The problem with your suggestion is twofold, simply stated:

A) People are easily convinced of falsehoods, and nowhere near so easily convinced otherwise when the truth comes to light.

B) Companies that can afford to throw tens of thousands of dollars/sterling/euros at someone for complaining about less than two hundred can just as easily afford public relations efforts to concoct and reinforce damaging lies about people they feel are a threat, feeding back into A.

Later, Kerrigan discovers that she's the only entity in the Swarm that can handle a bra clasp.

I really wish I had mod points, because White Flame hits the nail right on the head. Small local businesses need the Internet like a fish needs a bicycle. A blogspot page for events, maybe a simple '90s style page to show off bits of inventory and provide contact information, and that's really all they need at most.

Shit, I'm a gamer and I've spent on average a hundred bucks on upgrades a year for probably the last decade. With the exception of the occasional Cryengine game, there's been very little released in the last several years that demands (or even just begs) for regular, massive upgrades.

That was my reaction. I suspect they're going to wildly misread the 'subversive Star Trek' theme and make it so Roj Blake has more space-sex than James Kirk.

I hate to break it to you, but under that kind of model you'd probably be watching four channels worth of serene blue nothing. Cable packages subsidize less-popular channels, which includes... Syfy, TLC, the History channel, not that they're huge losses at this point, and basically anything else that isn't driven by one of the major basic networks or popular premium channels like HBO. Even they'd be impacted, because while advertising is a huge source of income, contracts with cable providers provide steady baseline funding as well.

In a nutshell: A lot of the crap you don't watch is ultimately funding the stuff that you do.

Anyone with the gumption to claw their way out of an unmarked grave deserves an interview at the very least.

Ask a Zentraedi.

Whitelists are a fair idea in principle, but in practice malware-laden ads distributed by promiscuous ad networks are a problem. While reputable networks allow sites to tailor ad campaigns and block specific ads or types, they often trade spots among themselves which can result in bad ads slipping into rotation despite the safeguards. And 'bad' can range from 'loud, expanding Flash' to 'welcome to the botnet, comrade'.

Sites that are particularly large, or under a big umbrella, Slashdot for example, can avoid this kind of thing by running their own in-house network... but smaller sites don't have that kind of luxury. There still needs to be an interest in vetting submitted ads by those internal networks as well-- curse.com is basically an ad network with forums and MMO add-ons floating on top, and they have a bad history of serving malware and spear-phishing attacks to their users.

Mmmno. If you really think that there's one single reason why Linux has never swept the non-nerd world by storm, then I have an open-sourced bridge to sell you.

The formulation might be different. American soft drinks tend to use high-fructose corn syrup, which lends a different flavour than the glucose/fructose mix that's typical in Canada, and worlds away from stuff made with cane sugar.

Oh, that's easy. Take it down for 'improvements', set up a Kickstarter, and promise an assortment of Tux-themed gewgaws bought through Dealextreme in exchange for pledging at a variety of levels.

Someone's already done a short Portal movie (search Youtube for 'Portal: No Escape'; I don't want to accidentally give hits where they aren't due), but you're right. It's really difficult to pull off a film where there is only one visible, active actor. It's possible, but while I enjoy Abrams' oeuvre for its flashes of cleverness and all of its ridiculous spectacle, I don't think he could pull off a straight-up Chell vs. GlaDOS.

Of course, this is assuming that everything is based on the games and not the broader continuity they're built from. A movie about Gordon Freeman squeezing antlion bits, or Chell discovering that the cake is (twist ending!) moist, delicious, and real? No. God, no.

A movie based around the events of the Seven Hour War, or the events leading up to GlaDOS going on-line, on the other hands? Those, or something strongly resembling those, I could see.

Preferably one from a regime that doesn't have a history of embarrassingly faked propaganda shots.

What's worse is that ad networks will trade space between themselves. Even if a site is conscientious about the ads they show and the networks they're affiliated with, malware-laden ads can still filter through because of that promiscuity.