If the current cheap phones had perfect support for 3d-holos of the caller for free already today, I still wouldn't really use it...

On the other hand, for virtual goods with near-zero marginal cost, if some user pays $5 for the bundle then it often is $5 more profit than with the normal prices.

By the way, does any noticeable percentage outside of US believe in creationism, or it is just a local issue there?

My impression seems that there is no mass debate about creationism in other countries even the most religiously conservative ones such as Poland, and even Vatican and the popes have repeatedly claimed that there is no contradiction between their faith and evolution theory or big bang theory...

IIRC, the UK has a semi-recent law limiting 'final clearing' of cheques to 6 days, but in USA it still is allowed to treat it as 'semi-cleared' and possibly invalidate it for as long as the bank wants, which may be months for international cheques.

The point was that pretty much everywhere else 100% settlements are non-cheque settlements and people there don't really use anything like a cheque. USA and (partly) UK are only large markets where cheques are still seriously considered.

Yeah, the man could've just forged the checks himself, submitted to his bank, wired it out to Malaysia and went for an early tropical retirement sipping margaritas..

That's how commonly used payments work everywhere else (Europe except UK, Asia) - all settlements are final and that's it.

If you want to eat a severely restricted diet, then you must spend osme time to consider what replacements to eat to sustain your long-term health, you can't just skip a major food group and rely on things working out by themselves. Some vegans do it, some don't - and suffer after some time.

You can't stay healthy on salad and tomatoes; I know some extremely healthy vegans who eat an extreme variety of foods every day that I don't consume in significant amounts - nuts, sprouts, berries, extreme variety of foreign origin vegetables. But if you take the lazy way of usually eating what your local food places have as vegetarian option, then you probably have an extremely unbalanced diet that's missing or lacking at at least a couple essential aminoacids or vitamins.

That's the problem. With meat you can be lazy - while steak alone isn't balanced either, there have been experiments trying a sustained 100% meat+offal/brains diet for more than a year with no problems identified; but you can't survive on any staple plant alone, you need a diverse mix of them.

If most people would be able to stay reasonably healthy and with normal functional capacity for 500 years on average, then there is no reason or possibility for retirement at 60 - eternal life would naturally mean eternal work to sustain yourself, of course.

Most people would gladly work their asses off for 0.1% stake in the next Facebook, Zynga, Google or whatever.

+1. I don't normally care about these 'first birds' of data working for or against something, since the conclusions quite often change after it has been discussed in the scientific community for a few months, but for this, my first thought was "in your face, Sheldon!" :)

USA levels of imprisonment are apparently possible without a collapse of society.

So in UK, they could imprison five times more people than currently are held incarcerated there. For every axe-murderer, we could put five Anonymous guys behind bars, and the society most likely would function just as well as USA. From what I see about the numbers of Anonymous, they could imprison every one that did something online to 'protect wikileaks' if they get the evidence, and imprison ten times as many for simple suspicions on doing that, and that imprisonment level would still be quite possible.
Does that answer your question?

You most likely haven't lived in a totalitarian regime. You can very simply throw enough people in jail to change everyone's behavior - ask any old ex-USSR citizen who has lived in times of Stalin, there are quite many of them around. You might ask people of North Korea if you could. The nature of homo sapiens is that they need far more serious worries to consider rebellion against a strong authoritative power - wikileaks wouldn't be it, so such causes can be easily suppressed by simple ruthless actions, jails, torture and executions. Only widespread poverty or starvation or perception of weak leadership or outside force could do it - as for the large dictatorships of 20th century. Force of people? Bah. It can be easily suppressed for generations, as history has shown.

Make two or three high-profile arrests and convictions, and the membership of Anonymous may easily decrease by an order of magnitude, as Joe Random Citizen will not do it anymore out of fear of reprisals.

The "dumbest folks" as you call them are your bread and butter, your main force, your only resource. Who cares about the smart hackers for uses such as Anonymous? They are an extreme minority, they can perform as individuals, but for a major effect you need to convince regular guys to do their part - and they wouldn't even know what a vpn was even if you wrote and gave them a vpn-for-dummies pamphlet.

I believe that the uninformed people also have a right to free their mind from intruding advertising - so I tell them about AdBlock and suggest to try it.
I believe that the current majority who watch ads don't do it because of an informed choice - they just don't know what modern technology can do for them.

If it was made by military saboteurs, then wouldn't such a targeted action be an act of war?