Your troll is worthless. There is no physical-object analogy, but one is coming: I copy the CAD design for a piece of plastic furniture being sold at huge profits. I then use my 3d printer to produce the same furniture at a slightly lower price than the original, and offer a free download of the CAD with it (the originator charged a nominal fee to pay for his server.) Since the CAD file is GPL licensed, perfectly within my rights. To continue business at his higher price, he may have to start competing in other ways: offer a warranty of basic function, have better availability, guarantee replacement turnaround, etc.

So then we both succeed in our various niches. But I find a way to improve the design and therefore more durable printed furniture. The originator is within his rights to copy my improvement back into his product.

Good thing you're such a flagrant moron that we shouldn't have to worry about you reproducing.

Hobbyist support my ass.
As a lawyer he's thinking "Ooh! 100,000 people banned, that's a big target to profit from!"

As a hobbyist, if I want to run whatever software, I pay: $100 for a motherboard, $130 for a small case and power supply, $50 for a hard drive, $30 for an optical drive, $0-200 for an operating system, $50 for a wireless keyboard and mouse, $80 for a wireless gaming controller, $15 for a DVI cable.

Anybody guess what I bought to run homebrew software? A fecking computer!
An xBox is not a computer, and if you want to change that, Microsoft is well within their rights to say they don't want xbox-like computers on Live!

There are three reasons to mod your Xbox:
1. Turn it into a cheap PC

2. Play homebrew software (basically #1)

3. Steal games.

All of these rely on the same method: replace or disable protections on the OS or base firmware. It's in the quick start guide(the thing that tells you what is and isn't included) that if you mod your xbox, you will not be able to play Live! and may not be able to play the games you own.
So why the hell is anyone surprised about the ban?
And why the hell is anyone even angry about the ban? They expected it!

No. But the _expected_ target audience of Nintendo owners are children, so those are the most heavily advertised for Wii. They somehow didn't notice that we original NES owners GREW UP. We got old, but never stopped enjoying games. I have tried half a dozen games on the Wii, two of them Final Fantasy games, and I would probably enjoy the mechanics a lot more if they didn't plaster CHILD all over the screen with baby this and baby that. Enough of the baby bullshit, just give me a game!

I'm an adult now, please stop advertising to me-20-years-ago.

(Almost kept Star Wars: Force Unleashed, but while it was a mature theme, the mechanics relied on childish button mashing....)

I'm not the only one who thought 'mature' as in older games, but the article is referring to Mature rated games, which is to say games that you have to be mature to not imitate.

Although sometimes I really want to...

Seriously, when my shoe got wedged between the dash and accelerator, the FIRST thing I did was hit the clutch, the second thing I did was shift into neutral so I could slow down, and the third thing I did was unwedge my damned shoe!
I think there was an itch on the top of my foot or something, but I learned to be more careful of where my feet were in that car.

I'd been a manual transmission driver for 5 years at the time. Did I waste time thinking about it? NO! My instinct when I need emergency slowdown is hit the clutch. My instinct when I need precise braking is to go into neutral. I don't need to think about those anymore because I spent enough time thinking about them so I could drive at all.

Mine is a custom construct case, but any atx-based case will do for the old Gateway flexATX or similar ITX boards.
I had a 900Mhz PIII on a reclaimed Gateway flexatx with 512sdRAM and a sata controller with 5400rpm 500GB drive, with an old dell sff power supply, 50 watts.
I have not metered the rebuild(1u server PSU, itx board, 1.2Ghz) but I imagine it's around the same power.

IOW: Don't forget the old low-power hardware can still max out 100Mb networks.

Seriously, that's the first thing this made me think of, when combined with the 'sensing' robot designs.

It looks like we'll have Star Wars-universe limbs well before we have the energy weapons and light-speed travel.

Because patents have a very limited lifetime.

Why, would you prefer they be protected by copyright?

Your question lost its legitimacy when it wasn't about open standards(if the standard is supposed to be free, the tech behind it can't be monopolized.)

Ban open carry and pass conceal carry in one bill. Bonus: those who can legally carry now are automatically grandfathered in to conceal-carry.

You write the bill, I'll hide until the fan stops throwing shit.

No the keywords are almost certainly more like silent, attack, government, agent, TA^D ...

That's a terrible analogy!
Of course the price of one game can be different from another!
  A much better analogy is: Game prices(shh) at Walmart.(I work near one(A), my mom lives next to another(B), and my wife works near a third(C).)
I can go to A, mention that Final Fantasy IV is $29, $5 less online(Walmart.com), if I could get that price now, I'd buy it. They match Walmart.com.
I can go to B, mention that Final Fantasy IV is $29 online, and they remind me it's the same price there!
I can go to C, mention that Final Fantasy IV is $29, or $10 less online, and they say "Sorry, we don't match walmart.com at this store." I say "Walmart doesn't match Walmart's prices, but they will match somebody elses?" he says, "Umm, yeah." I say, "Well I'll buy it here, start playing it, order it online for less, and return it here for the higher price, right? Package, UPC, and other stuff you guys check match, so should be no problem," he says "But the serial number has to match," I point out, "No serial number on the package, it doesn't matter," he says, "I guess so."

So I did, only sad part was the online one had different artwork, and it shoplifter-beeped on the way into the store.

It's always a wonder when some entrepeneur says something stupid like "it would only take 25,000 square miles of road to power the US three times over" without doing the basic f-ing math and realizing(considering a road width of 28 feet) that is over FOUR MILLION MILES of road!

It's a great idea. It would be cool if all the roads were replaced with it, wonderful if it really held up to the 2 feet of snow and 20 degrees below weather some places get. But it would have to replace a hell of a lot of road to approach the numbers in the article. Even if you say six lanes, that's still over a million miles of road to replace!