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OK - http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20004170-54.html . It may mean that you have to hold it up to the sun to use it.

Where did 100x come from? These are just numbers drawn from thin air. Let's use some real numbers at least. For example verizon spent $23 billion and was offering it to 11 million premises in June 2009 by delivering it to very densely populated metro areas. Now to deliver it to 50x more locations you have to scale that up by a massive amount per-home-passed because as you get to rural areas obviously that number declines rapidly. How fast would be tough to estimate. But even if you scale it linearly you're looking at $1.115 _TRILLION_ dollars or about $3,745.82 for every American in the country. You would obviously need to scale that up by an order of magnitude to reach all the rural areas in the US.

And these numbers are a ridiculously absurd attempt at calculating something like this. I bet these numbers aren't even remotely close. If you could build out a fiber network to touch the entire nation for $60B (600 million * 100) it would have been done many times over.

I will bite :)
"They did this around the world, long term and had to set the tech up to do it and keep the data collection going." http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5h8imuNrdgq9uo-_uDoktPD05Y2Rw
Google said Street View cars have been collecting WiFi data in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Britain, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Macau, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan and the United States.
Google missed a request from the German gov to show what data they collected and how it was stored ect.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-20006157-265.html
"Google skips German deadline for Wi-Fi data"
"we need to review, we are continuing to discuss the appropriate legal"
The Media Access Control (MAC) is like a unique number in a wifi devices hardware. Not easy to change and google collected it too with the users data packets, SSID (Service Set Identifier) and their locations.
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/197349/google_rejects_german_request_for_wifi_data.html
As for the COINTELPRO idea, what happens when a state task force or city PD wants to run its own cyber department but cannot seem to get long term, rolling blanket city wide warrants?
They might just buy data in bulk from the private sector and then set up their own intelligence gathering networks.
Mistakes will be made.

Try http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy on for size.

Quit being so a navel-gazer and believing the whole world should operate the way your corner does.

Proud to be Canadian with sane Copyright laws. cf. Judge: File sharing legal in Canada.

You're actually being self righteous. Here, those who share actually spend more on music than those who don't:
http://news.cnet.com/Study-File-sharing-boosts-music-sales/2100-1023_3-898813.html

I actually agree with you about this in every other case, but Microsoft is a special case. Analysts are already saying that "Failure is not an option." Sigh. I guess we'll have to have one more iteration of this. Here's how it goes:

Normally I'm not one to praise Microsoft's end results, but I'm not stupid. They hire the brightest minds from the best schools with strong foundations in classical IT art as well as contemporary vision and they work them to death because that hazy zone between exhaustion and physical failure is a special point where human brains integrate at miraculous levels. Microsoft has known this for twenty years and organizes its workers accordingly. These folks driven in this way can make an awesome mobile OS, they did, and I'd love to have a copy of the source for that bad boy. These Microsoft developers made a rock solid performant and genuinely innovative phone OS which is the core of Windows Phone 7. It's tiny, boots fast, suspends and resumes instantly, and pinches ergs like they're made of platinum. It has an intuitive touch-centric interface. It works flawlessly with all the latest technologies - hell, it'd make a great HPC OS if these jerks would think out of the box now and then. This was about two years and three reorgs ago. This is the mockup they'll trot out to the major phone vendors hoping to get them to push the platform - short a few apps but you can see the potential because it's beautiful, intuitive, responsive. They built an app store for it, and shopped the mockup around to app developers under NDA. Some of the AC posters here even have it and they're in awe of its incredible flexibility, its power, its potential - and they should be because this bare OS rocks. They float an early 2009 release date to some of their preferred pundits even though it's not finished yet because that's how you feed a flackalyst.

It's a killer mobile OS but it's not a Windows yet. For six months they put some finishing touches on the version they intend to ship - integrating Bing search and Windows Live services into everything, building the Mobile Office apps for it, porting Silverlight, .NET for mobile and a bunch of other stuff. This is leveraging the platform so that it pushes all of the other Microsoft platforms because making products that can be extracted from their internicine application and server dependencies is not the One Microsoft Way. The shipping version then ran like a dog, leaked memory like a seive and crashed every few minutes. So eighteen months ago they rebooted the team and tried again. They got the same result, so nine months ago they reorg the group from higher up and try again. The new group can't get the thing to work right in nine months, so yesterday they reorg the entire entertainment and mobile division to be directly under Steve Ballmer and reboot their efforts yet again. This product was supposed to ship in early 2009. It is not even close to ready. It probably never will be because all of these internicine ties never did work well, are a moving target, and have reached an insurmountable level of complexity for a mobile device which must by definition be the ultimate in computer reliability and stability while remaining cutting edge in a dynamic market. It literally can't be done.

Even today Microsoft executives are shopping around that slick mockup that no end user is ever going to see to their phone partners at the manufacturers and carriers, playing the push/pull game. "You want this. You need this. You're going to want to start planning the marketing around this product right away. This is going to be a slam dunk! And look - it says Microsoft on it everywhere so you know businesses are going to eat it up. [Hushed]It has IE and Outlook." / "Of course, this iPhone killer isn't for everybody - it's exclusive to our special friends. Committed friends l

was just chatting to a friend about this and he then sent me this as a very effective removal tool

http://download.cnet.com/Remove-Fake-Antivirus/3000-2239_4-10915342.html

Google actually has permission from Namco, the owners of Pac-man, for a permanent Google/Pac-man logo/diversion :)

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-20005577-52.html

You can play that here:
http://www.google.com/pacman/

Fun extra: It actually works on mobile devices, including iPhones and Android :)

I should post a link to back up what I'm saying, if that makes any difference. It usually doesn't with people who have already made up their minds what they want to believe. But anyway...

http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-202143.html

And in case you don't feel like reading the entire article, the important line is: "Apple, which ended its third quarter with $1.2 billion in cash, will use the additional $150 million to invest in its core markets of education and creative content, Anderson said."

Funny that, because their share price wasn't doing so well when Microsoft pumped money into Apple to keep them solvent just a few years ago.

Yeah, $150 Million, when Apple only had $1.2 in cash. What a float. http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-202143.html

"MSFT is slowly crushed"? If raking in billions and billions of $$$ is being slowly crushed, can I pleeease be crushed too? Everywhere I go I see Windows 7, from little netbooks running W7 starter to bad ass gamer rigs. Everyone just seems to love W7, as I've been told over and over by customers it is finally the MSFT OS that "makes sense" to them. even my 67 year old dad, who is about as clueless as they come, after trying the W7 Beta to try went and had me buy enough licenses to cover his work and home PCs/laptops on launch because he says this version is finally "easy to use" and understand.

And lets not forget that it ALWAYS takes MSFT awhile to find a footing before gaining marketshare. Xbox 1 was a flop, but even with the RRoD issue the X360 has been stomping the PS3 for more months than I care to look up and has been making a profit for nearly 2 years. So if MSFT truly wants a piece of the mobile market they will eventually use their unlimited pocketbooks to bring on the right people to fix it, just as they brought the Office guys over after the Vista fail to fix what became W7. And it looks like one of those you mentioned, Apple, may be headed for some MSFT style antitrust which certainly won't help their bottom line, and Android is having troubles of its own.

So while I personally hope it ends up with a "1/3 for each" state between Apple,MSFT, and Google so healthy competition helps all of us, I wouldn't count MSFT out just yet. Their plans tend to be "learn from the competition, then make a little better widget" which we haven't seen whether or not it is gonna work yet or not in mobile. I would wait for about 2 years after W7 Mobile is released, and count share at that point rather than call them toast now. But I will agree that if W7/W8 mobile is a flop they should cut their losses and get out, just as short of a miracle I don't see Zune going anywhere market wise.

Well, Sun is kind of a company who manages to have their own language/framework on billion devices (J2ME) and still manages to lose money and prestige over it.

Every phone, almost every cell phone you see has a working J2ME and companies who can actually code does create miracles on it. Just imagine what if MS wasn't that blind and managed to get a compact .NET on that number of devices.

Or forget devices, look at CNET Download.com top downloads which is more amazing:
http://download.cnet.com/mac/most-popular/3101-20_4-0.html?tag=rb_content;contentNav

It includes Limewire which is pure Java and it runs on one of the most hostile Java environments (both OS and userbase).

I can't understand how they CAN'T make money over it. I can't understand the patience of Java developers either... You make top of a general download sites top 10 list and you don't even get mentioned by the language vendor. They had a joke like portal (java.com) and it bugged some people at that sick company to convert it to a pure "download" page.

I mean Java is at a state where MS and Apple (with their culture) can't even dream of and they still manage to get acted like step child with weird rumors going on. I wonder if they have donated/sponsored a CENT to Limewire and Vuze, reason of 90% of Java desktop installations. If there was such a popular .NET open source application, MS would even assign some anonymous coders to that project.

If it comes down to Adobe Flash or HTML V5 H.264 I'll take Flash any day and twice on Sundays! At least Adobe doesn't act like douchebags and make you pony up $$$ just to have flash support in Linux distros. And SD Flash plays beautifully on this 1.8Ghz Sempron I use for a low power netbox, and with the latest Flash I can add a $50 AGP card and go full HD. From what I have seen HTML V5 is frankly a dog, and even in a window it runs like a slideshow.

And let us not forget the real enemy here is MPEG-LA, who unlike Adobe really REALLY likes to sue...a lot. Old Steve may like having only H.264 on his iStuff ( and why not? Apple and MSFT are a part of MPEG-LA) but I prefer having a format I can run just about anywhere WITHOUT having to write a check. MPEG-LA has made it clear that even just using a browser plugin to view H.264 means you WILL pay up.

So everyone can go "poo poo Adobe, poo poo" and I'll be the first to say their past versions of flash left a lot to be desired. But at least it seems they are trying, and aren't going around trying to lock up the web with an AV paywall like MPEG-LA. Why anyone not drinking the iKoolaid would actually want MPEG-LA with their major douchebag behavior to win over Flash is frankly beyond me. And please don't claim the H.264 paywall is a "standard" because it doesn't matter if it is all locked down behind a paywall of patents. I mean, do you REALLY want to help lock web video into a legal minefield that benefits Apple and MSFT while screwing Linux?

They are lying, they are trying to justify their lawsuits against third party ink vendors in an attempt to keep ink prices high.

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1649866/hp-names-dodgy-ink-vendor

http://news.cnet.com/Inkjet-refiller-lashes-out-at-HP-for-lawsuit/2100-1041_3-5647086.html

There is no need for these cartridges to cost so much, once HP has done the R&D the cartridge design and ink formula need not change when a new printer comes out, and for the most part I bet they don't. No ink is worth $8000 a gallon.

http://hothardware.com/News/8000-Per-Gallon-Printer-Ink--Lawsuit/

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-20005668-265.html?tag=newsLeadStoriesArea.1

This has got to be the craziest post I've seen in a long time.

Last summer CNet reported that 50% of GPL projects hosted by google code were GPLv3. That works out to at least 56,000 projects. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10294452-16.html This information took me 30 seconds to find on google. Before making wild ass comments, please do some research.

Now, you may have meant that GPLv3 code is rare on embedded devices. This may very well be true. But at least look up the numbers and tell us what they are rather than making outrageous comments backed up by nothing.

Also asserting that RMS is trying to capitalize on the popularity of the GPL to ram home his minority views is completely ridiculous. The GPL has ALWAYS been his vehicle for ramming home his minority views. Did you honestly think the GPL was popular when it was first released???? RMS and the GPL popularized these ideas in the first place. v2 isn't working exactly the way he wanted it to, so he changed it. What kind of warped view of the world do you have to have to think this is unreasonable?

Finally, if industry is accepting the GPL because it is pragmatic, then that is a good thing. I'm sorry that you can't see beyond the end of your nose to see that v3 addresses pragmatic issues. It might not be for you. That's great. Choose another license. But take a look at some of the messages here. For example, vendors are allegedly shipping software for their wireless routers with vulnerabilities. Fixes exist for those vulnerabilities, but the customer can not apply the fix because they can't load a custom build. Things like this do not endear customers to their suppliers. Generally speaking, having the ability to fix your own problems is a good thing. This is one of the pragmatic issues that v3 fixes. The license is a promise by the vendor that these kinds of things won't happen. It is something that an informed consumer can base their purchase on if it is important to them.

I happen to think it is important to me. Many other people here happen to think it is important to them. Obviously you do not. I think you are letting your bias cloud your judgement, but that's up to you.

This has already happened.

That one has already an arrow to define the direction flow of quantum data passing the intersingular relais, which will be cheaper in the end.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-20005452-248.html

Seriously, anyone who has had the displeasure of working directly with the upper personnel of that company knows exactly what I am talking about.

Where do they find their rogue's gallery of thuggish jerks? Is there some code word or something in their job advertisements that attracts such scummy people?

Except they don't come up, until now. In November Californians will vote on a referendum to legalize marijuana. According to the Wastington Post, who suggests Washington DC watch CA, the referendum is close to winning with about half in support and half opposed to it.

I don't think any one of 51 states or district have made anything legal to make/grow and sell.

Again you're wrong. In Alaska small amounts are legal. "The sale and distribution of marijuana, however, is still illegal".

On J Edgar Hoover:

Politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, didn't like him. The only reason he kept his position as director of the FBI is because of his extensive collection of private files.

If that's the case, then we get what we deserve.

Well J Edgar Hoover is long dead, good riddance. But as I said before most people didn't know what he was doing. Information found it hard to get around, and that's how politicians want it. After-all they even included a muzzle clause, where librarians and others who had information requests issued by law enforcement couldn't say anything about it, in the Patriot Act. How many people even have an idea what's happening? Obama ran saying his admin would be open, well his admin has refused to release the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, ACTA, a favorite topic here. Just as with a number of other things it's "classified in the interest of national security pursuant to Executive Order 12958." What does copyrights have to do with national security? While businesses can see it the people can't.

Which brings up relevant questions. One is, why aren't the people demanding it be released? Another though, is how many people even know or have heard about the ACTA? I just searched CNN, "acta" returned 40 results but none I looked at said anything about it and "Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement" returned 3 results, but none of them say anything about it either. Two were about counterfeit money, one about counterfeit drugs, and so on.

Falcon

The decision was reversed on appeal.

Well, I mean, a judge called the alleged contractual obligations "evanescent.". But you seem to be taking them as factual, and that they happened more or less the way the Winklevosses claim they did. Why are you doing that?

What I'm espousing here basically amounts to critical reasoning skills. Who's making these claims? What is their motivation for doing so? What other possible explanations exist for the alleged facts, and are they more or less credible than what is being claimed? What's the background to this accusation?

Whenever I have a "gut feeling" about something I always do my damnedest to try to disprove it, because "gut feelings" are invariably based in emotions rather than rationality.

And when is the last time you looked at every single line of code for a major open-source application and made sure that it was totally and completely safe? Do you just use them, assuming that someone else did it for you?

It doesn't matter if I do it; if it's an important enough piece of software, somebody has. And if it's really important, more than a few somebodies. And if it's really really important, I can pay somebody to do it. And it's not an either/or problem like you frame it. You may not realize this as you seem to be a bit of a noob in regards to security but security requires a multi-layered approach. Having the source is just one. Surely you aren't foolishly arguing that I'm better off not having it.

At least with a major author they have a physical presence, buildings, investors, publicly traded, cash in the bank.

That's your argument? Really? I offer this in rebuttal. How many coupons would you like?

As far as you know. Who knows what they might be looking for? http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-19512_7-10400276-233.html

The hard drive manufacturers are already doing this with large 2.5" drives. The first 1 TB 2.5" hard drive was 12.5mm thick, instead of the usual 9.5mm It doesn't fit in most notebooks but is still small enough to serve as a portable external storage medium.

My thought exactly. Macintosh already has EFI and GPT. Snow Leopard is pure 64bit. What is really going to hurt is when 48bit memory addressing ceases to be adequate.

Snow Leopard do have a 64-bit kernel option, but you need to enable it yourself, it is running 32-bit by default. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10320314-37.html

As the title says; 60 percent!? Really?

From Download.com.

Total LimeWire client downloads: 206 million.
Total last week: 320,000.

Total uTorrent client downloads: 8 million.
Total last week: 61,000.

P2P & File-Sharing Software

Easter is attributed with the sale of 50 million games. This year, Easter came in March (a surprisingly good month), not April like it usually does (a surprisingly dismal month).

Perhaps this isn't the sole reason, but I'm sure it's part of it. There's really nothing to see here.

In other news, Obama keeps privacy oversight board on ice

This is true, and it's going to get even easier in future Android releases. Froyo (2.2) is slated to include tethering and a wireless hotspot.

Well, I guess now at least we know what the launch of that secretive X-37B Air Force shuttle was for. So we should be safe, assuming that a PS3 update doesn't screw up its aiming system.

In a comment the other day someone pointed out that the RIAA etc. hardly ever go after any major distributors of their work, preferring to target individual end users, because judgements against people responsible for thousands of instances of copyright infringement would make it obvious how absurd the damages awarded per instance were. However: "The RIAA has said it is entitled to the maximum statutory damages, which is $150,000 for each registered work that was infringed. The number of infringing works they could try to claim is likely in the millions." from http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20004811-261.html So basically the RIAA believes they're entitled to a multi trillion dollar damages award?

Why were you a sarcastic asshole when the GP was trying to make valid points?

In case you don't know; and I'm assuming you don't in good faith, Your games will stop working if they don't talk to the verification servers.

Oh, I'm sorry I shouldn't have called them "your games". I think what everyone is trying to point out is that they don't like the whole system that DRM inevitably forces on you. You no longer buy a game and own it as your piece of property. You rent it.

Makes it hard to do what you want with them and when the companies get bought out, go out of business or just change their minds and shut off the verification servers you're SOL.

Don't forget what happened with the kindle.... I want to shit on people when I hear them bragging about their kindles.

As much as players might enjoy the convenience being brought in with this new model, giving up your other rights isn't necessary. There's also the related debate of having the right to run servers yourself and playing at lan parties.

Declan McCullagh's CNET article

There's just one problem with Think Progress' claim: It's not, well, accurate.
In a case of truth being stranger than astroturf, it turns out that the PowerPoint document was prepared as a class project for a competition in Florida last month. It cost the six students a grand total of $173.95, including $18 for clip art. ....
The competition was organized by the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, a nonprofit, free-market group that ....

It was an MBA class project to create a marketing campaign for a think tank to SELL to a telecom company on a $100 budget, and it wasn't even the winning entry for the class. So yeah, it's a Powerpoint that's just waiting to cause trouble.

So it's meta-Astroturf , not genuine Astroturf(tm) fake grass product as-seen-on-TV. And these meddling liberals have just burned it (without even filing an Environmental Impact Report about the effects of flame on Astroturf!)

Declan McCullagh's CNET article

There's just one problem with Think Progress' claim: It's not, well, accurate.
In a case of truth being stranger than astroturf, it turns out that the PowerPoint document was prepared as a class project for a competition in Florida last month. It cost the six students a grand total of $173.95, including $18 for clip art. ....
The competition was organized by the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, a nonprofit, free-market group that ....

It was an MBA class project to create a marketing campaign for a think tank to SELL to a telecom company on a $100 budget, and it wasn't even the winning entry for the class.

Think Progess either got suckered, or is trying to pull a fast one.

The PPT document was created by six students as a class project in Florida last month. From the CNET article:

"The Think Progress article is hilarious," David MacLean, the Canadian member of the six-person student team from four different continents, told CNET on Wednesday. "We've had a really good laugh in the last day over this. This is one of the funniest things I've ever seen."

MacLean added: "It was a class project done at the Atlas think tank MBA program. We came up with the concept in a few days."

Did the BSA bother to count the number of people going legit by using legal alternatives due to the BSA threat?

I use Open Office instead of MS Office due to the legal risk of a misplaced sales receipt or installed on too many machines. Open Office does not come with those risks. Most of the machines in my house run Ubuntu. Slowly as legacy support is no longer needed, we are migrating away from the legal risks involved with bad EULA terms.

http://news.cnet.com/2008-1082_3-5065859.html

How much has this story cost the BSA and Microsoft? I am not Microsoft free yet, but moving in that direction.

Google as a company makes money by giving away information. In order to get that information, we selectively let them collect information on us. Our privacy has value to us, so we want to keep it private. But not trading information is against Google's very nature. They make money by disseminating information.

This is why Google can be so careless as they were with Buzz. You could see that lack of regard reflected in Jim Clark's (Google CIO) comments about Buzz. All that valuable private information won't make money so long as it's locked up. If your intimate details are revealed to the web, you might lose sleep over it but Google can only make money out of it.

This works so long as we trust Google, and mostly they've kept that trust. But in Buzz and with Doubleclick they're skirting close to the edge. They want to see how far they can push us, and that's proving a moving target. But even if they do push us too far, look at Yahoo! Even after the revelation they were ratting out their Chinese users to the Chinese government, many people continue to have a Yahoo email account anyway. The same applies to the recent leaking of Microsoft documents showing they will sell info on you to 'law enforcement' (for a fee), but most people still use Windows.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/07/technology/07yahoo.html
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10459676-38.html

Don't trust Privacy Law to protect you. In many countries its a feel-good toothless tiger. Take Australia's. Here's a feel-good FAQ with a feel-good quiz, but what it doesn't mention is that if someone violates your privacy you have no legal recourse. The worst the Privacy Commissioner can do is issue a non-binding finding that has no financial, civil or criminal penalty.

http://www.privacy.gov.au/faq/individuals

Correct, the phone definitely matters. Don't let the scare mongering get to you, but the phones with the best reception also have the highest level of radiation. Those are the phones I personally look for. Nothing is more aggravating than using a cheap POS which drops the most calls.

No wonder the Droid and BB 8330s have good reception. =)

Downloadable content is the future, not bits permanently etched into chips or optical disks.

Not only is that choice of words inaccurate from an archival data management standpoint, it highlights a weakness that only downloadable content has: It can vanish at any time without warning.

I heard there were some Kindle owners pretty upset about that.
Imagine if Sony could delete games off your PS3... whether you purchased them legitimately or not.
What makes anyone think they don't have that ability right now?

My problem with the cameras is they are a guilty until proven innocent item. Fighting bad tickets is simply not something I like to do on my days off or worse during my work. I've had two moving violations in my life. One was a bad speed radar ticket. It's not like I am the guy collecting tons of tickets. It won't take many automated screwups to get me to the point of endangering the operators of the highway bandits, especially when they are wrong or corrupt.

url:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/7043325/Driver-parked-in-front-of-speed-camera-gets-tickets.html>

Several people fought an automated ticket with the GPS records. Radar said ticket. GPS with a base accuracy of 0.1mph said innocent. The proven false positives are way too common. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20001248-38.html http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20080712/NEWS/807120355 http://www.phillyburbs.com/news/local/courier_times/courier_times_news_details/article/28/2009/november/10/pa-man-using-gps-to-fight-speeding-ticket.html I carry a GPS and record the track as a regular activity if I have to drive through some parts of town. Most non technical people are unable to use this defense. In some cases, the court has rejected the evidence as they know too little about it. Can you say unfair trial?

One of our radio personalities got a red light camera ticket last winter during an ice storm. He literally slid through the intersection.

Due to these issues, I am simply marking red light cameras and frequent speed radar spots on my GPS as closed roads and use alternatives instead. I plan my routes to avoid them. Businesses in the area may suffer as a result. I don't know the business impact overall, but I avoid the areas.

I don't buy that for a minute. So Apple's sold a million iPads. Whee. According to this article, there were 33.3 million netbooks sold last year.

It cracks me up when reports like this come out and everyone starts screaming about how Apple's taking over. No they're not. They're not close. They've never been close. They'll never be close. It's not what "everyone wants." The million people who will buy any stupid goddamn thing Apple sells bought iPads. Those million people are by no means "the general public." So in short, who the hell cares? In consumer electronics, a million units hardly even registers on the scale.

Let's play with the data a little bit. Let's assume for the sake of conversation that iPad sales continue at this rate. I don't think they will, but let's go with it. In three months, they've sold a million. By year's end, that makes four million. Four million units is roughly 12% of the netbooks sold last year. I don't know what your definition of "taking over" is, but in my book that doesn't cut it.

I'll leave this right here:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20000898-245.html

Universally known eh?

Every review of the iPad I have seen was written on the iPad and every reviewer I have read has said that, while not quite as good as a physical keyboard it is quite sufficient for something like writing an article for a magazine or blog. If that's not good enough for sending emails or posting on facebook or slashdot then you aren't doing it right.

David Pogue's Review

CNET's iPad Review

UberGizmo iPad Review

Mossberg had positive things to say about the iPad's keyboard (no surprise there), and Engadget didn't slam it, but they only really talked about "banging out e-mails" on it.

About the only thing the iPad's keyboard has going for it is that it's larger than some netbook keyboards. But you have to balance that against the fact that it's not tactile, so there's no touch typing.

I suppose that if you're used to typing on an iPhone, you'd love the iPad. But for those who need to do any type of document production -- other than short e-mails -- it's not going to work as a netbook replacement.

Well, since iPads don't use IBM hard drives, pixie dust won't help.

Unless you think Jobs is actually growing iPads, in which case pixie dust might work there, too. Or not...

And you are in no way, shape or form, in any hypothetical or actual fashion, entitled to tell me what I can or can not do with my computer, and what subset of the base 256 representation of pi I can or cannot download with the internet connection I paid for.

So because you paid for the internet connection, there is no limit on what you can do with it? How does that make sense? Because I bought the car and paid for the gas, I can drive it on your land without asking?

It cost money to create it? Tough shit. Sue the guy who uploaded it. If you can't find him, that has nothing to do with me.

If you're a willing participant, it has everything to do with you. I'm against exhorbanant fees for simply downloading (thousands of dollars per song, for example), but that doesn't mean I think downloaders have no liability. You should be liable for the cost of the good (about $60, plus some nominal penalty for repeat offenses), and the uploader should be liable for much more.

Also, if the number of pirates is as high as these companies suggest (which would also mean that there are also many people who agree in principle, but don't do it for whatever reasons), shouldn't that invalidate any laws against it in a democracy by default? Think about it: how many people breaking the law does it take to change it, if the majority of the population is at least neutral to their cause?

Not by default. Notice that is both of your cases, the law was rewritten through the process of a representative democracy. The exact reason for a representative democracy is to prevent this kind of 'everyone is doing it, so it's alright' mob-rule.

My proposed solution: a) extend Fair Use to the whole of the internet for personal use (even Hungary has that fercrissake), b) slap on an optional and reasonable Entertainment Fee/Tax to designated connection plans, to be distributed among the content creators based on measurements, and possibly c) zero tolerance among those who opt out, with fines based on the tax, not $2M for an album.

This is reasonable, but none of it justifies piracy now, since it's currently illegal. You need to change the law first.

And don't give me some bullshit that free access to a luxury entertainment item is a human right, equivalent to being treated equally regardless of the color of your skin.

You can't say you're entitled to have that copy and have any legitimate basis for that claim, regardless as to the cost to the business.

And you are in no way, shape or form, in any hypothetical or actual fashion, entitled to tell me what I can or can not do with my computer, and what subset of the base 256 representation of pi I can or cannot download with the internet connection I paid for. It cost money to create it? Tough shit. Sue the guy who uploaded it. If you can't find him, that has nothing to do with me.

Also, if the number of pirates is as high as these companies suggest (which would also mean that there are also many people who agree in principle, but don't do it for whatever reasons), shouldn't that invalidate any laws against it in a democracy by default? Think about it: how many people breaking the law does it take to change it, if the majority of the population is at least neutral to their cause?

If you think the examples are absurd in this context, you're right. But in 15 years, we'll remember this as the dark ages where corporations roamed the tubes hunting for dead people, and have not yet adapted their business models to reflect the inherent freedom of the internet. Or we'll remember this as the good old times, when you could modify the OS on your computer without going to jail for non-compliance with the Computing Device Copyright Infringement Monitoring Act. Which one of these lies ahead of us? You choose. We all do, day by day.

My proposed solution: a) extend Fair Use to the whole of the internet for personal use (even Hungary has that fercrissake), b) slap on an optional and reasonable Entertainment Fee/Tax to designated connection plans, to be distributed among the content creators based on measurements, and possibly c) zero tolerance among those who opt out, with fines based on the tax, not $2M for an album.

Microsoft themselves have admitted that they weren't very standards driven in regards to IE6:

"While it is true that our implementation is not fully, 100 percent W3C-compliant, our development investments are driven by our customer requirements and not necessarily by standards," said Greg Sullivan, a lead product manager with the Windows client group.

It doesn't get much clearer than that...

REF: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1032-5088642.html

I for one am no expert in this subject, so here are some links I ended up reading:

wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC

a decent article that could provide one with some insight on the patent "wars to come": http://www.vcodex.com/videocodingpatents.html

a random google search to a blog post with a good bit of information, but also opinionated: http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/2010/01/html5-video-and-h-264-what-history-tells-us-and-why-were-standing-with-the-web/

cnet on Microsoft's stance: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20003838-264.html

Lastly, does anyone have a good article on Opera's stance? - I had heard they are against it, but not much more than that...