I'm sorry, I don't understand how you think taking money from the middle class and giving it to the poor fixes anything. Corporations and the upper-class have more than enough to be able to bring the poor out of the danger zone and still remain wealthy. The middle class, by and large, did not get there by doing anything other than working their asses off and getting paid salaries proportionate to their work. Whereas the upper class more often than not are getting paid money that is vastly beyond what the rest of society considers appropriate for the work they do. CEO of a company that fired 10,000 people last year and lost $5 billion? Earn a severance package of $100 million. Gamble with other people's money on the market and send $500 billion up in smoke? Get a $2 million bonus.

So only non-idiots and non-Microsoft shills believe that flamewars work? Man, I don't know which side of this I want to be on...

Welcome to America, where corporations are protected like deities, and the average citizen is expected to forfeit any and all rights.

Hehe. You said "logic".

This is valid when we're talking about a manufactured good with a material production cost. The manufacturing cost of a single copy of a console game, sold in a store, shrinkwrap and all, is pretty small. I don't know the exact numbers, but it can't be much more than a couple of bucks, especially with the cheap 2-3 page black and white manuals that have shown up in the game boxes lately. The manufacturing cost of a digitally distributed game is zero. In both cases, there is a fraction of overhead, in terms of distribution, marketing, etc. While a whole lot of people will buy games at $60, there are a significant number of people who will not pay that much for games. Just as there are a significant number of people who won't pay $30 or $40 for a new hardback book.

When you price things at "impulse buy" level, you sell a lot more. When Steam has one of their huge sales, people start buying up tons of games that they otherwise would not have bothered with. I spent well over $100 on games during their sale this past summer - money I would not have spent on games if not for the sale. A few hours of entertainment that may or may not be good is really only worth about $15-$20 for me, and that's pushing it. Gambling $60 on the chance that a game will have enough content at a high enough quality to keep me interested for a couple of weeks or a month is just not going to happen.

Books, music, movies, and games are all competing for our entertainment dollars. Whoever provides the biggest value for the money generally gets the sales. For me, that value is reduced the more the item is restricted. I used to buy a lot of books, but paperbacks are increasingly inconvenient for me, and an e-reader would be the perfect solution... except that those e books are usually saddled with DRM or are more expensive. Computer books, such as those for various industry certifications, have always been expensive, but when the electronic version is even more so, it's just insulting.

If I could find a large selection of $5-$10 novels that interested me in electronic format with no DRM, I'd be buying them up. But right now the value proposition just isn't there to justify the initial purchase of a Nook or Kindle.

In a thousand years, if archaeologists cannot gather sufficient data from other observations besides paper records, then it really wasn't that important anyway.

I disagree with your assessment of what constitutes basic knowledge. Perhaps you'll disagree with my assessment that since this is a US-based and US-centric site, it is to be expected that most of the readership and comments will be from the viewpoint of US residents?

Email sex isn't too bad. Just have to be careful not to get any Epaper cuts.

While it's true that those factors would reduce the spread and effectiveness of such an outbreak, the ease and speed of worldwide travel serve to negate that and then some.

This is precisely what the US government has been doing for the last decade, in case you hadn't noticed.

Any time an exceedingly obvious patent is filed by a company, it should be immediately placed in the public domain, and the company that filed it should be forced to pay royalties to the government. Not only would this reduce the amount of stupid patent filings and court battles, it would get our national debt paid off within a year or two.

And if you trust Consumer Reports' methodology, you have less than half a brain.

http://www.allpar.com/cr.html
http://blogs.cars.com/kickingtires/2011/03/consumer-reports-admits-reliability-data-was-scarce-for-chrysler.html
http://www.truedelta.com/pieces/shortcomings.php

There are plenty more articles out there explaining the problem.

Exactly why I have been perplexed that this patent war has erupted in the mobile space. Yes, Google was lacking in patents to retaliate with, but Apple and Microsoft knew that to directly attack Google could backfire fast, so they went after smaller players. B&N just decided to find out if those patent nukes MS was threatening to throw were actually going to detonate, or if they were duds. Looks like the emperor's got no clothes on.

Now, the real question - if the court decides these patents are bogus (which I can't seem them not doing), what happens to the other companies who licensed from Microsoft? Can they have those agreements invalidated?

When there are billions of dollars at stake, hard work and cheap labor are easy. For a few hundred thousand or a couple million dollars of traceable merchandise, no, it is not worth digging such a tunnel.

ICS is designed to work nicely on both phones and tablets. Google knew that 2.x was not really ideal for tablets, hence Honeycomb. But forking their own OS was not ideal, either, so ICS now combines the best of both and should provide a great experience on either format.

Sorry, union regulations prohibit the toaster from ejecting until the timer gives approval.