There's a third group of people you missed in your post - those who review games because they genuinely love playing them and want others to find the good ones and avoid the bad ones, and maybe even in some Darwinian fashion improve gaming as a whole. I've been doing online game reviews for almost a decade - companies send me games, some ask for me to review them specifically - and I've always posted my honest opinion of them without dilution or pressure from my agent. I've had companies send me games that I subsequently slammed. They're probably not happy about that, but it allows my readers to know that I do write unbiased reviews (or at least biased by nothing more than my own opinions). Here's a hint to finding fake reviews - if you're reading a game review with a banner ad for that game across the top of it, it's probably not a real review.

Only sort of tangentially related, but I have an Invisible Fence dog containment system which has a lifetime warranty as long as I'm the owner of the house in which it is installed. They still service it 12 years later.

I'm going to send Eric Schmidt 14 pictures of my ass.

It's only complicated because we differentiate between different types of income. If the tax code were written such that you took this year's net worth and subtracted last year's net worth, the difference could be called income, and for something like 99% of the people it would be laughably easy to calculate (we would need some type of depreciation table for homes and cars, perhaps a few other valuable items, or just exempt one house and one or two cars per household). Lop off the first $20,000 or so (in my system it would be a year over year calculation, so cost of living would be included automatically), and flat tax the rest. With one house, two cars, a saving account, and a minor stock portfolio, my income tax return could be maybe four boxes.

I had a rottweiler mix that lost his front left leg to osteosarcoma. At slow speeds, he would move kind of like an inchworm, hopping his remaining front leg forward, then jumping both back legs forward, wash, rinse, repeat. He could do it while keeping his head on the ground, say following a scent trail. At higher speeds (and even after the amputation he was faster than his brother) he would do a run in which his two right legs would move, then the remaining left rear would move. His head would bob up and down as he ran. Oh, and when he peed, he would lift his left rear leg, and balance on his two right feet. BTW, the cancer came back and got him a year after the amputation - bone cancer of the back left leg, and we didn't want to try him as a two legged dog, though I understand some of those get around as well.

My dad always told me that a lawsuit is like two people setting themselves on fire and lawyers warming themselves with the flames.

Weeeelll, yes and no. Could Afghanistan copy the F-35? No. Could they figure out how it is made invisible to radar and adapt their radar systems accordingly? Maybe. Could they understand how we defeat guided missiles and modify them with improved CCM? Probably. Could they decode burst communications channels and get data on missions, flight plans, troop movements, etc? Yes. So while I'm not in the least concerned with them building one, I am concerned that they will negate much of the advantage we gain by building it ourselves.

Depends on how the beam is delivered (CW or pulsed), the wavelength (some are absorbed quite strongly in the skin, others not so much), the power density at point of impact. A 40W CO2 laser in long pulse mode might well not burn you - the peak energies are too low and the wavelength is off. In grad school I leaned and arm into a 5W Argon ion laser running CW at 514nm that left a blister on my arm 2mm wide and 10 inches long faster than I could say ouch. I also knew a girl working on a 2W short pulse YAG at 1064 that blew two 0.02mm holes in the center of her retina in one pulse per hole (left blank spots in the center of her visual field). Visible lasers are bad in general, both from a skin damage and an eye damage perspective, and given how many people wave laser pointers around carelessly, I'm less than thrilled at the prospect of this laser getting out cheaply into the public.

BTW, that 400mW red laser is a pretty unique animal - I've only seen one HeNe (I'm assuming it's a HeNe - a ruby laser would be too big and complicated to move) over 10mW in 25 years in laser work. It was a 600mW large frame unit used in holography and was over four feet long and weighed about 75 pounds. Surely there's an easier way to deal with wasps?

This has always been one of my hot buttons. Put bluntly, I can make a movie in which a guy hacks a woman's breast off with a machete and that's NC-17, but a couple having sex, oooh, can't have that - that's X rated. WTF?!?! Jumping Jesus in a chariot what message does that send to our kids?

And how long before "imminent cyberthreat" is software piracy, child pornography, or any number of other crimes du jour? Thanks but no thanks - we'll take care of our own tubes.

I didn't RTFA, but the summary states the iPads are pre-loaded. If I buy a copy of a game and install it on a computer, I can't then rent out that computer and let someone else play the game, can I? How would that be different from buying a copy of a movie and then renting it out? Typically rental copies are purchased differently from sale copies for movies. I assume the same is true of games? Not to insinuate in any way that the company is doing anythign illegal - perhaps they've jumped through those hoops - but I'm curious nonetheless.

Whether or not a two hour "Who's the Boss" block in the evenings is worth anything is fully up for debate, but local news channels fulfill a niche that the crush of 24/7 news channels doesn't touch. I want local weather, local street closings, local politics, local crime, local sports. In the hours right about dinner I'd guess that the ratings of local channels rate higher than cable news. How they fill the rest of their schedule, I have no idea.

I run the NOCD cracks for all the games I buy. It's just more convenient that way. Who wants to keep dozens of CDs floating around their desk getting scratched up? I've got C&C4 on my laptop running the crack patch so I don't have to be online to play it. And I wasn't even considering buying Assassin's Creed 2 until the crack came out - now it has, and now I have. Are all of those considered pirated copies?

I'm pretty sure you're thinking of Enemy of the State (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120660/). Not a great movie, but not awful either.

I can think of at least three towns in Northern NH that don't have a single land-based broadband option open to them. Heck, landline phone and cell coverage is spotty. Low population density - you betcha. But isn't that the sort of thing the billions of dollars dumped on the communications companies by the government supposed to solve? Oh, that's right, they turned the money around and lobbied with it instead of improving their networks.