The summary is misleading. Ebert is talking about why box office revenues are dropping in TFA, not the movie industry as a whole.

Greenpeace is complaining that the Internet:

a) Allows people to research far more information than the limited amount they prefer to give to people, thus letting people be swayed by other, more -- or less! -- rational environmental groups;

b) Emits more hot air than they do.

But seriously folks: this claim that the IT industry uses "dirty energy" can be leveled at any industry in the modern world. That is to say, an industry that uses electricity. They take any industry in the US (which they do in the article) and then say, 'It uses enough energy to power country (x)!' (In the article's case, the UK.) For example:

"The health industry doesn't do enough to reduce its reliance on 'dirty energy'. If you took the entire US's health industry and pharmaceutical firms' energy use, it could power Spain!'

'The media industry doesn't do enough to reduce it's reliance on 'dirty energy'. If you took the entire US's newspapers, magazines, and television news' energy use, it could power South Korea!'

'The government industry doesn't do enough to reduce its reliance on 'dirty energy'. If you took the energy use by all levels of government in the US, it could power Italy!'

Repeat ad nauseum.

The real question is, 'Why does the industry matter?' The energy used by ALL industries in the nation will aggregate to... guess what, the types of energy the country has! The solution is move the whole country to use cleaner energy, which would necessarily mean that all industries in that country would be 'cleaner' in their energy use.

This is Greenpeace using the Apple Strawman scheme all over again.

As a Bay Area resident who's seen Newsom's "management" of San Francisco, I don't know that I'd be so quick to follow Newsom's lead. Not to mention that he has a history of making big annoucements... and failing to follow through.

This isn't even a policy agenda that can be argued from a moral or social perspective -- it's based on erroneous beliefs with no scientific backing whatsoever. Not to mention that there are already agencies who test every damn cell phone when it comes out. Sounds to me like there's already legislation (albeit at the federal level) to handle this should cell phones prove to be brain cookers.

I got 93/100 on Firefox 3.5.5

Apple could also use it as a tool to keep 3rd party software from advertising on their OS, too. So even if Apple didn't mean to use it themselves within OS X, they could use it to prevent others from doing so with other software on OS X.

It's the 'I'm taking it so nobody else can have it, either" principle.

A lot of shows will be free for the first episode on iTunes, a sort of 'loss-leader' to suck people into buying the whole season if they think it looks interesting. It's usually temporary (the first couple of weeks of the season) before it becomes a pay episode again.

I don't get it. Don't use twitter because you might be served injunctions? How about 'don't be an asshat' so you don't get served injunctions? There's nothing inherent about Twitter that makes one of its users more likely to get roped into legal entanglements. That's entirely the actions of the user.

I think a 'Windows party' more along the lines of the Boston Tea Party would be the slashdot thing.

So if regular tuna is 'chicken of the sea', what would this super tuna be? 'Ostriches of the sea?'

(Or if you go with PETA's metaphor of 'kittens of the sea', I guess these would be... cougars? Leopards?)

The phrase that stuck out for me was, 'a phase transition into "subhadronic" matter'. While I certainly recognize the need for new vocabulary when a new model/theory/phenomenon is described or discovered, this particular phrase, "subhadronic matter", gives me Star Trek Voyager flashbacks.

"Captain, the Borg are pulling us in!"

"Lt. Torres, can you reroute the power to the deflection array dish, and invert the signal to send out a subhadronic matter stream? That should disrupt the tractor beam long enough for us to warp out!"

"Recreate the forces inside a collapsing star, of course! Why didn't I think of that?"

Hey, borrowing something they've seen on American TV worked once:

One of the stranger impacts of the show occurred on January 31, 2006, when The West Wing was said to have played a hand in defeating Tony Blair's government in the British House of Commons, during the so called "West Wing Plot". The plan was allegedly hatched after a Conservative Member of Parliament watched the episode, "A Good Day", in which Democrats block a bill aimed at limiting stem cell research, by hiding in an office until the Republican Speaker calls the vote. (Source)

Maybe the cops thought, 'Hey, if it worked for the politicians, it must work for us, too!"

If you're using Pay-as-you-go on Rogers and are putting in $15/month, ask Rogers or Wireless Wave for their $100 refill. Unlike the smaller amounts, the $100 lasts for a full year, so you don't have to remember to keep putting in $15 every 30 days or so.

I moved to the US, but I kept my old phone and converted it to pay-as-you-go. I use my Canadian cell whenever I'm visiting, as the $100/yr I spend is less than the freakin' roaming charges AT&T applies.

The airport to nowhere!

Source

Faye: "It's a little known fact that every Canadian citizen is born with a sharp, serrated edge somewhere on their body as protection from polar bears and enraged Quebecois."

Marten: "Every night they quietly hone their blades, biding their time until the Great Curling, when they will cleanse the earth of all other nations. That's why they're all so polite- they know we're all doomed eventually."

What's to stop Microsoft from offering a crappy version of Firefox? They've got engineers to spare; they could download the code (ah, open source) and tell their engineers to muck it up so it crashes or mis-renders and so forth. Then install it so IE7/8 looks shiny compared to a rotten turd that they put in because they had to.

I don't think they'd even have problems releasing their Firefox CE (Crippled Edition) source code to comply with the GPL. ("Here, you guys can have this back!")