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There's always pressure regardless of whose payroll you're on. The trick isn't so much who writes the check so much as who's receiving it. If someone has high integrity, then they'll do what's right regardless. Likewise, someone with low integrity will bend to any pressure or sell out for any potential personal benefit, like a comfy job in the private sector after they retire from public service.

IPad sales numbers have not been impressive.

You don't know what you're talking about. You're saying what you wished were true rather than what is true.

http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2011/01/19/apple-posts-record-profit-ipad-sales-surpass-projections

Because, believe it or not, Google and Apple are "close" to one another. As close as two companies can be while still sorta competing. The two companies share alot of the same board members to my understanding. And Brin, Page, and Jobs are not enemies.

Have you lived in a cave for the past year?

There were two shared directors as of May 2009 when the DOJ mentioned they would investigate. Then Eric Schmidt quit Apple's board and Arthur Levinson quit Google's board...

Then Jobs proclaimed that Google was trying to kill the iPhone... sure, this could all be fluff, and the two companies are really being controlled by "them" or Dr. Evil, but if so, they have quite a few people fooled... especially since Apple is now increasing the fronts on which they compete with Google, and vice versa.

Clearly, this is all orchestrated.

Well, this is the best I could find.

Yeah, yeah, Troll, Offtopic, etc. ...

they usually create innovations independently then pay protection money to the trolls

Actually it works both ways.

While their primary function is not as a patent troll Apple, Microsoft and Amazon have in turn played the role of the frivilous patent litigant with the biggest difference being in their objective of halting the "Progress of Science and useful Arts" to the betterment of their bottom line.

Games? Social Networking? The fact that Murdoch is a part of this venture does not surprise me, because it shows an astounding lack of understanding for why people are buying ebook readers and what the market actually wants in a book reader appliance.

It seems likely that the next generation of touchpads (like the ill-fated "crunch" or Apple's rumored device) will have a decent shot at replacing the current dedicated reader devices (and I say that as a Kindle user who likes the fact that my Kindle doesn't have a bunch of dancing raisin applications distracting me from my reading). If that happens, it will be more like an iphone or ipod-touch experience, and users will expect to do more interaction. (My Kindle feels clunky and ancient next to an iphone, although it is still better as a reading device in a number of ways.)

That said, there is one thing I can see some value in for the proposed format: daily deliverables. This is something that isn't done all that well in current generation ebook readers, but it isn't exactly a new idea. There has been some freeware software for the Sony Reader that was able to download and sync online newspapers for you for quite some time now. I first ran into it a couple years back, but didn't actually use the functionality. The only real drawback to it was having to connect it to your computer in order to update, so wireless updating in a smooth manner would be worth some money.

For years I used software like plucker to retrieve freely available newspapers and download them to a Palm Pilot. When I got my Kindle I used Calibre to do the same thing, but I found myself actually *paying* for freely downloadable content just because it was more convenient to have it delivered to my Kindle overnight and in a hassle-free format. Pay for Slate? Pay for the Atlantic or the New Yorker? Wha??? If it's cheap enough, I find myself willing to pay. And last month it was reported that some 30,000 subscribe to the WSJ on Kindle. Clearly, paid-for subscriptions are going to be a part of any future reader platform and any future publishing house.

It's kind of difficult for TPB to claim that they were not aware of the lawsuit if they already started to counter-sue a week ago.

Read about it here

Huh? No its not... it may be moving to lower the price, but thats what happens over time. Most people are fine with $0.99 per song. I don't mind paying $60 for a really good video game.

The content I get for free (news), I'd not pay for, because I simply don't care enough about it to get access. I already don't consider it having value... but am I going to stop paying for other content because some similar content is free? Nope.

Lookup sales of digital music downloads... they have been going steadly up.

http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2008/02/19/report:-digital-music-download-sales-pass-cd-sales-2012

Another group of fantasists speculate about ways of extorting money from Google, which they portray as a parasitic feeder on their hallowed produce.

From what I understand Google licenses news from the big news wires as well as from some of the big newspapers. Some of that has been forced through lawsuits.

Before that, they would just crawl news sites and display headlines and summaries, just like in their normal search.

It seems odd. Google has to pay for the privilege of sending them traffic. I wish I could get a deal like that.

If I were Google, the next time the traditional news outlets came to me with their hands out I'd tell them I've decided that I'd be more than happy to remove all their content from my index and no longer "steal" their business. Thew newspaper execs wouldn't like that too much.

"Gamers" are a tiny minority. While over 70% of the American public plays video games, most of those aren't Crysis players. They're playing games on their cellphone, or they play freecell or some other solitaire game, which you can get a better implementation of for Linux... or they play flash games, which work fine on x86 and x86_64 Linux.

Hardcore gamers are a small minority of course, but they tend to be a lot more computer-savvy than the average user, which increases their importance. Friends turn to them when it comes to computers, etc. But games are a concern for more casual gamers as well. When you enter a game store, you generally find no games for Linux (unless things look really different over there in the U.S.), and that's where the casual user will go. Anyway, people are lazy, and there's got to be some incentive to change OS for them to do it. So why would people change to Linux? Most people don't care about open source and other possible ideological reasons, and price is a small issue, since you can always get Windows without paying for it anyway. The average user don't have any incentive for change at all. But if you could tell the hardcore gamer that you can get the latest games and possibly better performance (if that is the case) on Linux, you might have the embryo of your tipping point right there.

Understanding the makeup of the population of video gamers? YOU FAIL IT! The average age of the U.S. gamer is 35[...]I'm 31

I included myself in the "youths" bracket, as opposed to the middle aged, and I'm not younger than you are. Call me sloppy, but I didn't expect the Spanish inquisition.

It's nearly 2.30 a.m. over here, and I have to sleep, so I can't explain myself in more detail right now.

You underestimate the importance of games.

No, I don't. You overestimate the importance of big-ticket games.

Gamers are forced to keep Windows installed, and it's a pain to dual-boot.

"Gamers" are a tiny minority. While over 70% of the American public plays video games, most of those aren't Crysis players. They're playing games on their cellphone, or they play freecell or some other solitaire game, which you can get a better implementation of for Linux... or they play flash games, which work fine on x86 and x86_64 Linux.

There are of course lots of middle aged people who don't play games or who are satisfied with simple ones, but they won't start any great migration.

What do you mean "great migration"? Ever heard of a concept called the "tipping point"?

Youths are the key, and the gamers especially.

Understanding the makeup of the population of video gamers? YOU FAIL IT! The average age of the U.S. gamer is 35. Those of us who buy multiple big-ticket games a year are far in the minority. Actually, now that I think of it, let me just be anecdotal; I'm 31, and while I did reinstall Windows XP so that I could replay some old games I owned (mostly Mechwarrior IV which doesn't support arbitrary resolutions anyway to match my display, so I'm over it again - fucking amateurs) the only new game I've bought I think in the last COUPLE of years was Twilight Princess... which I bought when I bought a Wii. The next one will likely be Wii Fit... if my gigantic ass will fit on the thing. I'm (barely) under the weight limit, but I wear size 16 shoes and have a very broad stance to match my height.

Sorry, but people like you and me are now in the minority of gamers. And people like me don't care so much about computer games any more. I have a Wii, an Xbox, and a PS2. The only game I play on Windows any more is Civilization 2, which runs fine in vmware.

adults (a niche market which Playstations have traditionally been strong in)

The age of the average gamer is 35. Adults are certainly not a niche market by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, even adult female gamers outnumber the teenage male gamer.

How many times has the MPAA or RIAA been linked with hiring hackers to DOS attack torrent websites or upload releases that contain viruses or malformed software in them?

RIAA hired hackers to infect P2P users and websites
http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2003/01/15/riaa-denounces-claim-it-hired-hackers-to-attack-p2p-systems

TorrentSpy says MPAA paid man $15,000 to hack and disrupt TorrentSpy's network
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/7583.cfm

The hackers are only responding appropriately in this case.

The Swedish government put The Pirate Bay in court and TPB responded appropriately by hiring lawyers and civilly appearing for trial.

The MPAA and RIAA hacked and disrupted P2P networks and so hackers fought back using the same exact methods.

Is hacking the MPAA or RIAA good? Not at all. But they started this nonsense both in and out of court with lawsuits and hiring people to illegally hack and disrupt networks.

I wish someone could explain how it is that countries everywhere are moving towards stricter and stricter IP laws when at this level there is plenty of evidence that they are having a deleterious economic impact. Even in countries in Europe where campaign contributions are not influential as in the USA. It seems that left wing politicians who supposedly abhor big business are just as pro IP as everyone else.

It also seems that whatever level of IP protection exists its never enough. Recently the EU considered extending copyright term lengths from 50 to 95 years. http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2008/07/17/eu-proposes-extending-copyright-term-length-95-years
If anyone has some insight I would appreciate it.

I am assuming you know about the folding@home project, yah..?

Which supposedly hit a petaflop back in 9/07.

Microsoft is huge, bigger in revenue than IBM, and enormously rich.

Not according to financial data. MSFT have a 54 billion income, vs. 96 billion for IBM.

Microsoft is facing a saturated market. Every desktop PC on the planet that could run an MS app is already doing so. The rest is running non-MS OSes and that percentage is growing. In the server world, Linux is a very strong competitor. Same in the consumer electronics world. Mobile phones? Against Symbian and Linux, Microsoft CE is losing market shares. Set-top boxes? After what MS did to AT&T's IPTV project (delayed because of Windows CE problems), carriers will think twice. Airplane in-flight entertainment systems? Linux again.

MSFT is trying to make inroads on new markets, but it has so far failed to achieve domination in anything but the desktop.

So I wouldn't sell them short, but I wouldn't expect them to skyrocket either.

my sis went to app-state tho....maybe i should take them more seriously now.

No, Don't take them too seriously.

I was in the States last summer and I couldn't find a non-HDTV at the Circuit City there

When you pray, the RIAA pays !