If copyright acted on a sweat of the brow basis, then you could claim that your near-perfect reproduction of an MP3 is original only if the original copyright has not expired. Sound recording technology hasn't been around long enough for copyright in notable recordings to have expired.

Depends on the country. In the United States, the Southern District Court of New York ruled in Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corporation that faithful photos of a public domain painting aren't original to get their own copyright.

In what way does a camera on a tripod pointed at an exhibit taking a long exposure with the museum's existing light damage the exhibit?

The headline of a Slashdot story and the subject of a Slashdot comment are limited in length. Comment subjects are limited to 50 characters. Headlines can be longer, but they still have a limit that I happen not to have tested. Some people have a habit of abbreviating Microsoft as M$ in subjects to save seven characters.

Yes. Windows Update updates Windows. But it does not update third-party software that runs on Windows.

Even if so, Blaskowicz would probably prefer to block Internet-capable apps from using coordinates derived from cell tower trilateration in the same way that he'd block them from using GPS coordinates.

That's exactly the case for the printer driver problem that kicked off the GNU project. Mr. Stallman and friends wanted to interoperate with a printer, and its manufacturer was being obstructive.

Without copyright, anybody with more time than money could disassemble, document, and distribute any proprietary fork of a program and turn binaries back into (assembly language) source code useful for cloning the added functionality in the Free branch.

Except play console games that never get released for PC. Some genres, such as fighting games, tend to be full of games available only for consoles.

This is true of some PC games, I admit, but not all of them. Look for controller-friendly designations in Steam and other stores. And before you buy, look at screenshots or YouTube playthroughs. If the text is still readable when a screenshot is resized to 432x240, or when a video is played at 240p, they'll still be readable at a TV seating distance.

Xbox brings up a good point: Dead Rising is among the console games with the same problem of having tiny type.

Like PlayStation Greatest Hits, Steam sales allow a game's publisher to extract at least some revenue from people who wouldn't pay $50 at launch for a game but might pay $20 later. People who must play during the first year subsidize those who can wait.

A landline works over a wired connection to the telephone network. But by and large, end users don't care about whether a house phone uses a wired or wireless connection; they care about how much they have to pay and how long they have to wait to make or receive a call. And historically, in Slashdot's home country, landlines have been one to a house and have had unlimited minutes.

Are you talking about Mr. Nakamoto or Mr. Jobs?

But we know who this Satoshi is.

An Internet-connected navigation application has the advantage of requiring less space in expensive flash memory. Without an Internet connection, you might need to store enough "offline map data" to cover a continent. Or what am I missing?

Yes. A touch screen is good for absolute positional input, and a directional pad is good for directional input with tactile feedback as to which direction the player is pressing. What other difference were you thinking of?