"GCS had leased over 15 thousand of the tablets (at a cost of $200 a year)"

That's less than 13 cents each. What kind of quality did they expect??

Long after I started switching to eBooks, my wishlist still had print titles on it and I continued to receive them as gifts from friends and family that know I read a lot. I wonder if this will apply to those books that were purchased off my wishlist directly.

Of course they will only work on Kindle, since that's what Amazon sells. But that's easy enough to get around :)

OK look, this may sound like trolling, but I ask in all sincerity... why does a country like Romania need to be doing basic scientific research? Let the US and China do the hard work and maybe spend your time and effort eliminating cronyism and corruption in the government in general? If I was paying taxes to the Romanian government, I would be worried about a lot of other things before I wanted a dime of it to go to a Science Ministry.

And before anyone points me to the Wiki list of scientific discoveries by Romanians, I've looked at it. I don't know how many were made *in* Romania and in this century, and I didn't see any of them listed on the "Timeline of Romanian history".

I'm not saying they can't do good or useful research... just that in the current situation, I don't know why they would care very much about this.

It doesn't take a "brilliant", or even a very smart person to make the connection between "I can create accounts at will and assign them any rights" and "Those accounts can access stuff I can't".

This is why you have security procedures and audits. Dummies.

This is great news! Until the bacteria evolve to colonize humans!

I, for one, welcome our new nitrogen fixing overlords.

Your analogy is incorrect. Listening to a recording is not the same as seeing the original artist perform it, or no one would ever go to a concert. And listening to a song doesn't instantly give anyone the ability to duplicate it exactly in a live performance.

Also, copyright was around long before it was "easy" to copy or steal a musical recording.

Indeed, it's a very different world; but my point still stands. Lack of copyright didn't, doesn't, and wouldn't rid the world of creative endeavors. It would certainly change the way creativity is "done". But are there no artists in Somalia, where there is no copyright law? I don't know, I've never been there. But I suspect there are at least a few, because art is part of human nature.

If you really believe that copyright the thing preventing the world from becoming a barren, artless place, where no one ever works to write a new song or paint a new picture, I guess I'm not going to convince you.

I suspect "often" is not accurate in this case, but it's irrelevant. Copyright law doesn't encourage the artistically inclined to create. It encourages some people to try and make a living at creating. I don't have any problem with that. I just disagree with the basic premise that absent copyright there'd be no incentive to create, because IMO it's obviously false on its face.

In the time before, I imagine very few people made a decent living just by writing songs. They had to perform them pretty regularly if they wanted to eat every day. As far as I'm concerned, the idea that someone can sit down and write a song and then get paid for that one act for many years without ever again even thinking about it is stupid, and I don't think it should be encouraged.

People invented things before there were patents too, you know.

This is exactly right. In fact, there was no music, or singing, or recordings, or concerts of any sort before copyright was instituted and ASCAP was founded to protect the artist and give him the brand new incentive to create.

My wife and I used to love Tivo. We had a series 2 with lifetime, and then bought three series 3 boxes, also with lifetime. It was a HUGE outlay, but we felt it was worth it and we'd be set for a long time.

Unfortunately, this was just before they announced the new series 4, which they were keeping quiet, so they weren't making any new units. It turned out they were only shipping refurbished units. Within 6 months all three units had failed, as well as a couple replacement units. We got so frustrated with losing our recorded shows, dealing with shipping back and forth, etc, that we ended up selling the units on eBay and switching to DirecTV with their (at the time) superior DVRs.

We felt sort of like since we'd paid all that money up front for lifetimes, Tivo had our money and didn't really care about fixing the problem permanently. They just kept sending us refurbs that would fail within a few months. Needless to say, our Tivo love dried up and we won't be going back.

Just as a point of comparison, if you think $30k is an "average" salary for 4 months, you aren't living in the same America I live in.

Also, are you just pulling that $100 figure out of your ass because it seems like a lot for you to pay for a pirated program? If I were a business person in, say, Iraq, or another country where I couldn't legally buy this enterprise level software, $100 would seem super cheap to me.

I'm not disagreeing with your contention that the punishment doesn't fit the crime though, but I'm too lazy to RTFA for more detail, so I'll limit my comments to your post :)

I think you are putting the emPHASis on the wrong word in the headline. It's "The VIDEO GAME drawn by Hand", not "THE Video Game Drawn by Hand".

Not even the idea of a video game drawn like pen on paper is original. I remember many years ago playing a game called "Pencil Whipped", which was a Doom-like FPS made entirely of hand-drawn figures on paper. It went one better though because all the sound effects were done by the creator making noises and onomatopoeia. It was awesome and hilarious.

I would see that movie, if it weren't billed as a sequel to Blade Runner, but just as its own thing.

If the test "showed similar IQ results as a classic intelligence test", and the classic test is "biased", wouldn't that mean that this test is biased? Or would it have to mean that the classic test is *not* biased?

Label your spoilers next time :) Maybe not every nerd here knows how it all started.

I enjoyed my 1st gen Nook Color, but I rooted it a month after getting it and kept it that way, with the play store, etc, for over a year. But when the Nexus 7 came out I jumped ship for the "full" ICS experience. It wasn't the lack of the Play store, or the other restrictions that led me to switch... it was the underpowered hardware and the old version of Android.

If they had made this change 6 months ago, before I bought my Nexus, I might have reconsidered. But honestly I think Google's offering is a better choice. The only advantage the Nook has now IMO is the ability to read enhanced eBooks that the generic android nook reader can't. And I only have one of those, which I ripped and converted with some utility so I could still access the content.