Presumably, that is the point - take a rather boring job that humans have to do, and make it so a robot can do it.

The Tor guys just went through this process of creating deterministic builds to solve this problem. Fascinating process and some more info here: https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/2013-June/009257.html

That's basically why I think utilities should be public services provided by the government. They're the only ones that can have a planning horizon that extends that far.

It used to be ad-free because the cost of running those services was trivial and handled by educational and research institutions.

Now the number of services has multiplied (by a lot), both to cater to a wider variety of experiences and a larger number of people.

The cost of running those services has multiplied (by a lot) - no longer just a few kilobytes of plain text, they are rich multimedia experiences including, in many cases gigabytes of high definition video.

I too remember the good old days of the "wonderful" 90s Internet of using lynx to look at web pages and figuring out Trumpet so I could get Mosaic going to look at images. It was fun and exciting and great. But when I compare it to what is possible now - in many cases, completely for free if I'm prepared to sacrifice a tiny part of my attention and privacy (both of which I am conscious of and careful to manage) - well, I'm pretty amazed and what is on offer.

Any time you want to put your hand up to be one of those intelligent, compassionate human beings and provide ad-free wonderful services - please let me know because I'll happily sign up to take advantage of them!

When we stop voting the same people in, I guess

Is there any reason to artificially create it? Surely people that are buying this stuff are not putting a lot of skeptical analysis into its actual providence. I would actually be surprised if the majority of it that was sold was fake anyway and only the ultra-rich are buying legit stuff.

Yeh, except in NZ you have to worry about them sending a SWAT squad to your door for copyright infringement issues, a la Kim Dotcom :)

Just because you mentioned Switzerland, Wuala is a Swiss secure storage mob. Servers in Switzerland, Germany and France. Good focus on client-side encryption.

Free-to-play exists because the developers that have nailed it with a good game are making money hand over first, and everyone else wants to do that too.

Allow me to introduce myself - I'm someone that likes free-to-play!

I've been playing Dota 2 a lot in the last 6-8 months. It is as often frustrating as hell, but it's great fun having a good game with friends.

It is a free-to-play game; they make revenue selling in-game content like clothes and effects for characters. I am totally, completely uninterested in this, but I am by far the unusual one - most of the people I've played have dropped at least the cost of a normal AAA game buying stuff, and I know a few people who have spent over $100 - no doubt there are even more.

There's the occasional in your face thing trying to get you to buy something - usually just an item expiring notice or something - but they are few and far between. I am easily able to ignore it.

I often spend hours a day playing this and cannot believe they're giving something this awesome away for free. Maybe I'll buy something some day - some of the in-game content looks really visually impressive and it gives your character a unique flavour - I can see why people like doing it, although it seems like playing dress up with virtual dolls.

Some games are more obnoxious about it - I play a bit of Tapped Out, the Simpsons game. It is much more in your face trying to get you to buy stuff. I love the game because I love the Simpsons, but it's just idle pleasure for me and I have no plans to drop money in it either.

(plug: I did a review of Dota 2 which outlines the game for noobs. I encourage people to play it because it's F2P done right, it's extremely well engineered and well featured - and it's great fun.)

Broke the rules? Overstepped its legal authority?

Is that the euphemism we're using now for "broke the law"?

Here in Australia, I have heard tell that giving people a bad reference is grounds for a defamation lawsuit. As a result many companies (including mine now) refuse to give a bad reference and will instead only confirm the person was employed there and politely decline to answer any further questions.

Positive references are not a problem. So typically, if you ask for a reference and the person only is prepared to confirm they worked there, I think it's safe to assume bad reference.

How someone could say that with a straight face after 10 years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq is beyond me. Instead of being used to export high explosive to the Middle East, maybe some of those delicious tax dollars could have done some good to the actual citizens of the United States?

Do you need to force them? Every four years there's a great opportunity to really change things, and that's just at a head-of-government level - I don't know anything about how Senators or Congressmen are voted in (I'm Australian), but it seems like the ballot box is a good place to start.

It seems (from reading /. and other sites) that even seriously committed Democrats aren't happy with how the last "Change" you were promised worked out. The two party option seems to be killing you guys. Get some independents in there.

To an outsider it just looks like there's no difference at all between the parties, and that everything is set up to try to force people to think "well if I don't vote [Republican|Democrat], then those damn [Democrats|Republicans] will get in!"

Fwiw I know heaps of people here in Australia that have never bought from Amazon; as you speculate the shipping costs remove a lot of the benefits for the casual item. Because of often hyperinflated costs here though it's still sometimes cheaper to pay the huge shipping costs, but most people I know don't bother or end up shopping an an alternative store.

I buy all my books from Book Depository (which iirc is now owned by Amazon, so that may count :) because they she from the UK and somehow have no shipping charges.