It's a $50 upgrade, not $100. Still expensive, but pretty much in line with other android phones.

Have you read Orson Scott Card's Pastwatch Redemption? It's a time travel story where the people who invent time travel decide to stop Christopher Columbus from discovering the Americas, in order to prevent the slaughter of the natives. While researching, they realize that their current reality resulted from someone ELSE changing the past to try and avoid a future with a mainstream religion that included human sacrifice. Interesting problem to have to deal with.

I agree that the Covenant books are pretty depressing, but they aren't Sci-Fi. Have you read Donaldson's Gap series? It's a space opera arguably as depressing as the Covenant series, maybe even more so.

Jobs that can be outsourced(relatively successful in manufacturing[and if you choose the CNMI you can even use 'made in USA' stickers while paying at roughly Chinese rates!], rather a mixed record in white-collar tech) or done under-the-table with reasonable safety for the people who matter(Gosh, officer, I had no idea that my janitorial contractor's subcontracted cleaning crew might not be 100% on the up-and-up immigration wise... I figured that they were so cheap because they just had a good work ethic...) don't really need H-1Bs...

Translates to:

Jobs that can be outsourced or done under-the-table with reasonable safety for the people who matter don't really need H-1Bs...

You might want to consider using less parenthetical statements---at least, assuming you want people to actually read and absorb your statements.

If you can honestly do this, then why don't you go get Randi's million dollar prize? Don't you like money?

Not caffeine specifically, just coffee and tea. Lots of soda drinkers around here.

Is it just me, or does this summary not link to the actual article?

Sorry, DoS. It's a little early for me.

I think he's trying to say that the 4chan-ers not only wouldn't call for help, but they would DNS their cellphones, just for fun.

Hack the playkey? I'm just wondering how all of this DPP nonsense is going to get past the old fashioned burn-to-disk; rip-from-disk "crack". Unless they disallow burning to optical media as an audio CD, any five-year-old can and will "hack" the DPP, probably without realizing it.

They get groped all the time on trains--so often that there has been talk of making train cars available just for women

Your info seems to be a bit out of date. For at least the past few years (during which I've spent time in Japan) there have been female-only cars during the morning and afternoon rush hours. The proportions of cars:people is such that in the ladies cars mostly everyone can sit down, while the rest of the cars are packed like sardines (very uncomfortable, especially if you're mildly claustrophobic, like myself). With all of the time I've spent on public transit in Japan, I've never heard of any chikan. Westerners like to talk about this like every woman gets groped every time she goes on a train...probably because they watch too much anime, which is not indicative of real life.

Japanese women are in a completely different situation than other western women--they're really more in the position of women in the 50s or even more similar to women prior to WW2, where they had a predefined role to perform and certainly were not at the same level as men.

This is also not quite as bad as it used to be, and certainly not to American pre-WWII levels. Career women are very much a fact in Japan these days, and while there is still quite a bit of discrimination against them, it's not as bad as the discrimination against foreigners (especially other Asians; Koreans and Filipinos are especially looked down upon). The worst discrimination, IMO, go to other Japanese; e.g. the Burakumin
Japan's problems mostly arise from the fact that because of their recent feudal roots they are in in effect if not in name still a "class" society, dragged unwillingly into an industrialized world. The majority of their human rights and anti-discrimination laws are on the books due to external pressures, and are rarely enforced. For example, while it is technically illegal to discriminate based on race, there is actually no penalty for the offence.
Of course, all of this is terribly impolite to talk about, and I apologize if I've offended anyone. I actually love Japan and the Japanese people and culture; they just still have a lot of catching up to do, which is made very difficult by their unique culture of conformity and obedience.

Did you ever consider that the fact that you SELL video card might affect your neutrality on the question of how much people should spend on them? Just a thought.

If you think our UFO catchers are bad, you should see the ones in Japan. Instead of 3 pronged claws, most of theirs have 2 prongs...and some have only one. Still possible to win, though, and I'm guessing they're popular because they're like legal gambelling. There's a strong seconed-hand market in Japan for the collectable toys you get from UFO catchers and gatchapon (capsule toy) machines. You could spend $100 and if you get a rare enough toy, make all your money back with some to spare.

Here's a two-pronged Japanese UFO catcher: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UFOCatcher1.jpg

Arcades are still alive and well in Japan, as I can attest from my recent trip there. I spent some time in a 7 floor arcade...one floor all UFO catchers, one floor all sticker booths (and mostly girls-only) with 5 for games. Expensive, though; the games used ¥100 coins; ~$1 at the exchange rate at the time.