For a fairly entertaining examination of this idea, someone might want to check out out Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle books. I've only gotten through the first (Quicksilver) but it takes place during Newton's lifetime and Newton himself is one of the more major characters, along with Leibnitz and other less famous "natural philosophers."

Yes, Mr. Kotick is one of the most hated people in the industry for good reason. Check out this extremely detailed and disturbing post on Teamliquid.net about how little he cares for his developers and the games produced by the studios under Activision.

Personally, I blame him for the deluge of bad decisions coming out of Blizzard regarding Starcraft II, including:
-No LAN play
-No cross-regional play
-Fees for tournaments and a more centralized, locked-down system in Battle.net 2.0

Most or all of these features were available in the Starcraft, which was released in 1998! I expect some or all of the features that the community is clamoring for will be introduced eventually--for a subscription fee. Because that's all Kotick sees in the Starcraft community: a bunch of passive cows who are just begging to be milked of all their worth.

And the worst part is, I pre-ordered Starcraft II anyway. Sigh.

Wow, I see you're already getting used to acting like an American. You'll be ready in no time! :) --note to sensitive moderators: the smiling emoticon means it is a joke.

Since when does an ellipsis denote sarcasm or irony? It just seemed like you were trailing off.

South Korea doesn't even have nukes. That's North Korea. And even if they did have nukes, their "arch-enemy" is right across the border.

MAYBE, but in your country you walk a block to the local DVD store and choose from a selection of thousands of pirated DVDs, each selling for the equivalent of 1.25 USD per disc? That's what it's like living in any city in China. It's probably impossible to buy a NON-pirated DVD in China (I for one have never seen one!). Technically these shops are breaking the law, but the relevant laws are not enforced.

Another example of the higher level of piracy is Baidu's music search. Baidu is the Chinese equivalent of Google, and using mp3.baidu.com you can find pirated mp3s of pretty much every song you'd want to hear. They block some of the files if you are accessing it from a foreign IP address, though. Check this search I just did (from inside China). Can you imagine if Google had a site like this? It would be sued into oblivion (although blogsearch.google.com can get pretty close!)

Even on TV, pirating is rampant. Talk shows and reality shows often take their background music the soundtracks of popular films like the Lord of the Rings or Star Wars, and something tells me they aren't coughing up royalty checks for that.

I figured as much, and I still use Chrome for light browsing, but as I said, my computer is aging and it does have to swap to disk frequently. :-/

I actually have been using it up to and through the latest version 5 update. It is better before but I'm still getting the same bugs (albeit more rarely now).

But look at this from the other angle: the browser is not cutting edge, it is mature and stable.

On my aging Mac, I started out with Safari, then switched to Firefox when Safari started getting buggy as hell for no apparent reason. A couple months back I switched to Chrome just for kicks, but after a while started noticing it wasn't as stable or bug-free as Firefox (specifically, Flash would die and my Youtube vids would have to be restarted, also when I have lots of tabs open some pages appear to be blank even though they have loaded and are supposed to display content on them). So I switched back to good ol' Firefox. Sure, maybe it's not the fastest, the sleekest, or the most advanced browser on the planet, but it's damned reliable and eminently useable!

I have no clue who my future employers might be (I suppose that would depend on which field I get my degree in), but I could definitely ask some people who have management and HR experience. The reason I posted this to Slashdot is because it is like asking 100,000 people at the same time. Seems more efficient. :)

"How valuable is an graduate degree earned online?"

Oh, the irony. Maybe I should become an hero.

Auditing the fed is often used as code to mean investigation into the fundamental business model. The problem is that if it ever became mainstream how the fed really works, it really will threaten the dollar. I would like to see citation of your claim they have published the numbers, I know they have published SOME numbers, often heavily redacted though. Some facts about the fed. The Federal Reserve is a private institution. The Federal Reserve holds a monopoly on the issuance of currency in the USA. Prior the the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act/TARP Act of September 2008, commercial banks were required to hold 10% of deposits as reserves. Part of the reason for the credit spread blowups of October/November 2008 was because in the same TARP Act the Fed was allowed to pay interest on deposits without publicly stating the interest rate. As a result of various acts of Congress in 2008, the Federal Reserve now has the authority to buy all sorts of assets (commercial paper, corporate bonds, mortgage loans, etc.). Much of the Fed's activity is not made public because of the use of off-balance sheet vehicles. There is debate over the constitutionality of the Fed's various powers. Also that If all money created is debt and counts as principal, where does the money come from to pay interest on this debt? It comes from the money that gets printed in the future. This is why inflation is a natural result of our current monetary system. This is often what you hear Ron Paul talking about on the floor. The teapartiers have unfortunately locked onto this as a talking point, but often lack facts, and hence it often gets dismissed as a conspiracy theory. I think the biggest benefit of auditing the Fed, is publicly knowing who really owns and controls it, knowing that a foreign company might control our very monetary system should at the least make one pause and research it a bit more.

I am a Russian citizen and do not believe western democracy is the best form of government. I also think you believe it not because of some deep comparison and analysis you performed but because it has been beaten into you head since you were a kid. Democracy is just a way to elect a strong capable leader. We already have a strong leader and a system that passes authority to another strong leader. Why do we need crazy election eccentrics? On the other hand I have been following Western election and USA elections in particualr and I do not for a second beleive the system worked to provide you with a good leader. If the system worked than why was Bush Jr, the president, not once but TWICE?? Was he really the most capable man for the job in America for whole eight years? If the system misfires so badly why keep it.

"Unlimited" is just a holdover from 56k modem times. They offered a number of minutes per month for the basic subscription fee, and over time as AOL and MSN and the occasional third leg battled it out for customers that number increased fairly consistently. Pretty soon it was $20 for unlimited internet. 5k transfer per second, 2592000 seconds, that's 12960000k or 12656m or 12GB. It would be impossible for you to download more data than that (we'll ignore compression since the limit ignores compression, and today's compression is better if not eactly the same).

If you consider your bandwidth as above, there is an upper limit on your current transfer per month, which is the unit by which you're paying. So it's imposible to offer "unlimited" access is there is a bandwidth limit. $20 for 12GB then would be maybe $30 now - for a 12GB limit? 24GB would probably be worth $40, unlimited would be pretty expensive.

So even limited, we're a lot better off. If we understand there's always a limit, that is, and if the ads quit saying "unlimited". The dial-up days are over, we're buying in bulk now.