"I made this half-pony/half-monkey monster to please you.
But I get the feeling that you don't like it.
What's with all the screaming?
You like monkeys; you like ponies.
Maybe you don't like monsters so much.
Maybe I used too many monkeys.
Isn't it enough to know that I ruined a pony making a gift for you?"

No, no, no. It's the Boy Scouts of America.

Ironically enough, Kili actually has three peaks.

Blackmail is such an ugly word. I prefer extortion. The X makes it sound cool.

How can something be X-times less massive than something else? I can understand half as massive, or 1/10 as massive, but two to ten times less massive doesn't make any mathematical sense for a result that must be a positive number.

This would be the equivalent of going out in the streets in your car, shutting your eyes and hoping everyone else on the road is kind enough to honk their horn to signal their position.

Marco.

who will prosecute the suspects? A criminal trial is expensive and ends up importing criminals to whichever nation chooses to prosecute. That's the reason that the Somali pirates get turned loose. A similar situation would arise for trans-border cyber crime. Everyone would hope that someone else would prosecute.

I agree with you wholeheartedly. All of the free market crowd should recognize that a free market is predicated upon all participants having enough information to make informed decisions. So access to information is critical for the market participants to know what they are consenting to in an agreement. All of the arguments from economists about market efficiency are based upon perfect information by all parties. This is clearly an idealization, but it underscores the need for widely accessed, shared information in the running of a free market. A free market is not a natural state of the economy, it is a highly refined construction based upon thousands of years of social evolution. Communication and access to information are essential infrastructure.

Living in the rural Ozarks, we have decent broadband, with the exception of one provider that absolutely sucks.

It eventually comes down to property rights, though. The government lacks the legitimate moral authority to confiscate an individual's property to provide that property to someone else. Taxing one person to provide for someone else is theft, pure and simple.

I object to this for a different reason: I consider the concept of an organization with world jurisdiction intrinsically dangerous and unacceptable. It's like a monopoly: if you don't like their rules, where else are you going to go?

Please pronounce a hard 'g' in NOM... oh, wait ;)

Agreed. I've always just gone out, bought a new phone outright, and whacked my existing SIM card in it when I got home. None of this contract crap. But from what I can tell it is very hard/impossible to do that in the US? Which sucks ... I hate being tied to a particular carrier (and besides I have several SIM cards floating around that I tend to use in different situations).

Even worse, the US phones I've seen actually brand the phone hardware/firmware itself with the carriers logo and stuff. Wtf?! The phone should have NOTHING to do with the carrier. The analogy you made with brand X Wifi cards only working with brand X hotspots is a good one.

I can make perfectly readable jpgs of book pages with a Ricoh GX100, handheld, at 400 ISO. Soft edges? If my eyes don't see them when I'm zoomed in x16 I doubt it'd be a problem for any OCR software that can cope with normal quality printing.

Kit snob much?

Yeah, the fallout from Chernobyl isn't nearly as dangerous as the fallout from coal burning in the USA. (No sarcasm there)