[akots]

I have 3Gb plan for $20 per month. Never can get close even to 1Gb. I read news/forums and check all emails, sometimes play chess. Also, 4G LTE is somewhat slow, at least in DC. It is actually quite slow and very annoyingly so. But this stuff changes your life. No more wondering when the bus comes, just dial the GPS Metro website and it will tell what and when comes. I'm becoming very addicted and rely a lot on the phone.

Casual arguments and conversations about a specific subject turn into googling things and netting a result immediately. Which saves a lot of time and mental energy.

With regard to copyright, I have a few patents, mostly in pharmaceutical area. Never sold anything, but still would like to keep the options there open.

I do buy software/games just because Open Office (Apache version these days) is plain ugly and you need to stay synched with your Windows things at work. But I never buy music or clips or whatever. Also, I did not buy the first Hobbit (there are obviously no DVDs yet), just torrented it and did not like it much. But I bought Farscape complete (with Peacekeepers Wars), Kill Bill, and a few other things which I specifically like. Same with Game of Thrones. Cannot be arsed to get a cable TV and moreover the HBO subscription. It's like $50 per month here and I barely have time to watch BBC news (starting to like Al Jazeera more recently). There is no alternative and you cannot buy DVD with GoT, so that also got torrented. I promised myself to buy the disks to compensate since it is actually very good and enjoyable. Whether I'll do it or not, not sure. Would probably depend on how reasonable the price is going to be on a set.

Also, I play a lot of Mass Effect 3 multiplayer, so I bought all DLCs for the game and actually have not played them yet. It is just for the first time since Civ3 and/or Civ4 there is a game where I put a lot of free time. Almost every moment at home I'm not eating, cooking, cleaning, or sleeping, or talking over the phone, I play ME3. The complexity is amazing and the people are very nice although mostly a bit too young, especially the ladies. I think my situational awareness is not what it used to be 10 years ago and thus, I suck on higher difficulties but I try to hold my own there as much as I can.

Not sure about Open Source vs Windows polemics. Half of our students use Macs and I recently was forced to use iPAD and iPhone for a few days while traveling. That is really bad. Compared to Apple, Windows is actually quite decent. And Linux just still does not have enough stuff on it. Very few pieces of professional software run normally on Linux.