iTunes may have put a dent in MP3 distribution but by no means did MP3 sharing dry up. PirateBay's MP3 sharing was still very popular, Oink was massive while it was around and today you have Waffles and WhatCD. So don't beat the "we'll stop pirating if you sell it to us" drum, because just like the MPAA's pirate sales figures, your speech is also a lie.

Your shtick may sound good on paper, but nobody really wants a fancy metal box for their movie. There's a reason 99% of movies are still sold in their standard plastic casing, and it's not because movie companies are cheap or uncreative, it's because that's what the customer prefers. We could widdle down your point and just sell special features on the disc, but that can be copied just as easily as the movie but often excluded in pirate copies for simplicity and smaller overall size.

New biannual? Last I checked Win95, Win98, WinME & Win2000 and WinXP all had approx 2yrs in between their releases, it was XP -> Vista that ever broke the MS 2-3yr rule of thumb. Hell I'm glad we're back to it and I hope MS stays on this track.

Welcome to Xbox 360 circa 2006, at least MS realized that DRM'd movies in a box was more of a rental than a purchase, charged you adequately and let you have the movie for 7 days. I wasn't very excited about a $5 digital 7 day rental, but it looks like a blessing compared to Sony's $20 fee, heck this makes BlockBuster look like a good investment. Let's also not forget consoles have a shelf life of 5yrs, and the PS3 came out in 2006 so how much longer will the majority of people will have their PS3 before they sell it. How much you want to bet you can't re-download your movie to your PS4 without purchasing a $4.95 transport fee? If they even allow that, remember Sony's promise that you could "upgrade" your PSP discs to digital downloads for $5, and at the last minute they pulled that and told you to pay full price. Wake up people, Sony _LOVES_ the idea that you have to re-purchase things every 5yrs, or sooner. They love the idea that you buy a $1 song on iTunes for your MP3 player, you pay $3 for it as a ring tone on your cell, you pay $2 per month to use a song as a ring back for people who call you, you pay another $5 for the music video. Also don't forget Sony is the same company who didn't want you to rip your CD, they wanted you to buy the CD now, and in a couple years buy the songs again for your iPod. Sony is drunk off of the "CD revolution" that made everybody replace their cassettes and vinyl, it blew their profits sky high, good for them. But now Sony is trying to artificially recreate this scenario in the digital world out of pure greed.

Well if you're applying for an IT job with an AOL address, no matter which side of the fence you are on, I can't help but think this is the equivalent of a car engineer applying at a German company and he drives a KIA.

I see john37@aol.com wanted to interject his $.02

Those new LED TVs from Best Buy are the bawm! Crystal clear 1080p can render 2012 in full accuracy.

Protests? Damn hippy, back in my day we use to fight for what's right with guns, if we wanted to be nice, we just threw all your tea in the ocean.

I know it's easy to pick on Second Life but my wife use to play it obsessively so let me give you some real insight: The game gives you a lot of power to import models, animations and textures, think of it as an in game "make your own Sims game", where you can set rules, scripts that execute on other people's models, etc. The game is flooded with woman, usually stay at home wives, these aren't necessarily your traditional "fat goth chicks". I'm a hardcore gamer myself, mostly just Xbox 360 lately, so I wouldn't touch Second Life with a 10 foot stick, it's not that it's a game as much as it is a social adventure that allows you to build more of the game. Unless you want to just be a consumer and shop for things people have made (clothes, animations, items) and just play what others made. My wife spent 99% of her time creating and selling items, there's no money to be made in Second Life anymore, unless you outright scam people somehow.

Doesn't a low bitrate encoded song in the MP3 format sound like an auto-tune song that all the kids prefer now anyways?

Actually you can cash those CCs, I recently got a $100 one from Verizon for signing up for DirectTV (Fios TV wasn't available in my area, so they push it to DTV) and I was able to go to Bank of America and withdraw (charge) $100 to my card and get the full amount, no fees or anything.

Some companies do something even worse than pay by commission: they punish workers with the lowest sales figures. Now I'm not talking about meeting a certain minimum, it fact it doesn't matter how great your sales were but if you were the worker with the lowest figure that month (per hour) then you get chastised and or written up. I don't know if Best Buy does this greedy practice but you can certainly mark Victoria Secret for being guilty of this. So now, as a customer, you get all the same pressure to buy, but the worker doesn't get a single penny of the sale, and that really pisses me off as they're enslaved to pressure/annoy you with no benefit at all.

Don't worry, the day Norton ports their AV package to the iPhone is the day AT&T will ram it down the user's throat as a 3 month nagware trial. I mean you can afford to run Norton on your 3GS, no sense letting all the ram and speed go to waste!

Warning: I'm standing on a soap box as I type this...

Simple eh? Ask a room of people where mail merge is in Word and I bet 99% people that have used mail merge before have no idea. Is it in the Edit menu, the Formatting menu, or the Data menu (was there even a data menu?) This applies to most features.

Ask any UI expert and they'll tell you the Office Ribbon is the most important UI thing to happens since the GUI. If for any other reason is because the ribbon focused on task based UI instead of technical organization that didn't apply to your average user.

PS: Just because you're use to something and know it well isn't a good reason to invalidate a new mindset.

is that you don't get flashing / talking / music / girls in bikinis / speeding gophers / outright lies in your newspaper or magazine.

Imho online advertising did this to themselves, they were as annoying and eye catching as possible (and I mean that in the worst possible way) that people learned to HATE online advertising. I don't mind Google text ads and such, or even banners, but the flashing, animation and sound is the one spoiled apple that ruins the whole barrel.