I thought that because of patent royalties and greater complexity of processing, a cellular radio capable of data cost substantially more than a cellular radio capable of only voice and text. What am I missing?

So what unlocked Android phone do you recommend as an alternative to a $299 iPod touch?

Either kids, or a grown-up and his girlfriend, or a grown-up who has grown-up friends over for some other reason and they get an itch to play a video game together. PC multiplayer has historically required a separate PC and a separate copy of the game for each player because PC monitors have historically been physically much smaller than TV monitors. This size disparity began to change in 2007 once TVs gained PC video inputs and PC monitors shot up toward 23" to use cheap mass-produced TV panels, but there's still been enough inertia and enough ease-of-use advantage for consoles to keep their hold on the living room.

Then the owner of copyright in the sound recording can distribute lossy files to the public and distribute lossless files only to people who have bought a license to make remixes.

Not if an application depends on a particular peripheral with an XP-only device driver. ReactOS, an environment for running XP device drivers, isn't quite as mature as Wine.

Let me Bing that for you: Skype headset

https://pineight.com/ loads in Firefox on Windows XP and Chrome on Windows XP, but it gives a certificate error in IE on Windows XP because IE on Windows XP doesn't support Server Name Indication, a feature required to use SSL with name-based virtual hosting.

Of course you can make calls. Just open the Skype app from the Start Screen and put on your headset.

Let me guess: That was prior to the proliferation of controller-friendly PC titles that followed the release of Steam Big Picture. These games use bigger fonts because they know the player will be sitting farther away, and they include presets for the Xbox 360 controller and maybe even some popular HID joysticks.

You answered your own question: the PC isn't already in the living room. If you keep a console next to the TV, there's no need to shut down the PC, unplug cables, carry it from the computer desk to the TV, and plug in cables, and then do the reverse once gaming is done. Or were you referring to buying one PC for the living room and one PC for the computer desk?

I bet what spire3661 meant was "indie" as in companies formed by industry alumni, not real indie as in companies formed by people who happen not to have had a chance to move the whole family to an industry hotbed. There's a difference, as you pointed out a year ago.

But I'm still glad that Sony Computer Entertainment has taken a step away from the console makers' fallacy and toward the model of allowing review sites and free demos to speak for a game's quality, even if it may have taken competition from Apple's App Store, Google Play, and the forthcoming Ouya console to get SCE to do it. Microsoft, which appeared the most progressive of the seventh generation with XNA, appears to have fallen behind in the eighth by continuing to require indie developers to partner with an established disc game publisher to get a "slot".

I don't own an iOS device quite yet. Have controls in platformers for iOS become as responsive as controls in platformers for even the almost 30-year-old NES? Is it even possible to make a responsive virtual gamepad on a flat sheet of glass? Or are platformers themselves passé?

I thought sending SIGINT to modern GUI programs would just cause them to copy the selected text to the Clipboard.