Perhaps run them 1-8 days after the show airs in the land of origin.

This is based on the idea that a slice of money from advertisers gets to the content producers because they can reach their potential audience - and awareness means that people might buy their products.

Instead, with a subscription service, you get guaranteed money because the people watching are willing to pay for the service. So yeah, too bad for the advertisers (or not, because nobody here in the EU cares for US insurances or mortgages or other products that are very much region-locked by their nature). They're even paying when they're not watching - that's what a subscription is! Better, when they get access at exactly the same time as it's transmitted via air, there's no reason for them to look for torrents.

There's no reason whatsoever to delay the release of the streaming version, unless you really want to bleed money for no good reason and go against all principles of capitalism. Offer the goods to as many people possible. The only delay should be perhaps in the subtitles, but since torrents don't have those anyway, it doesn't matter.

What I want to see is Trusted Government, but apparently that's an NP-hard problem.

I move to the menu, click on it, click on the section I want and click on the application I want.

If you know what it's called you could type it before you've even moved the moved the mouse a few inches. If you use it often, put it in a place where you can directly see and activate it (desktop, quicklaunch) so you don't have to waste time searching through sections or following paths. You need a tree/directory structure mostly for when you only have a vague hunch of what you need, instead of something specific.

Typing is way more efficient; provided of course that you're not hunting and pecking. The problem with the MS command line was always that unless you defined a crapton of paths in some configuration file it couldn't ever know what you were talking about - you'd have to 1) explicitly navigate there and 2) know which executable you wanted to start.

Just time your actions on a daily basis; what do you start using the menu and how long does it take you every time to navigate to it? Then compare this with hitting the Windows key and hitting "exc" or "wor" or what other 3 letters your software of choice starts with; it's faster. Since MS also does its research on a grand scale by recording metrics of millions of users, I'm fairly certain they've got better than personal/anecdotal evidence ;)

If copyright can be prolonged indefinitely or nudged every 20 years, there's far more incentive to kill off successful authors. After all, they only cost money after they've created a work that can be milked for the next 120 years.

Why'd you want to continue to pay for Amy Winehouse's drug habit if you can enjoy the royalties of her two albums for eternity minus a day? If they became public domain after her death, anyone would be able to download them without repercussions - making the intellectual property worthless at once.

Humans put out less CO2 than one volcano.

Mod parent down, he's completely and utterly wrong.

What has been seen, can now finally be unseen!

I claim that we darn humans have a hard time with reckoning the importance and value of numbers

No worries: those who don't get it will not know what Sieverts are anyway. When you say "Radiation exceeds tolerated levels for nuclear workers" (from this chart here ) you'd have a sufficient panic-inducing headline without having to explain what Sieverts are.

I like being able to divide a foot into all sorts of weird ratios and still have whole numbers.

And then you have to divide by 7 and then you're also in fractional/rational numbers land.

Driving drywall screws every 16" into a 48" wide sheet of drywall? Try doing that in metric!

Instead you'd have a 120 cm drywall sheet and you'd put screws in every 40 cm. Not exactly a compelling reason you're giving there.

"But it's smaller!" - yes, and as a result, they should be slightly cheaper unless the manufacturer is fleecing you.

sometimes it's actually pretty nice to have the computer built into the keyboard

Until you spill your drink. Though I agree that a flat box with only the connections, laptop-sized and having 2 or 3 DVI outputs would be pretty neat. It'd do the job as HTPC and portable workstation. The room saved by not needing a screen or keyboard could be used to improve specifications or cooling - but not to the point where you'd make it completely bulky.

It's way more efficient to generate power in a place where you can squeeze the efficiency out of it (reclaim and reuse any generated heat for instance), and your car won't like a 400 kg filtering installation while a power plant doesn't care about having one added to it.

Plus, you can get electricity from a much larger variety of sources; oil can be had by drilling, biofuels or thermal depolymerization. 2 out of those 3 depend heavily on location.

Why isn't he pulling his hair out

He appears to be bald already.

High-speed pizza delivery.

Gold and silver -are- useful goods. Electronics benefit from 'm in various ways; they don't corrode. They're just outrageously expensive to use. They're not useful if you completely dump the entire technology tree and start at hunter-gatherer level, though.

A nice defensible storage for our critical data.

It's not defensible - not even if it came with nukes.

Besides, L. Bob Rife is going to purchase it.

Now if you are rich on the other hand, the tax would apply to all kinds of luxury expenses. Buying a ferrari? Well then you are paying 23% of the purchase price in a tax. Buying a plane? The same.

That is based on the assumption that the rich make a lot of these luxury expenses. Something tells me that if you want to stay rich, you don't; hedge funds aren't as flashy, but give far better returns. In other words, you're not going to put a dent into their income if you assume every single one of 'm lives like a soap opera millionaire.