Really? I thought Macs worked by charging using that little spinning pinwheel thing.

The last thing we want is a system where you pay to extend copyright. All that will result in is Disney and co having eternal copyright and the little guy not being able to afford to extend beyond the initial period. Hardly fair.

The last thing we want is a system where you pay to extend copyrights. That means Disney gets eternal copyright yet the little guy gets 20 years as he can't afford to extend it beyond that. Hardly fair.

Not likely that simple. If anything children from rich parents are more spoilt thus don't see the need for money as they get everything they want anyway. As a child I had to complete a fairly hefty list of chores for a lousy $2 a week, so I jumped at the opportunity to score a bonus $5 by washing the car or similar, because it made it 2 1/2 weeks closer to me being able to buy Super Mario World. I can definitely say that us kids that saved up for months for new things took a lot better care of them than those who got them just because they wanted them.

Similarly at high school I knew two guys who got $100 per A and were decidedly C-grade students as they got $40 a week pocket money and bought lunches every day. Yet those who had no income were certainly motivated at the idea of $20 for an A, and they got jobs first, etc...

But for digital versions I can see it making a difference. For instance will Facebook Scrabble use the old or new rules?

Doesn't sound very sustainable to me. Lets say 10% of their readership signs up and their online sector profits triple. Now the other 90% will go to other sources, and talk about those other sources while only 10% would be able to recommend Murdoch's publications. Now if someone is looking for a new news source, they can't check Murdoch's publications for quality without paying, so even if recommended them they might just go with a free site they think is good enough.

So sure he increases immediate revenue, but he also positions his publications such that the readership will only get smaller an smaller until it vanishes. I'm not accounting for the effect of hard-copies here, but I'm not sure that matters much so a young person who is looking for his first newspaper.

As someone living outside the US I see it similarly, the US exports mostly luxury items and little in the way of necessities. As such I'm still baffled why other countries jump through all sorts of outrageous hoops to accommodate them as many simply do appear to need the US. I understand why the US is good to export to, it is a substantial and reliable source of income for exporting countries. But if all these trade regulations coming out of the US are so terrible why do other countries take them lying down?

As far as I can see the US would be absolutely boned if exports and imports ceased (as would many other countries), whereas everyone else would be fine until the US comes crawling back without its totally one-sided trade agreements.

Of course I really don't know that much about the subject. I just don't know why other countries let the US impose trade restriction upon them that only benefit the US. If anyone cares to give a good explanation for why things are panning out as they are, I'd be grateful.

The only time I'll click an ad is if I know where the URL is going, not some stupid 80-mile URL that doesn't even take me to what I want. 99% of the time ads aren't even relevant, but when I see sites that host their own hand-picked ads, I'll click them if it looks interesting.

It makes sense too, a site picks out ads that they think their audience will be responsive to. They host them on their own server as to avoid ad blocking, and I actually click said ads. Sure ad-tracking and such can't really work so seamlessly, but it could be a lot better.

This is a terrible idea for one big reason. If you share a console you are screwed as one person might play the demo, get all the features stripped, then you go to play and the demo is as good as worthless. Now if he wasn't so keen on the game, but the demo may have sold you on the game, they've essentially lost a sale as you'll never find out that you'd actually like this game.

The program will just realise that all programs break because of user inputs, and will patch programs so users can't interact with them.

Not really, all the really popular stuff will get coverage, but the more niche you get the less coverage there is until you get down to stuff that doesn't even get any reviews on aggregation services. I've played some good games that simply were not reviewed by any typical review sources, simply garnering a few blog posts of praise. Sometimes because its overlooked, overly niche or no reviewers care about the product.

For example a lot of distinctly "for kids" games on DS get totally glossed over by major review outlets simply because the current readership couldn't care less. Yet among those games there are studios pumping buckets of rubbish intending to sell on name alone and studios that actually put effort into making games that would be fun for young children. Some of the latter are quite good, but nobody will ever know that.

Or that you aren't willing to wait.

My usual routine for DS games is to decide if I want the game, if so I'll buy it off Play-Asia and download the ROM and play that and maybe even finish it before the game arrives. I don't feel bad about downloading a game I have paid for. When it arrives I'll write my save file to the retail cart using a DS program called SavSender and keep playing.

Living in a PAL region I can say pretty much any TV made since 1990 supports PAL and NTSC signals, and the hybrid PAL60. I've played all 3 modes on a fairly old TV with no problems. Even Nintendo releases games without proper PAL support to PAL regions when it is convenient for them (Geist, Metroid Prime 2).

PAL Wiis support progressive scan, but only the NTSC-based 480p and not 576p like all PAL DVDs are (the hardware couldn't do 576p anyway). All our TVs support it so no big deal, a huge step up from the GameCube whose PAL titles were intentionally stripped of progressive-scan support, making them fairly useless on modern displays whereas NTSC GameCube games played on a Wii get the full benefit of 480p.

It may have been in early days when the not-yet-named product was still being considered as a GameCube add-on to prolong the system's life.

Lameboy DS seems to work fine.