News will now remain free. If the major providers put their shit behind pay-walls, one of two things will happen:

1) There's already a thriving eco-system of ad-financed blogs and other sites that basically do nothing but sift through, reword and extensively "quote" the stuff behind the login-prompts. These sites will just get bigger and stronger, eventually hiring more of their own staff. Since that's 90% of what traditional newspapers have been doing since the dawn of time, there is more than enough precedent for this business model.

2) If the going get's really tough, Wikinews or some other major non-profit payer will become as hugely popular as Wikipedia is now. If Britannica or Brockhaus had made all their content available for free under a reasonably license for personal use, Wikipedia would probably not be where it is now.

That's bullshit. That's just not how it works.

-) If he begins to work out, he will start to sleep way better almost immediately, very probably more than making up for the hour of sleep he might lose.

-)If he keeps at it, his resting heart-rate (along with recovery time, triglycerides, and many other things) will go down significantly, while his musculature and nervous system will get more efficient. His breathing will get deeper and more relaxed which again positively affects heart rate and the autonomous nervous system, and so on.

-) If he is like most people, exercising will additionally help him get rid of the insane cravings for unhealthy food we all sometimes experience.

This is not unthinkable, it's already fact. If you want to work in large corporations, in scientific development or on open source projects, you have to speak English in any case.

However, even if you just work on your own private projects at home: EVERYTHING these days originates in English. Keywords, documentation, online forums, code comments, function names, etc... Practically all the large conferences are held in English as well. Not using English as your development language will just make you context switch that much more often.

What do you mean, turn on? I stopped turning off my home computers around the time CD-ROM drives became popular.

Quadruple-Eight-Core processors? Liquid nitrogen cooled and overclocked to 4 GHz? After the maxed-out new Mac Pro, there's almost nowhere to go with standard hardware. There is also no reason for Apple to lower prices significantly, since their unit stales are still going strong, regardless of the economy. If you were expecting anything more it's because you're clueless.

... especially in a financial downturn. I have made large ERP acquisitions in the past, and we simply struck out the clauses we didn't like before signing the contract, and generally simply didn't pay what the supplier didn't complete exactly on time plus a 5% tolerance. And that was that.

In twelve years on the internet I have had zero privacy problems, zero credit card problems, no spyware incidences and exactly 1 virus infection - which was due to some unpatched 0-day exploit in Windows NT back then. It didn't result in any data-loss though, because I back up my stuff.

If the internet really is that dangerous, I am -along with most of the people I know- a pretty freaky statistical outlier.

Don't apologize for taking that class, you probably just had a bad teacher.

Touch typing at very high WPM is probably the single, immensely useful thing I would probably never have acquired if I hadn't learned it in high school.

It would makes Iowa completely irrelevent in the national elections.

And irrelevant it should be... Seriously.

I've never have had the same handwriting for more than two days in a row. Writing for some reason is always a relatively conscious process for me where I'll shape the letters according to the mood de jour. Size, style, slant, stroke... All differ from day to day. I considered that very weird when I was younger, now I just accept it.

... are so much more efficient than simple broadcasting that any advanced civilization would use them. If they are out there, we can't detect their communications directly.

GMail with calendar integration, chat and now Google Gears is the best damn email solution I have ever used - by far. If a hard problem like email can be tackled in the browser with such success, a lot of things can.

Yes, it's fraud. Hiding the price in the general terms and conditions is NOT legally binding. Especially when the front-page lists the word "Freeware".

This is ridiculous. You cannot hide the price of a product in the AGB (German for general terms and conditions.) This is not a valid contract. She can just ignore the motherfuckers.

Regardless of that - if she's still within 14 days of the purchase she has the right to change her mind and just send them an email saying that she doesn't want the product after all. It's that simple.

In Europe, when a consumer buys something over the internet he has an ABSOLUTE right to change his mind about the purchase within 14 days.

That right cannot be taken away by any contractual bullshit. If she is within this period, she can just write them an email and that's it.