Oh, I dunno...

1. 1. The hours you practiced, without compensation, to get to the point to where you could record the music in the studio without wasting too much time with retakes.
2. 2. The years you practiced, without compensation and possibly paying someone else for lessons, trying to get good enough that you could actually record something someone else wants to listen to and (hopefully) purchase.
3. 3. If you're an instrumentalist: the instrument you had to buy, accessories (strings, etc.), and periodic repairs to keep that instrument in good working order.

Just to name a few.

Other than musician and surgeon, there really aren't many professions I can think of where you're expected buy equipment and learn how to use it at your own cost, then perform essentially flawlessly the first time every time or you'll soon lose your job.

manbearpig?

You didn't do so well in that marketing class, did you?

Nah. It just shot the tonearm off the record. Never could make it all the way through that one without a stack of pennies to weigh it down.

If your video card has a secondary output, you're ready to go.

1. Download Hulu Desktop.
2. Run an HDMI cable from the second output of your video card to your TV.
3. Get a media center remote for the computer.

Done.

Ask your local police department if you need to subscribe to phone service to dial 911. In many locations you'll still get a dial tone if your phone service has been disconnected. In those cases, you can usually only dial 2 phone numbers: the local phone company (to set up service) or 911.

If you want the technology to improve, donate your speech!.

It's absolutely free for me to listen to voicemail. I am not willing to use text messaging until it's free. In fact, I have my provider block all incoming texts since I'm unwilling to pay a single penny (definitely not $0.20) for them. Data plans on the phone are too expensive, so I can't check my email from my phone.

I want the reverse: I want to call my voicemail and have it READ me my email.

Nope. Nowadays, the parents would more likely say there was no way their little angel would do anything the way they were describing. Then they would sue the school district for confiscating the child's personal property.

I'm serious about this. Parents these days are complete idiots (for the most part).

Many of us could survive without high-speed internet, but many others require such a service to remain competitive in our chosen professions.

Maybe not critical to all, but certainly critical to some.

Nope. The way they chose to make a profit was to sell large high-priced cars.

When gas is cheap, many people don't care if their cars are gas guzzlers. So the crowd that wants SUVs bought them. The rest of us bought reliable small, fuel-efficient, foreign cars since there really was no domestic alternative.

Gas makes it's way to $4+/gallon and everyone wants to jump on the fuel-efficient car bandwagon, and no one was left on the gas-guzzing-who-cares bandwagon. If American car makers had designed cars to fit the fuel-efficient market alongside the SUV market, they would have still been able to make profit. They ignored one market; foreign manufacturers didn't. Toyota still made the Tundra while it made the Corolla. The American assembly line workers would have been perfectly happy to make a car that would sell, but they can only make the cars in the quantities the company decided to have them make.

The execs and designers made a bad business decision. Good thing that the execs don't need a labor union to ensure they get reasonable health insurance and retirement benefits! Heck, if the company wouldn't provide those kind of benefits, they'd just get a job as an executive for Sears or Georgia-Pacific, or any other big corporation since business execs usually don't know shit about the businesses they run and are completely replaceable by another business exec idiot! Lets just screw all the stupid laborers 'cuz labor unions are evil!

Another design problem is reliability. Read the Consumer Reports car guide from the last several years. Each year, they print a paragraph lamenting the absence of many/any American cars on their "reliable used car" list. If that paragraph hasn't been pasted on the wall in the board rooms of all the American car manufacturers for years, they are obviously idiots. If the company fatcats haven't been asking themselves every day of every year of the last decade "why can't we design a reliable vehicle?" they deserve to be forced to live on zero pay while they pay their hard-working factory workers out of their sold personal assets.

Or, better, they should be forced to work 60-hour weeks in the assembly lines. You know, without "luxuries" like health insurance.