The real question is whether Apple will ban other internet streaming apps from the app store once they release their service.

This is what happens when you let a bunch of lawyers take over the country's judicial system. Every business is scared shitless of lawsuits. Every little complaint results in a massive overreaction.

It won't burn you, but it might make you less... potent.

There are two reasons why x86 Windows would eat battery.

First, Intel's processors are not power savers. They eat power. They consume power to perform computations, they consume power to cool themselves down to keep from overheating when computing. Just having to translate x86 CISC to RISC on the chip before doing the computation is an additional step that uses power. Even if Atom can turn itself off when idle, it cannot avoid the x86 overhead.

Second, Windows is a resource hog. It was never a very well-coded OS. It was open, and popular (due to its DOS legacy as a result of IBM), but not written with efficiency in mind. And not only that, but with Windows running, the machine will never sit idle. It'll always be doing something in the background.

But Windows 8 isn't going to replace desktops with tablets at work anytime soon. Hell, work machines aren't going to replace Windows XP and 7 with Windows 8 at all, whether on the desktop or some other form factor. It's not that Microsoft declared war on their hardware partners. Instead, I think they declared war on the user. Their hardware partners are just collateral damage.

Well, if it's a laptop that runs Windows 8, then the answer is because it runs Windows 8. You can't really get the full experience of Windows 8 out of a laptop. Then again, you probably wouldn't want any experience with Windows 8 at all.

Well, maybe he's now working as a janitor at the McDonalds?

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: not having patents would confer significant, often insurmountable advantages to large corporations.

I do advocate patent reform, but outright doing away with it will be bad for all but a handful of people at the very top of the corporate ladder.

Sounds like winapp2 is an independently-developed "application" that Piriform does not own. If you wrote your own libraries to parse the file, then they'll have trouble successfully suing you. But that doesn't mean they won't sue. If you're using their libraries, then best ditch it and rewrite that piece yourself.

In either case, you need a lawyer. Let the lawyer respond.

Where have you been the past 100 years? It's been this way since the industrial revolution. It's just worse now because the resources needed to make progress are greater than even, yet at the same time, the rate of (expected) progress is more rapid than ever.

Fair has no meaning in business. All's fair in love and war. Business is war. People study war texts like the Art of War to gain an edge while doing business. There's even a book or two on the very matter. Problems arise when a business wages war against the people and its government, instead of other businesses. Problems also arise when people and government become collateral damage to the war businesses wage against each other. But those are not relevant from a business standpoint, only from a social standpoint. And unfortunately, businesses have done both over the past 100 years, and with the government weakened and corrupt, the people are beginning to suffer for it.

But things are not all bleak. We are still able to recognize the corporate excess and greed, and discuss this topic openly and freely (for the most part). Things aren't better than they were 50 years ago, but at the very least, we can see this and respond to it as best as we can. That, when taken away, will be the beginning of the end, when you know corporations have fully taken over. Until then, I think there is still hope.

In the case of Android, I think Google's been more than fair. They haven't restricted third party stores from their devices (like Apple). Their policies are not arbitrary (though total enforcement is always difficult), nor are they anti-competitive (again like Apple).

If you want to open your own app store for Android, go right ahead. You can even have it exclusively host "piracy-enabling" apps. You can create a TOS for your own app store that you feel is just. That, I feel, is more than fair.

Now, should there be an appeals process? Certainly. There are always misleading or false reports. But I don't think Google, full of brilliant (and some not-so-brilliant) employees, would not have already thought of this. So either the ban is in appeal, or the app really did violate a TOS.

The question is, if this was a frivolous complaint, what measures will Google put in place to discourage people from trying to ban the competition. It isn't a matter of whether they have to do so, but if they don't make the playing field appear even, then people eventually will move to other app stores with a more lenient TOS.

That depends on your age, sex, race, and sexual orientation.

The only modern living relative of the infamous Hitler changed his surname. So you won't find any more of those, unless somebody changed it to "Hitler" from something else. And if they did that, then they were cultivating a particular reaction.

Did you know corporations can deduct an employee's compensation package from their income taxes? On the other hand, individuals get a very small deduction for each child that wouldn't even cover basic expenses.

Err, there's the FDIC for a reason. Unless you had over $200K ($250K now) in an account, you didn't lose a dime when the bank failed.

It took a bit of time to process all the claims at that time, so you didn't have access to your money immediately, but you eventually got it.

The thing about ripples is that it dissipates and eventually disappears. There were a ton of smaller, regional banks managed well ready to step up and take over. But because the government bailed out the big banks, these smaller banks with better management couldn't rise to the top. Likewise with your example, there are a ton of smaller advertising platforms out there ready to pounce should Doubleclick fail.

Hardly. I imagine free public wifi would be heavily throttled. QoS settings, in particular, would make it impossible to do things that require high bandwidth. It'd be most likely used to receive e-mail, maybe read wikipedia, and perhaps play flash games.

As for government regulating public wifi, it certainly can be used to censor certain speech, but not without breaking the first amendment. Private entities don't have the bill of rights to consider, while the government does. So any service provided by the government would protect free speech more.

And besides, nobody's taking away the landlines. I imagine if the FCC does censor say, indecent sites, the corporations won't. And if the corporations do irrespective of whether it's because of the government, then we have bigger problems than just government censorship of the internet.

Education is also a luxury item.

Internet access is an important part of today's society, just like education. It is almost a necessity for many common, everyday tasks, just like education.

The FCC already regulates television and provides every home with access to a set of television stations. I don't see why they couldn't regulate public wireless internet access.