Most of the folks working in the "music industry" are not musicians.

If you do not agree that we should encourage a robust system whereby musicians (and other artists) can make a middle-class age and contribute/enrich our society, you and I will never be able to have a reasonable conversation.

The gulf between "average independent musician income" and "super rich musician" is astronomically huge.

If you want our culture to have a rich music component, full-time musicians need to make a decent middle-class living. Currently the number that can is vanishingly small.

FTFY. And of those very few, the ones who are making a living that's equivalent to even a 1st year helpdesk employee usually had help from a label at one point or another.

My MBP gets pretty damn hot when streaming off ustream.tv, for example, and that's with the power brick being external. I'd rather the fans be a little more powerful and the MBP be a little less ridiculously hot.

Enthusiasts call that an "xMac", and Apple has no interest in producing it.

The US doesn't have anything like a "national warranty".

Of course, after I hit submit, I realized I should have clarified: while the anime/manga is, of course, drawn art, the "books that people protest/picket" are photo books. Insofar as I can tell, they are not sexual in any way, but, of course, that's from my point of view. The people protesting, apparently, disagree with that assessment.

There are books that have pictures full of naked children that are published by major publishing houses, and there are people who picket and protest national chains who carry them.

Also, when the first wave of popular anime started coming over to the US, they decided they needed to change the age of many of the high-school-aged characters (or older characters who had relationships with high-school aged girls, specifically) because, shockingly, sometimes in literature people do things that not everyone might approve of.

It's not so rosy a picture of free-from-censored-influences with regards to art in the US as you appear to believe it is.

Not all coastline is beach environment, numbnuts.

In general I've had the most luck with T-Mobile, even for non-smartphone applications. Their pay-as-you-go plans and their willingness to let you use your own hardware without too much hassle are big pluses, as I see it. Plus their "cheap phones" are actually kinda nice.

Companies like to make people think that once you agree to a contract with ah arbitration clause, that you've got no recourse. Same with companies that have you "sign a release" and other such things.

Fortunately, (and their legal department knows this), that's not necessarily the case.

Yeahhh, but in a variety of situations it was stated that, at least on Earth, they don't use currency, and that accumulation of wealth isn't really necessary anymore because pretty much anything you could want is easily obtainable (hey, I dunno man, ask Picard and Kirk).

It's true that in much of the rest of the galaxy there are various forms of currency, but not everyone is the same as the Earthlings, so *shrug*

I kind of agree with you on this. The blurb quoted basically reads to me as "there isn't an easy alternative that allows me to do almost no marketing in order to have people buy my app."

While I sympathize with the author(s)' feeling that the AppStore's rules border on the completely arbitrary, there *are* alternatives, just not brain-dead, no-work easy alternatives.

re: McDonalds, its possible. I remember hearing/reading that they used to use some sort of bacon flavoring in their seasoning salt for the fries, though, and it started a veggie whargarbl storm.

I don't buy it. That article doesn't quote any of the survey questions, but with a result like that, I'm quite comfortable that the question design anything but impartial.