Case in point: the Transformers films and DC/Marvel superhero films exist to sell toys. As Yogurt pointed out in Spaceballs, it's all about the merchandising.

That still doesn't tell me why "the right to operate the cab" itself, as symbolized by a medallion, needs to be made artificially scarce in the first place.

Consider, for example, if the client were to compute a hash of the downloaded ad video (or even of decoded frames from the ad) and send it to the server in order to acknowledge that the client has received the ad. Then you'd have to download and run the whole thing. It'd be an "ad blocker blocker blocker" as I described above, still eating into your cap. Ultimately, the ISPs that set these caps are the ad blocker blocker blocker blocker, as described in the featured article. In case you're confused by the terminology I'm using:

• Ad blocker: Not loading the ad
• Ad blocker blocker: Checking that the ad is loaded
• Ad blocker blocker blocker: Loading the ad anyway and displaying it in a hidden virtual environment
• Ad blocker blocker blocker blocker: Charging you for downloading the ad

Not necessarily. Several regulated industries, such as law and health care, require a degree as a condition of a license to practice. Other fields, such as development of software in industries where closed platforms are the norm, require some employer to take a chance on you first. And a lot of times, a relevant degree is the only way to convince an employer to take a chance on you.

In a regulated industry, there's not much of a lawful way for "your own successful projects" to happen before you get hired.

Right now, publishers of video games have the power to make Twitch irrelevant by sending notices of claimed infringement pursuant to OCILLA regarding videos of video games whose copyright the publisher owns. If Comcast can convince publishers to forbid Twitch streaming of their games, especially games that are adaptations of films and series produced by Comcast's NBCUniversal division, Amazon will have less leverage. I wonder whether WB Games would be willing to do the same as a favor for the cable company that Time Warner used to own.

My cousin's phone is a Samsung Galaxy S Captivate. It's one of the few Android devices that hide the Unknown sources checkbox from the user, which was AT&T's standard practice for about the first year that it offered Android phones. This means step 1 of the standard installation instructions will not work.

"You appear to be using an ad blocker. To continue, please whitelist this site. Here are the whitelist instructions for the major ad blockers. To view this article without ads, please subscribe." What do you plan to do once this behavior becomes common? If you say "ad blocker blocker blocker", that has been tried, and it uses as much of your battery and monthly data quota as just displaying the ad.

So how should smaller producers of shows go about negotiating with Comcast to get their shows added to cap-free in-house streaming?

Spell check changed Comcast to Combat. Telling?

Yet you presumably subscribe to home Internet access to view UGC and sites with ads. And people subscribe to VOD services such as Netflix to view 90 minute toy ads such as The Wizard.

The disenfranchisement of hobbyists, the assumption that everything must be a "business idea", is part of the problem. Would you still be calling it cheap if it were $5000 plus a lease on a dedicated office, as it has been for several other platforms?

I imagine that Slashdot users tend to be attracted to technical puzzles. Fewer of us are attracted to business puzzles, especially because of their frequent connection to the birth lottery (that is, inherited wealth) and the spoils of past anticompetitive behavior.

The term "hacking" ascribes unwarranted malicious intent to the developers of MozStumbler. How should the developers of applications like MozStumbler "really try[] hard to work around the restrictions" in your opinion?

I don't see how a radio station in the United States can steam over the Internet using exclusively free software. Apple iOS devices play only MPEG codecs subject to royalty-bearing patents, not any free lossy codecs. And HD Radio in the United States uses an iBiquity codec parts of which are patented and parts of which are trade secrets.

Spell check turned iBiquity into Iniquity. Telling?

I earn an hourly wage. Perhaps the disagreement is over whether recording artists should continue to rest on laurels while collecting royalties or whether they should be paid for their time like the rest of us.

I was under the impression that it was unwise to copy Oracle because of copyright issues.

And the disadvantage that upgrading from a dumb phone to a smart phone may inflate your cellular bill by $300 per year or more. One may have to upgrade from $7/mo low-minutes voice-only service to $35/mo voice and data service if the CDMA2000 carrier refuses to activate voice-only service on a smart phone or the GSM carrier exercises a provision in the boilerplate terms of service to automatically add a data plan the subscriber's voice-only SIM.

If you have to buy a device locked to a particular prepaid carrier, you could always carry it alongside your existing dumb phone, just as people who couldn't afford an iPhone used to carry a dumb phone and an iPod touch. Use the phone to make calls and the $20 PDA to read books.