Assange is dangerous because he makes our Masters mad and that makes it hard for the rest of us.

i just picked mark twain's "new" autobiography from amazon, after calling border's only to be told it was "in the warehouse."

border's price? $35.99 plus tx

amazon? $19.99 no tx, no s/h.

connecticut's 6% tax would have barely changed the fact that amazon is overwhelmingly competitive v/v the other chain. after hearing border's price i felt like they were trying to take advantage of me. matter of fact, in comparison to amazon even with the tax, they were.

as for the writer's contention that in locales where amazon has physical presences but doesn't pay for fire, police and other services they avail themselves of, i don't know how they do things in those places but here in ct the towns charge property owners property taxes on physical assets stranded at the local level and those services are delivered at the local level by the towns collecting the cash, not by the state, and the inter city services like highway (construction and maintenance) come from user fees such as gas taxes, and of course income and payroll taxes on workers.

leaving aside the fact that buyers are responsible for sales taxes in the first place, not sellers, if amazon itself is arguably enjoying some sort of tax advantage anyway, the statement that they "don't pay for services" or somehow get them for free is false, at least in my state. they pay, they may not distribute as much, but they pay. every quarter a whole bunch of funds having nothing to do with point of sale taxes pour into the coffers of the cities and states from which amazon and similar online merchants operate.

- js.

since according to tfa nobody really needs onboard storage anymore, they'll be perfectly fine paying 20 times more for the storage they won't use.

otoh, since i didn't get that particular memo, i just bought a 2tb outboard drive for $99.99. that's 5 cents a gb, or 1/20 the cost of an ssd. and believe me, i need all that and more the way my media's piling up, when every time i "tivo" a netflix dvd to my drive i lose another four gigs.

hey, a quarter here, a quarter there and pretty soon i have enough money to send bainwol and glickman greeting cards.

- js.

so true. it's not like the whole ipod business was built on piracy or anything. i mean ask anyone with a few thousand tracks on their players.

so true. i pick up 4-5 yo 3 gig p4s for twenty bucks or less at tag sales. that seems to be the going rate (craigslist is a ripoff). the dells with the ghost partition are the easiest. 5 mins and you're back to factory xp settings. then two sticks of mem if you like, sp3 and k-lite and it's basically up to the minute for anything but gaming. it really is a huge change from a decade ago when boxes were underwhelming soon after purchase.

Yours is really an argument against DRM more than anything else, and around here you're preaching to the choir, myself included.

is what the boys want, and what those pipestem arms and little waist whisper.

Too bony.

and so am I, it's a funny article and an easy target. But when the science being reported on turns out to be dodgy (sugar causes diabetes, salt causes high blood pressure, high fructose corn syrup causes etc), the write-by-numbers approach with its rote opposing opinions and seemingly spineless journalistic waffling can remind readers not to get too caught up in the latest theory du jour.

Sure, I love the exuberant decisiveness and manic clarity of the Weekly World News (who doesn't?) but all in all I think major us newspapers do a pretty good job in presenting this admittedly complicated and theoretical stuff, particularly when read with a bit of skepticism.

- js.

Just another brown floater in a long depressing stream of never ending draconian legislative BS from big media's favorite strap-on(TM) tool.

It's dead in the water I'm afraid.

It may have been funny in the Swedish dorms, but it's holding you back and globally now.

Time to get serious. And this from a pirate. So have a burial at sea, make it walk the plank, whatever. But jettison the moniker.

- js.

and pronto. Hydraulic fracturing of shale is an absolutely legitimate health and environmental concern. There is no place for his behavior in Penn or any other state. The Justice Dept should get on this and him.

That's where we're at in Connecticut now, at least technically. The long established utility spun off its generation assets and became a distribution only entity. It's not working in any way as competitively as was described by regulators prior to deregulation. We have after all, the highest rates in the continental US. Still, I have to think selling access to info is even more lucrative than selling access to power, regardless of who generates it.

In any event, this is file-sharing heaven.

Even if those symmetrical speeds exist only within the confines of the EPB service area, we're looking at a mesh that when fully subscribed would be nearly 500 times bigger than a KaZaa node, and more than 15 times larger than one from a circa 2000 Napster server. A giant, city-wide WAN of tremendous throughput.

That's lot of content potential, and with theoretical transfer times of 3 1/2 mins for an average Blu-Ray, a profound amount P2P potential.

- js.

I can see this subscribed to by small businesses with data heavy uploads (film production companies, ad agencies etc). Spread across an office of 20 employees, $350 is peanuts when each worker is getting 50mps, assuming it's symmetrical.

However I think the price for the gigabit service will drop to something hotly competitive like $99 within 36 months as the electric utility begins poaching customers from the established players when it hits home that selling access to information is more profitable than burning coal.

It wouldn't surprise me if shareholders and even regulators eventually order a spinoff of this tail-wagging-the-dog broadband division, and it winds up with a cable co, where it all gets dialed back to the current offerings.

- js.

But this one's bitchin: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8kQbGa72tM&feature=related