From a cynical point of view, it sounds an awful lot like the people I know whose parents had them home schooled but then didn't actually spend any time teaching them anything. They didn't end up learning anything and now aren't really prepared to get a job that pays the rent.

I don't think it's impossible to make it work well, and for a certain kind of kid I think it would be fantastic. Unschooling would require a lot of involvement from parents, though, probably a lot more than public school would, and I expect that some portion of parents aren't willing to provide that involvement. I'd worry that those parents will latch onto unschooling as a way to justify letting their kids do whatever they want without any supervision.

If you go down that road then you end up with the world we have today: developers first look at the spec, and then they try to find out whether or not that part of the spec actually matters to the real world of browsers. The HTML5 editors want a better world, one where the major browsers are actually 100% compliant. They may not get there, but they definitely won't if they put things in the spec that browser vendors have said outright that they won't implement.

Indeed. I live in NYC, and since it has a sufficiently extensive network, I don't ever need a car, so my yearly transportation costs are $972 (soon to increase to $1068), paid for with pre-tax money. That's less than a lot of people pay just for insurance on their car, let alone gas or maintenance.

Actually, they definitely did make more money than they would have without the patent process. The chemical industry is one in which it's difficult to come up with a chemical that does a specific thing, but easy to produce a lot of a chemical once you have it. The patents weren't used to protect the company from patent trolls, they were used to protect the company from other major chemical companies. Without a patent, if they came up with a new chemical and put it on the market, another company could come along, analyze what they were selling, and produce substantially the same product without putting in the time and money upfront for the R&D. That would seriously reduce the profitability of coming up with new chemicals.

There are some industries in which the patent system works like it's supposed to. My dad was a chemist until he retired, and he generated a number of patents which have been really valuable to him and the company he worked for. It costs a lot of time and money to come up with chemicals that do interesting things, and patents makes it so that doing so is profitable.

The FAQ actually says it'll stay around. (RTFFAQ?)

Are you thinking of some other product? Orkut has been a Google service since the beginning, and is one of the top social networks in the world (though not in the United States).

So you're saying that it's self-explanatory once you've been exposed to it :)

Because "-rw-r--r-- 1 root root" is so self-explanatory?

They said it was less than 3 months away in March, 2008.

It's a free add-in to their service. For every buck per month you spend you get an hour of streaming. It may not be cheap, but since their standard mail service is already worth the money I spend, the Watch Now is a pleasant bonus.

Unless you're on the $8.99/mo. plan, in which case you only seem to get two (2) hours per month of streaming. I still haven't quite worked out the math they used to figure that one out, when their own F.A.Q.s and help pages state exactly what is commented above.

Also, the last time I checked, the service is not usable outside of a Windows system. At least, I haven't fiddled about enough since getting my new MacPro to see if it can be worked around.