that required the CD/DVD in the drive I installed a no cd crack so i would not have to juggle the discs ll the time. You hear a lot of issues with DRM failing on some system configurations which makes the game unplayable for people that legally bought it. DRM hurts sales instead of improving them.

I sometimes play some of the oldies I have for years. This will not be possible with the current games. If the publisher no longer want to support it it will no longer be playable.

Me thinks it has something to do with them floating license thingies.

To use a quote from Iron Maiden: Only the good die young, all the evil seems to live forever.

So I think AOL will be here to stay.

Then they just call it ash cloud computing.

Does this mean that Apple invented software piracy?

Forbid them from selling their stuff in the EU. Somewhere between a quarter and a third of Oracles income comes from the EU. That is a significant amount of money they cannot afford to lose.

As the saying goes: keep your feet on the ground instead of your head in the clouds.

But how many things in the windows OS actually use a ribbon interface? Almost none.

They are talking about smartbooks, not netbooks.

ehh? Microsoft has an OS that is suited for such devices. Either windows embedded CE or Windows Embedded nav ready.
Or even the CE derivative Windows mobile.

See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsembedded/dd630116.aspx

ehm, I checked on my netbook running windows 7 RC (32 bit) and the debug command is still there.

There is only one english language, which originated in a country called England. The other one is just a strange dialect for people that don't know how to spell correcly.

Why do you have to replace s with z in so many words and why are all those u's missing?

That should only be the case for native applications.
For pure .NET applications (fully MSIL) is should not matter as long as the runtime is available..

The same counts for me. It is sometimes very hard to read what the captchas supposed to be.

On one site I actually did some image processing to make the captcha readable. It was more readable for me, but not yet readable enough for a computer. If I processed it more it might be.

If I can do that with my limited knowledge of image processing, someone experienced can do this very easy and automated.