I couldn't agree more. In fact, I think it's extremely selfish and stupid that people aren't willing to give up the rights that the founders of this country fought and died to give us. It's extremely shortsighted for people to think their freedom is more important than the almighty, benevolent, caring, giving corporation. How dare they! Long live the corporation!

Sigh...

This is definitely true, so the "inconvenience factor" that most people will tolerate is a bit higher. Personally, I would want to be able to pull up the books on my PC as well as tablet/eReader, depending on what book it is (eg. technical manual vs. fiction).

"'To keep their overall revenue from taking a hit from lost sales to individuals, publishers need to reintroduce more inconvenience for the borrower or raise the price for the library purchaser."

Anyone who genuinely believes the above is going to reduce piracy/increase profits for the publisher is an idiot. The degree of inconvenience/expense a customer will endure in order to acquire a legal copy of a product is limited. In the digital age, you cannot shutdown piracy the way you could with purely physical products, and the book/music/movie/television industry needs to just stop trying. They are in competition with the pirates for market share, and not primarily in terms of cost. Of course there are some people who will always pirate a product because they are cheapskates, but there are far more people who would much rather have a legal means of obtaining a product that isn't laden with DRM, the inconvenience of going to a physically different location, or other restrictions.

The music industry was the first to get slapped with the wake-up call that DRM is anti-customer, and that digital distribution actually leads to bigger profits, despite low price points. The other entertainment industries would do well to take these lessons and run with them.

I would say this is just the start - the people who are usually in control of domain registration for web sites are the same sort who are going to vehemently oppose SOPA and it's ilk. The long term effects will likely be much more significant, as people change registrars when renewals come up, and fewer people register new domains with them.

GoDaddy's decision to not actually reverse their stance, and instead just put out a press release filled with lies has only compounded the problem.

CyanogenMod 9 will almost certainly make it to most of the Galaxy S/Tab devices that have CM7 support. The main problem is that there is not enough storage space to have ICS with Touchwiz--on a custom/AOSP ROM, that's a non-issue.

At no point did I say it wasn't a good strategy on Apple's part. All I said was that Apple didn't come up with some incredible innovation that Google is now copying.

Apple didn't create Siri - they bought the tech. Google has been doing this same basic thing, just with different syntax/polish since before Apple.

The only copying here is Apple copying Star Trek. Google chose this code name precisely because it was Star Trek and Sci Fi in general that inspired the bulk of modern technologies we use. If Apple decides to throw a fit and sues Google (or more likely, HTC/Samsung/Etc), Google will throw Star Trek as prior art.

I kind of hope that this is all some sort of ridiculous Trojan Horse plan. If not, whomever made the call to not have a reliable self-destruct sequence should be sacked.

It doesn't work very well in the idiotic playground of RIAA/MPAA execs. While they may presently inhabit the real, physical world, the term "real world" implies something a bit more broad, and I don't believe the "one price fits all" model has been demolished for all markets.

I might be wrong on this, but I'm pretty sure there are some huge differences between naval nuclear plants, and civilian plants. The naval plants likely generate considerably less power and are smaller. Plus there is no succeptability to natural disasters in the same way as a land-based plant.

The red tape surrounding nuclear plants in the US makes it all but impossible to produce a new plant if you expect it to ever be profitable. If the Navy wants to build a nuclear reactor for a ship, they bring in engineers to get it sorted out. If civilians/government wants to build a nuclear reactor, they bring in engineers, politicians, activists, etc etc, and never get anywhere.

Actually, you CAN plan for this. By, you know, not putting 75% of the entire world's manufacturing of hard drive motors into a single location.

[quote]The problem is lack of effective regulations and oversight. [/quote]

I'm not sure I can agree with that. The problem appears to be that right now, most nuclear plants are of a very old design, and that there is so much red tape in replacing them that it endangers lives.

To use a dreaded Slashdot car analogy: Most people wouldn't feel comfortable having a car using 1960's safety technology as their daily driver. Why should people be more comfortable with something as complex as nuclear power generation using 1960's safety technology and design?

Although it can be argued that the walls protecting Fukushima were not high enough (where does that arms race against nature stop?), that ignores the fundamental design flaws that allowed all the backup systems to fail. These are design flaws that could really only have been corrected by rebuilding the entire plant.

Not really - fewer transistors, sure, but the inefficiency where it matters (power usage, performance) is still worse than the previous generation, and well behind where Intel is. If anything, the fact that it is 1.2bn transistors instead of 2bn gives them even less of an excuse for the amount of power these things are sucking down while doing less work than the last generation.

That's kinda what they did when they went AT&T exclusive at the start.. there's a whole big argument to be made regarding what would've happened with iOS vs. Android had Verizon not been left out of the iPhone sales fest early on and decided to retaliate with pushing and marketing the Droid the way they did.

How do you define "TV"?

If you mean a display device with a tuner built into it, then there are two in my house (old CRTs), neither connected to cable.

If you mean a display device that can be used to display content regardless of a tuner (such as via the Internet), then I have 12, not counting cell phones/iPods. (7 LCDs, three laptops, two CRTs)

If you mean a display device with a coaxial cable or antenna connection that is actively used for watching sat/cable/ota broadcasts, it would be a bit fuzzy in my case. I've got a single HTPC that is connected to an LCD monitor and also streams cable broadcasts to two XBOX 360s. So there are three display devices that can be used to view broadcast television content (theoretically four, as I have 4 tuners in the HTPC, but have not assigned the 4th to any other device).

"TV" as it existed as a physical device ten years ago, does not really match up to what is sold today. Most "TV"s sold today are really just monitors, as they often lack tuners.

I'm sure the numbers can be manipulated to show whatever the interpreter desires, just like "record" sales.