Correct me if I'm wrong, but there were months of licensing negotiations between Google and the labels that ultimately fell through. I don't know about Amazon.

(http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/12/what-stalled-negotiations-between-google-and-the-music-industry/)

It's not greed. It's stupidity.

They rejected every deal these services had to offer, not realizing the obvious financial advantage of having an agreement before launch. They walked, and now they have to play legal catch-up in order to ultimately get probably less than they would have gotten if they had just agreed to the worst deal.

Sigh. Someone on the negotiating team should have known that these companies feel that they could absorb whatever the costs of being sued would be and still walk away profitable. But they didn't. So they have the business sense of gnats.

Unless the files are zipped into an archive, a lot of clients will let you choose which particular files you download from the torrent and skip all of the other ones.

I can understand why that might be annoying, but I would hardly count Chrome among other installer crap-ware. Chrome is by far the fastest browser I've ever used. It is quite snappy and responsive. It beats out Safari and Firefox- which has become, for me, unusably bloated - on an iMac Core 2 Duo by a pretty sizable speed margin. Since its layout engine is the same as Safari's, this must mostly be due to V8, which is lightning fast. Pretty amazing work, honestly. I can see why it's eating away at Microsoft's market share.

If you submit, those pesky installation questions will disappear. I submitted, and I'm happier now. If I'm a Google shill, I can deal with that.

How so? Am I missing something or are Bachelor's degree recipients paid a median salary several thousand dollars more than associate's degree recipients and about twenty-thousand more dollars than high-school-only students?

Or are you saying because graduates with advanced degrees beyond (but including) Bachelor's earned more that specialization is more valuable?

No, not all liberal arts majors are prepared for all jobs. People with bachelor's degrees, however, earn a lot more because the economy still demands them. Why?

I don't know the statistics on this but I would reckon most people who have ever taken a gen-ed physics course know that perpetual motion is impossible. I'm biased because I'm a physics major. On the other hand, natural sciences were a gen ed requirement at my school, as they are in most liberal arts schools. Either you know a small subset of admittedly dim-sounding college graduates, or are exaggerating to justify your prejudice.

Knowing about the threat would sure help us develop those means, though, right? You may have accidentally seen at least one asteroid movie (I don't blame you if you haven't, though). The response to the threat, and all of the attend technological innovations, always comes about *after* the Earth is facing imminent destruction. Seems unlikely, but in a world where Steve Buscemi can be selected to be on an Earth-saving mission to Space, anything is possible.

"He's got space dementia!"

There's a reason why liberal arts students are still the most economically valuable in the US and people still pay tens of thousands dollars a year to get a liberal arts bachelor's degree. It's not because they're saps. It's because, unlike those who specialized early on, liberal arts students are applicable to almost all of the tasks that are asked of them. They can be assigned to fulfill complex functions and are able to learn on the job, quickly. Instead of narrowing their focus colleges spent an enormous amount of time teaching them *generalized critical thinking* above and beyond what they learned in secondary education. Generalized critical thinking, it turns out, can be applied to nearly everything.

Wow, that sounds like the plot-line for a new uber-meta Michel Gondry indie film. People turn off their memories of watching the Hangover 2 (you're referring to the second one, right? they were both underwhelming), only to end up watching it again. Call it "Be kind. Switch off all memories of or related to the movie Hangover 2." It's gold.

People in Boston, upon hearing about the victory, said "eh." And then resumed shouting at each other in traffic.

You are quite correct in saying that there are no guarantees. However, it is worth pointing out that our failure to cure the common cold isn't due to any scientific inadequacies. It's mostly due to the fact that 99.9999% of all common-cold sufferers get better and do not die. If as much research was devoted to finding a common cold cure as is devoted to HIV research, I'm fairly sure some headway could be made. But it's good that the level of attentions given to these two diseases are so lop-sided.. I wouldn't haven't any other way. I will almost certainly not die of the common cold, although it's possible that I will die of the common cold as an opportunistic infection secondary to AIDS (but thanks to research, not by much.) (I don't have AIDS.)

As the average life expectancy gets longer and longer, more people are going to end up dying of diseases like Alzheimer's just as research funds were allocated to AIDS in direct response to the unconscionable suffering of the AIDS pandemic. The moral imperative (and basic impulse to self-preservation) for curing it will increase in direct proportion to the number of people suffering from it.

It's all perceived value which floats up and down. It has absolutely nothing to do with history or tradition. Nor does it have anything to do with "real value" - there is no such thing. Value is always imposed by demand. There's absolutely no reason that Bitcoins can't be as valuable as a dollar or gold.

Alaska official: Hey IT guy, we have 24,000 of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin's archived e-mails. That's too many to be stored in electronic form, though, right?

IT guy: Uhm, why, no, not at all. I'm not sure if you know this, but e-mail is short for "electronic mail," and the Internet is also electronic. In fact, e-mail comes from the Internet. So the e-mails you are talking about are already electronic.

Alaska official: Right, but converting all of these would be impossible. There are waaaaay too many, right?

IT guy: No, actually. I could convert them to HTML or PDF format right now if you'd like, and we can post them to the state of Alaska web site immediately.

Alaska official: What I'm hearing from you is that it is possible but very, very, difficult.

IT guy: No, it's quite simple, really. I actually did it while you were saying that sentence.

Alaska official: You're fired.

The other thing about Android is this: It is in the exact same position re: mobile devices as Windows was to PCs in the nineties, except for getting it into more devices isn't as difficult for Google because Google doesn't employ Microsoft's coercive, agressive licensing practices. Thus, saturation of devices with Android is likely to be even quicker than the saturation of PCs with Windows.

So if you are a commodity OEM manufacturer - why not put Android on your TV? Phone? Blu-Ray? Air Conditioner? (Hopefully not.) If I were Microsoft, at this point I would seriously consider giving Windows Phone away to any manufacturer who will take it. It's more important at this point to have a foot inside the mobile business than to be making a profit off of it. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), Microsoft will not do anything without aggressive licensing practices, and since it considers software its main business, they will not do anything with software where the road to profitability isn't direct and obvious, so that kills that idea.

Also, to elaborate on your specific requirement for "multiple categorisations", and so that I might save myself from a "smart-ass" mod, here's a possible suggestion: http://www.tagsistant.net/ It's a tagging file system. You didn't specify which operating system you were on, but this works with Linux/BSD. Not quite mature, but I could see it potentially going places. At the very least, the idea of implementing tags directly in the filesystem might trickle up to extfs or NTFS or hfs+ eventually.

There's an app for that.