DRM licensing and implementation increase production cost. The increase is compensated by taxing customers with higher prices. As prices rise, the incentive to purchase is lessened and the reality of copying and free distribution becomes more pronounced. A practically infinite supply of ebooks can only be adequately priced by experimenting within markets. The tangible goods approach to electronic markets is flawed at inception, as it ignores reality and attempts to contain a force much greater than itself. Imagine flying water into the sun to inhibit global warming.

have there been any studies done between people who shoot lots of people in public and mental illnesses?

to see slashdot trolling its users. on an unrelated note, please fix the tab order for the posting form, thanks!

you don't urgently need to get anything together, right any time. this is a condescending load of bullshit.

i would rather plug in my laptop earlier than use internet explorer 8.

when google does this it's considered cute.

talent that could be harnessed for developing games i like is being harnessed to develop games i don't like.

but i would rather just shut down final fantasy, dragon quest, sonic, and mega man.

perhaps the 'surge' in piracy is related to general economic woes? blaming piracy for lost money is baseless speculation. there is no basis for determining what a person would or would not buy simply because they pirate it, and playing a game in itself does not mean that a person would have purchased it. imagine if in the nes days when you bought a cartridge it would only be playable on the nes with a serial number programmed into the cartridge! then suddenly it costs money to buy the game AND to pay for the technology and labor behind ensuring that game only works on that cartridge. games are becoming more expensive not because of piracy, but because of speculative fiction being held as truth. that's not good business management. that's like investing in books because you think authors create reality after reading 'the number of the beast' by robert heinlein.

a lot of people unintentionally apply intentionality to evolution. also, just because we are capable of recognizing a more efficient development cycle or design of any given 'naturally' occurring life form does not mean that the efficient conception should have occurred. that's like saying that because we can watch mike tyson lose his edge we can say that it makes no sense that he still boxes. can he still stand? can he still swing his arms? when he swings his arms do people still get knocked out? if so, he has some survivability as a boxer. if not, he does not, and will fail as a boxer. things don't simply instantly disappear when it has been revealed that their methods aren't totally efficient.

liGNUx (tm)

jesus i hate when i start sentences, find something else to think about, then never oh look a flashing light

i think you really get into too much development and design effort when such a simple task can be accomplished by using resources that are already available. wikipedia already exists, and they already have servers to handle the search requests. i still say developing a small application (whether it's some javascript, a new add-on, or something that already exists) to add links to wikipedia entries that have alternate internal wiki entries, since according to the parent question the employees are going to be using wikipedia a lot, anyway. you can make the link apparent so that employees can simply take a quick glance to see whether they need to do any more internal research. you don't have to waste time downloading, restoring, and implementing the wikipedia database internally, and you don't have to waste time updating it, writing scripts to do so automatically, or finding scripts that will.

as to the api approach, i think that would be fun, but it seems like a waste of server power to have a machine dedicated to doing something that could be done on client computers dynamically with a relatively minute bit of javascript, and would be just as functional and ultimately less effort to upkeep. for future changes to the api you may have to alter your entire application, but if wikipedia just changes the html layout all you have to do is modify a regular expression and the rest of the code is still usable.

we've found that mcdonald's consistently sells their 'big mac' cheeseburgers in their branded restaurants. this prevents potential customers of burger and wendy's from purchasing alternative burgers, such as the whopper with cheese and the whatever wendy's sells. the united states government has determined that if mcdonald's begins to sell wendy's and burger king cheeseburgers alongside the big mac, a pending antitrust suit against mcdonald's will be dropped. mcdonald's has decided to stop selling the big mac completely, which is totally unfair, because our entire business plan was based on forcing our competitor to carry our products!

if with jews you lose, and you need to lose the jews to win, do you need to use the jews to lose the jews? if so, how do you lose the final jew?