Amazon seems to be doing pretty well. Lexmark has done very well with this model. Gillette has done very well for themselves as well. And IBM.

Customer lock-in wasn't invented by Apple. What makes Apple impressive is that they've managed to do it while getting their customers to keep asking for more of the same.

Ar, what a monster. He should be burned alive, but not to death, and then allowed to recover just enough so that he can fully feel all of the spikes of the iron maiden that closes on him as a manticore drips acid into his eyes.

Am i doing this right? I have no end of sympathy for your daughter, but I'm clearly not as vengeance-driven as you are. At some point in our past we decided that eye-for-an-eye was not a workable approach to justice and three lifetimes plus hundreds of years for an offense of twelve hours, no matter how awful those twelve hours may have been, goes so far beyond eye-for-an-eye... There's some horrible disconnect when it comes to sex crimes. We load down the act of sex with so much baggage that it's social anathema to do anything mildly sexually deviant, and crimes related to sex are seen as absolutely horrifying while doing relatively little physical / financial / property damage. There is of course the psychological aspect, which I by no means wish to trivialize, but I can't help but think that the psychological damage is made as severe as it is by all of the baggage which we attach to sex.

I have heard people say, without hyperbole, that they think that rape is as bad or worse than murder. Many rape victims also seem to feel that - 13% of rape victims attempt suicide. Think about that. These are people, a large number of people, who genuinely believe that it's better to be dead than raped. That's a problem, a big one, and it's a problem of perception. The courts only reinforce this, if they're handing down life-ending sentences over rape offenses, and that feeds the problem further.

Back to TFA: molestation isn't rape. Without reading the article, I'd guess based on the sentence that the offense of the guy in question was pretty small. Maybe a grope on the train or something, happens pretty often on those crowded Japanese commuter trains. Is that also worth murder?

You can't Godwin a conversation about World War 2, it only applies when someone is forcing an analogy. Same with Bush.

There have been convictions for internet obscenity. Bush (or Ashcroft? I don't know who to attribute this to) set up an "Obscenity Prosecution Task Force" in 2005 and successfully prosecuted several pornographers.

Like everyone else here, I don't want to give Facebook my real information. So when I set up a Facebook page for my business and it demanded a personal account to link to that business, I just made something up. I don't care if they ban / lock my personal account. Or all of my personal Facebook accounts, those mean squat to me, but what happens to my business page if that happens? Does anyone know for sure what happens in that case?

Well, I got it from this XKCD. And he got it from this report by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The trouble is, the AAAS seems to have changed around their website since then and the report is either no longer available or is just no longer findable by me.

So there you are. I'm willing to trust the XKCD guy, he's always been pretty diligent, but you can go hunting for the original document if you'd like.

Okay. If we want to start with the ocean, which is 3/4 of the world: marine fish biomass has dropped by 80% over the last century.

What's with the scare quotes? Of course the thumb prints are for tracking purposes. What else could they possibly be good for? A collage?

Not to detract from your main point, but breast feeding is one of those topics which has been highly politicized and any weird claims like this should be taken with a grain of salt. I've read a study claiming what you say (can't find it now), here's another study claiming that isn't true. There are many more. Enough that I think you'd need to be an expert in the field in order to sort between them.

Usually though, when researchers start dickering over this sort of thing, what you can say for sure is that whatever the effect may be it isn't large enough or definitive enough to shut up all the people who are wrong about it. So at the end of the day it likely doesn't matter.

I wouldn't mind if they made another expensive one, as long as it was for people with normal sized hands. The last good joystick I had was a Logitech: it had two hat switches and three buttons on top, all of which I could reach with my thumb of average length. It was wonderful, ergonomic, had force feedback, and cost me something like $90 many years ago.

A few years ago I pulled it out and realized that it was unrecoverably broken, so I spent some money and got a Saitek X65F - it's one of those premium all-metal joysticks, build quality was fantastic. The top of the joystick though, the head part, is ridiculously huge. My thumb would have to be at least twice as long as it is in order to reach all the buttons and switches there. (I do not have small hands.) And this problem doesn't seem to be unique to the X65F: all of the premium joysticks have gigantic heads. They can advertise more buttons and hat switches that way, I guess, but they're useless if you have to take your hand off the stick to reach them.

Anonymity isn't built into this. A Senator who wishes to place a hold anonymously brings the issue to his party leader and they place the hold on his behalf, without revealing his identity. As for why there's no time limit: I imagine because there was no need for it originally.

Well you can read the wikipedia article if you want, but all of these procedural rules boil down to pretty much the same thing: good rules which exist to foster informed consideration and thoughtful discussion of pending legislation become tools of abuse when the goal stops being about passing good legislation and starts being about pleasing your campaign donors.

The Senate hold was originally about giving a senator time to gather additional information on an issue, now it's a way to stop bills which a senator doesn't like without needing or allowing a vote on them. It can be defeated by a cloture vote, but this requires 60/100 senators rather than a simple majority. This rule has been used to great effect over the last six years to stop anything and everything. You may have heard that our congress over that time has been the least productive congress ever? This is what they've been using to achieve that. Most famously though, Ted Stevens and Robert Byrd used secret holds to stop an anti-corruption transparency bill (temporarily - they were found out pretty quickly). Stevens was later convicted for corruption related to taking money from oil companies, though that conviction was later thrown out for procedural reasons.

"Some people" are wondering things? Who? I see no links to that particular claim.

I seems like the submitter had intended to say "i am wondering" but decided to go all Fox News on it. We can do better than this.

This seems like a false dillema - how much agonizing do you do over whether you'll subscribe to DirecTV or DIsh or both or neither? If you want one you pick one, and if it turns out you don't like it you switch.

Really the music situation is much better than that, there are more choices and none of the awful contracts. You can switch easily if you wish and some of them offer free trials, or even entirely free versions. This is no worse than any other subscription service and better than many. Of course it's different from actually owning the music, but no one has claimed equivalency there. You can always just buy the songs if you want, from many sources.

Is that seriously the logic here? "I saw some random animal doing it, so I'm going to do it too." Cats eat vomit. Rabbits eat shit. (Technically slightly different from their regular shit. Not enough to matter to these unnamed celebrities I'd wager.)

::Sigh:: Fine, whatever. It's probably healthier than most diet fads.