It's even worse than you suggest for those early adopters. If you bought itunes music back when the tracks had DRM, and you lose it, it's gone forever- itunes won't let you download re-download albums that have been changed in the interim, under any circumstances.

But it probably won't be. Consider "There Will Be Blood" and "No Country For Old Men". Not horror flicks, sure, but in my opinion two of the best R-Rated Movies of their decade. Together, they won 6 Oscars and over 100 various awards from other sources. They were cheap to make, too, at about 25 million a piece. Yet despite the acclaim, they only grossed 40 and 74 million, respectively. Now, to you and me that sounds like a tidy profit, but for a studio to see two absolute standout R movies, with critical acclaim positively dripping off them and pooling at their feet, turn up about 100 mil between them? That spells R I S K.
Remember, too, that the exorcist was made a solid 25 years before theaters started getting serious about enforcing R ratings. It's a different world now, and R-type, blockbuster-budget films require either indestructible licenses or surefire, tested premises to get the green light.

It's true, he says that a lot. But if you see him as a calculating cynic, it just looks like an attempt to appear beyond questioning. What I hear is more like "See? Nothing up my sleeve. And now, for my next trick..." I'd bet his audience is actually less likely to fact-check claims that precede an invitation to do so. It's classic reverse psychology! Of course, even if his viewers did heed the call to "look it up for themselves", it wouldn't matter.
There's a fairly large, interconnected, conservative blog-sphere, just as there is a liberal one. Selection bias gives us isolated left and right information ecosystems, and each one suffers few internal contradictions. Beck can baldly lie and tell his viewers to investigate for themselves, knowing that the places they'll look will be echoing the same ideas at the same time. (Cass Sunstein was one of a few individuals who earnestly investigated ways to mitigate this damaging effect. For that, Beck gave him the gift of complete character assassination.)

- Domestic violence became something people report
- Driving, and every offence associated with it, gradually became possible for the average individual
- Harmless drug offences must surely have increased since 1928, when pot was made illegal

Even if the population has become more criminal, as GP suggests, it's audacious to claim that the UK was better off a hundred years ago:
- Life expectancy is up 30 years
- Infant mortality rates are less than a fourteenth of what they were
- You're slowly closing the gender gap for members of parliament and degrees obtained

In short, even if there is more crime occurring, the UK is undeniably better off now than it was in the past.

Egyptians are probably going to get what they want, or at least what they want at the instant of transition. That doesn't mean it won't be bad for us, them, and the rest of the world as well. I haven't read up on the Iranian revolution, but superficially the protests in Egypt seem similar- they're not really about anything, except the removal of Mubarak; a large proportion of the population is Muslim; and there's no obvious candidate to fill the leadership vacuum.
It's easy to imagine Egypt voting for a new government not unlike Iran's, and that's the last thing anybody needs- including the Egyptians.

Every Australian I've ever encountered on the internet recognizes that their government is a perverse congress of clowns and anencephalic monsters. Why bother with stories discussing what they think? While I don't support censoring their speech (a charity they refuse to repay in kind), I do think that their manic ramblings deserve the same global attention as a loud fart in a third-grade classroom in Pawtucket

Most of the other formats were killed by something that was better, though. Downloads don't revolutionize music consumption in the way the cassette did, and they actually reduce sound quality unlike the CD (they don't have to, but itunes downloads do). On the other hand, they are cheaper. Maybe that's enough? I Still don't think it's a forgone conclusion. History clearly favors obsolescence, but it's hard to say if the CD fits the pattern.

Just eyeballing their figures, 4 years sounds plausible. Let's theorize:

Are sales of physical media still a good approximation of the health of the traditional games industry?
How do steam and the console services compare to the itunes app store in terms of income?
Will itunes application sales continue on this trajectory, or level off as the ipad and iphone reach saturation?
Are there really many valuable ideas still to be expressed in app form?
Will iphone-game consumers ever migrate significantly to traditional gaming platforms?

So many questions! So few answers.

That anybody was waiting for Verizon? Almost nobody holds back on something they want for 3 years because of something as insubstantial as a moderate and geographically varied difference in network quality. Maybe the install base will increase, but double? Hah!

Hosting a picture of Muhammad on Wikileaks doesn't make a lot of sense because it's not actually an example of withheld information. Wikipedia offers several depictions of Muhammad. If you can find a thing on wikipedia with ease, it doesn't really need leaking.

What the fucking fuck? Check your facts before you say stupid shit.

3G wireless service, at least where I live, just doesn't cut it for any of the purposes a tablet might serve. Service is intermittent, pages hang for minutes before loading, even google maps is basically unusable.
When we have real wireless broadband in my area, then I'll look into a tablet. Maybe.

you listening, google? fix this.

And where I'm living, it's more than ten degrees Celsius above the historical average for this time of year. And none of this means anything, until we factor it into the global average. For what it's worth, November was the second warmest November on record according to the NOAA. It'll be interesting to see whether the anecdotal reports of a colder December reflect the true global mean, when that information is available.

202 trillion? I'd be quite interested to hear where that number comes from, if you don't mind. 20 Trillion I probably would have swallowed but 200 I'd like a source for.

Even if you're right, though, I think it's hardly a point that should give republicans leverage. We're going to disagree on this, but here it is: a lot of democrats think that liberal policies can actually decrease spending in the medium to long term. The health reform most liberals actually wanted is a good example; we figured that by taking the fat insurance company profits out of the equation, we'd actually save money which could be used to fund efficiency research and pilot programs, ultimately saving us even more money. Preventative care available to all would save us money both in the ER, and by increasing economic activity (keeping people from getting too sick to go to work).
Similar arguments can be made for infrastructure investment, resource efficiency (a.k.a. "Green" energy practices), freer immigration policies, and so on. I can get into some of those with you if you like, but I'd need to muster my thoughts on them before getting into it, so I'll leave it at health care for now.

See, it's not that liberals don't care about the debt, or don't see the seriousness of the debt predicament (although I'll admit, if that 202 trillion figure means anything, it's more serious than I realized). Often they believe that their policies are at least as effective at reducing the debt as their conservative counterparts (in the long term).