How much of a "review" can you make with a seven-second video shot on a smartphone anyway?

In what country? The United States, home of SlashdotMedia, has the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Internet activist Aaron Swartz ended up committing suicide over threats to prosecute him for CFAA violation for having spidered JSTOR.

Someone can know a product even if it was purchased through a channel other than Amazon, or received as a gift, or borrowed from a friend, or (in the case of books) borrowed from a public library or on Kindle Unlimited.

A PlayStation 4 owner tries a Wii U at a store or friend's house, discovers that the graphics on its games are roughly as detailed as those of PlayStation 3 games, and thus is justified in composing a review on Amazon without buying a Wii U on Amazon.

No matter how many pixels you pack into a 12 inch laptop, it's still going to be a 12 inch laptop and will need appropriate text magnification. Otherwise, good luck fitting a 17 inch laptop into a 12 inch satchel.

True of Pandora, not of Spotify. Spotify users make their own playlists.

When Garth Brooks did that, it was called GhostTunes. But his complaint was more about selling singles separate from the "context" of the album.

Not yet. "Later this year" (source), Apple plans to release the Swift programming language under an open source license. It'll probably take some time after that for someone to port it to GNUstep.

If the shelf life of a musical recording is measured in months, then why does copyright in the recording subsist for two orders of magnitude longer (95 years)?

Better yet, frak both "share" and Cher.

Along with Jack Valenti and other big names in the entertainment industry, Cher was among the "forever less one day" proponents of copyright term extension. Normally, copyright is designed to "forget" old works so that, say, songwriters don't run the risk of accidentally making a work too similar to an older work, getting sued, losing, and falling into financial ruin. Term extension interferes with this forgetting.

Why flip them twice a year and not, say, weekly?

I was under the impression that a fail-over server that does not occasionally handle traffic in periodic tests could not be trusted to handle traffic in a true failure situation. Netflix routinely conducts tests of its failover infrastructure, shutting down large blocks of its leased Amazon capacity to make sure the rest of its capacity can keep up.

Both of this musician's names can be represented in ASCII: "Prince Rogers Nelson" and "O(+>".

Originally, to punish ancient Babylonians for trying to build a dangerously tall ziggurat. Since then, to preserve access to oral tradition.

"Gazinya" looks plausible, as if it were some ethnic variant of Garcinia , the genus that includes mangosteen and brindleberry trees.

Thank you for ninjaing me. I often chime in about this issue when someone complains about Slashdot's lack of support for Unicode. Most of the time, after I explain the code point whitelist and the reason for it, someone complains that a blacklist of dangerous code points would work better. My usual reply is that new versions of Unicode may insert new control code points that get activated before the Slashdot admins have the chance to add them to the blacklist. And besides, many characters outside the current whitelist are far more useful for what used to be called "ASCII art" than for readable text in the English language. For example, Oriya letter ii (U+0B08) looks to English speakers more like the head of a Smurf. And ASCII Goatse and ASCII Jack Off are why Slashdot had to add a lameness filter in the first place.

But apparently, Slashdot doesn't strip bad characters on display, only on post. This post, for example, still contains a bidirectionality override.