You might be right. I suspect it must be a bit higher, but probably not a lot. Well, and the difference would be made up of people who paid for the game, and then 'pirated' it anyway.

But, regardless, you're hassling your legitimate customers, to no avail. All it takes is one single cracked copy to become available, and the piracy rate will be exactly the same.

Arg, yes. DRM schemes are...annoying, but understandable in the short run.

But how many times have I gone back to play some classic game from my youth, only to be confronted with: "Please enter your serial number to continue"? I've moved five times since I bought this game, what are the chances I can find the original CD case/box/slip of paper/whatever that the serial was printed on?

Even more frustrating: my wife asks me to reinstall XP, and I have to scramble to find a valid serial. For a product I must have paid for 6 times over, but never really used.

In Vancouver (BC), we have walk buttons all over. If you don't press them, you don't get a walk light. But the lights are the same length, anyway.

So lots of people forget to press the button, and when the light goes green...they hesitate, then run back and push the button, and wait through this green light for the next one.

"When selling to users who want their devices to just work, we believe integrated will trump fragmented every time."

Yeah, just look at how well it worked for your personal computers...

Does anybody else notice all sorts of parallels between Apple vs. Google + Linux today, and Apple vs. IBM + Microsoft in the 80s and 90s? Including the hubris?

This is unbelievable! Next you're going to tell me that "3.9G wireless" doesn't mean anything, or that 9 out of 10 doctors don't recommend Crest, or that most items in an "up to 90% off!" sale are not in fact 90% off!

Sounds pretty paranoid to me. If we can't trust company advertisements for unbiased information, what can we trust?

Hehe, my $5 overdue fee for a late movie return, from however many years ago I last rented a movie? You think they bother with a credit report? 'Cause, uh...nobody else has complained.

You failed to mention that Rogers Video is one of the largest chains of movie rental shops in Canada. That's what makes this an especially weird coincidence.

At one point, I couldn't get a cell phone from Rogers the telco, apparently because I owed some late fees to Rogers the movie rental shop, which I could only pay at the movie shop. So I went with another telco. Weird, anyway; I hadn't realized they were all so tightly connected.

You know where 'soccer' comes from?

Asocciation Football. Oxford slang made it into 'socc-er.

But 'football' is right there in the original name. Maybe we oughta come up with a new name for our game?

Cost of development still matters. That's why android works--phone companies want to compete with the iPhone, but they don't want to create a whole new OS. And (snicker) I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the Year of the Windows Tablet.

As for media...that's a point. But then, it'd be open, so companies could develop the appropriate apps, and you could use the media you already have. I'll point out that Ubuntu has a music store, now...

...Tin foil hat!

So, how long will it be before somebody uses the "Power Lines" defense in a murder case?

I dunno, that wouldn't work again. Most Chinese people are essentially in denial about Tiananmen--they deny it happened, deny it's severity, blame it on outsiders and troublemakers, and, especially, they accuse outsiders of exaggerating it. Remember that they're used to a biased media, they take it for granted. It's natural for them to assume that our worldview is doctored, just like theirs is. With that assumption, it's safe for them to assume that our version of Tiananmen is hyperbole, intended to undermine their government (which...I mean, honestly, it's not like they have no grounds for suspecting our media...)

This is possible because they only ever got an after-the-fact, doctored version of events. In those days, you could cover it up.

Now? How would they suppress the storm of blog posts, YouTube (or equivalent) videos, images, cell phone messages, etc, that would accompany such an event? They'd have to shut the entire country down--and even then...well, in 1989, there were (relatively speaking) a handful of cameras in Beijing. Now, counting cellphones, every person has at least one (well, anyway, there's one per-capita in Beijing, I'm sure). An equivalent suppression would require shutting down the Internet permanently. They couldn't do it.

As evidence: there was a major earthquake in China in the 70's (not sure which one, so I don't know which to reference), many deaths, etc... The Chinese government took days (weeks?) to admit that it had occurred at all. In 2008, there was footage and images of the Sichuan earthquake on the Internet as it was happening. They can't cover things up like they used to.

And if the Chinese people had watched Tiananmen unfolding in real-time...?

This is why, in my opinion, arguments for embargoes are stupid. They end up hurting the people and strengthening governments (see: North Korea, Cuba, Iraq). On the other hand, if you freely engage in business with 'bad' countries, even obeying their rules, you get cellphones, computers, and cameras in the hands of common people. They don't need your wishes and prayers, they need your tools.

Well, there's the whole starving-to-death thing. When you're struggling to survive, it's a little harder to be creative and inventive. The speed of progress and innovation in the US and Europe was closely correlated with the amount of surplus food they had (and have) lying around.

China has only recently (almost) got rid of that problem. Now they're playing catchup. They're making a ton of money creating 'knock-offs', and building their infrastructure in the process.

Expect China (and India) to be the most innovative countries on earth in, oh, I dunno, twenty to thirty years.

Thank you for this!

I don't know why we take flack from the Windows world, here. How do you burn a CD in Windows? Open "Start->All Programs", and start scanning the list of programs for something than (hopefully) has "CD [Burn|Write|Creator]" in the name, open it, and...well, you're on your own, they all behave completely differently.

By contrast, "right-click on disk image, "Burn image to disk...", insert disk, click OK", on every (Ubuntu) system, seems like child's play.