...before you have to rent it

That's not even remotely true.

What amazes me about 2nd amendments fanatics is that thought they will go on and on about their individual freedoms and the wording of the amendment itself, what they fail to recognize is that Uncle Sam and Co. (the States) have EVERY RIGHT to regulate the purchase of firearms.

Switch to the 1st amendment, which is regulated ALL THE TIME. Just because you have a belief you want to express, doesn't mean you can't commit libel. Doesn't mean you can use it as an excuse to not serve African Americans or make a gay couple's cake (lower courts have decided this issue already and I suspect in June so will the SCOTUS).

So strictly speaking, the Gov't and/or States absolutely have every right to tell you that you don't get to buy missiles or nuclear weapons. End of story.

Rights are indeed regulated. Get over it.

Coming full circle, what many "lefttist morons" such as myself would like to see is not taking away anyone's guns, but rather regulating them sanely: Get rid of the gun show loop hole, better background checks, restrictions on magazine capacities to mitigate damage, and of course better healthcare for our mentally ill. And do at a national level since we need consistency and cooperation among the States so bad actors can't exploit borders.

Piracy has been around forever. Where there is any distributable media whether that is software, music, movies, what have you, there will be pirates. Grrr...

But that's not the problem...

Fundamentally, the Internet coupled with digital media has eliminated the need for the overhead costs incurred by conventional brick-and-mortar distribution models.

The way media is distributed directly effects the revenue model:

If I have to create a plastic case and a small metallic like circle and ship it across the country to stores in order to share poka classics that is going to cost more than just offering it as a digital download.

Newspapers are dying for this exact same reason, distributing just news is not enough to bring in readership that attracts advertising revenue (its all online).

I will reiterate: The Internet has changed the way distribution of media occurs thereby directly effecting the revenue models of all the major industries. Get with the program.

Mr Wayne should not be fighting piracy, he should be working with his publisher to discover new ways to get his books in distribution chains that make sense in this new economy.

In classical Slashdot fashion, "I for one welcome our new Kindle overlords."

I totally agree, I have one and even signed up for the developer kit. It was an interesting architecture to say the least, they had a LifeOS platform that run a C-like scripting language under a VM called Pawn. The architects I believe stated that Pawn provided a very fast execution environment but made *programming* simple enough for hobbyist and even non-geek types.

My issues were mainly they didn't release anything after the Pleo itself. I mean they were some holiday behavioral editions but that's about it. I really wanted them to release a PDK so I could come up with my own behaviors to really make my Pleo my own. I think its a fantastic idea, albeit with most fantastic ideas, the barrier to entry is typically high.

One thing though, they should open source LifeOS and/or the PDK if they can't sell it. I think a community run RTOS focused on behavioral modeling and extending the model via a simple expressive language and user generated content is fantastic. I even suggested to them in a long survey I filled out as an owner of the first adopter that they should allow folks to exchange behaviors via the web and create a virtual Facebook for rotobotic toys and their owners.

Its a winner and way ahead of its time...but yet again the business model around it needed to be ironed out.

Its a far simpler system, "better" is up for debate...

You are talking more about PIC than virtual memory vs non virtualized address spaces. All modern binary containers like ELF provide ways to relocate text and more importantly data. Remember, architectures like Intel are almost by definition position independent since address are offset based.

But even today, your application specifies hard-coded addresses, you will break something and its obviously not portable across systems.

In the other *better* world you spoke you may have it worst where you have to relocate text and data because processes are competing for the same hard-coded physical address space.

Messy? I have never seen translation as the messy part. In fact that's the easiest part. Its managing virtual address space that is messy.

Well I would say the penalty for virtual to physical translation is mitigated by the translation units on the processor. Remember, when x86-64 came out they did away with segmentation since most operating systems (other than NT) didn't make use of it at all (pretty much all mainstream UNIX kernels map segments to cover the whole physical address space). There is certainly a penalty for lookup.

To further the above, remember with a direct memory mapped environment there has to be a way to prevent processes from stepping over each other. As many people have noted, virtual memory allows processes to *think* they have access to the entire address space (albeit virtual one) when only a limited amount of physical memory is installed. This feature also enables a cleaner run-time and linking environment. Imagine if every program had to be linked with hard addresses, how would you manage them...

What's interesting is that the concept of virtual memory and its benefits have now spread on a much more wider scale with complete virtualization where the entire hardware is abstracted.

So the 8 folks living in Montana may have trouble...ok...great...

Statesman's thoughts are just really way off. Just like real estate is about location, location, location, media is about content, content, content.

The fact is the proliferation of many technologies from streaming audio to that AUX IN line in your car have allowed listeners to get the same content XM/Sirius provides for FREE.

Its not about iPhones vs satellite radio. Satellite radio has always had this stigma around it:

I'm going to pay $13/month because some satellite radio DJ creates better iPOD playlists than me? Seriously.

If they can get more exclusive content like Howard Stern (whether you like him or not is not the issue) then I can see paying for a subscription.

But as it stands, I'll stick with my mp3 player, burned CDs, and NPR if I want to listen to something while driving.