I think one other factor of the time that is being lost in our discussion is that printing a paper was a laborious and time consuming task back then, and the attribution information may have been lost to the second or third had recipients further down in the colonies. There was no cut and paste, unless you note the comment above with regards to smaller papers buying boilerplate from a larger paper. I think of this not as plagiarism so much as a primitive precursor to the AP.

That is one ugly mac Mini knock-off.

I would have to agree that it is probable for a ruler to take credit for the whole building a a structure when he might have only repaired or improved it. We see that in Egypt and other parts of the world as well. It might also lie in the ruler's believe that he is the reincarnation of past great rulers, thus it was in his estimation, his creation.

Or we could just acknowledge that corporations don't really pay taxes, they just pass those costs down to the consumer as they would an increased expense in manufacturing or materials.

I can empathize. As an American, I'm very glad to be able to watch the real Top Gear on BBC America. I tried to watch the American spin off and didn't make it through the whole episode.

I thought he ran after he shot Alexander Hamilton in a duel.

I concur. Not only do you avoid any of the blocking issues, but you are also guaranteed near 100% that your customers will never have any of their mail to you bounce. Your mail server may go down, but Postini will just queue it until your server comes back up. And on top of that, you don't take a bandwidth hit for all of the SPAM, etc.

This fits well with the boiling a frog metaphor. Indoctrination not only has to occur at an early age, but it has to be implemented incrementally across generations. By the way, where are all the hippie protesters fighting the 'man'? Now they are the 'man' and they don't like kids doing things they did when they were that age. I guess civil liberties aren't as important as they once though.

I'm glad to hear that you haven't shared my experience. In my state we have two pretty established senators, and in my opinion, one been encamped in Washington a little too long. The other may have a few more years of good service. My district has a new congressman who is a bit of a firebrand, and based on his performance locally, I expect him to be the type to read everything and ask heated questions. He still calls into the local talk station and gets an ear-full from constituents, so I have high hopes for him.

I have to concur with this thought. In writing to my senators and such over the years, I have noticed that they (or whichever staffer actually responds) have often not bothered to actually read the letter that I sent them, much less the actual legislation that I am writing about. They depend too much on someone else's opinion, expert or otherwise, to determine what their understanding of a particular matter will be.

I'm curious to know where your "roughly all Mac Users" statistic came from.

What was the name of that web appliance Microsoft failed with a few years back??? WebTV? But more to the point of your post, what would work in that arena would be for one of the tuner manufacturers such as Elgato to make a version that worked on a 360 (or PS3). There's not reason that it would have to come from Microsoft.