Fortunately for Amazon, the Kindle stores a terrifying amount of information about how you read a book. They could pay authors for the number of pages a reader spent more than a minute on if they wanted to.

Given that a large portion of what he did was turn the children's stories into epic battle sequences, I'm not sure that those elements "jive" with the gritty action as "were turned into gritty action". Every instance where the party fled or used intelligence to escape overwhelming odds, Jackson simply turned them into superheroes who blasted their way out.

A particularly pungent example would be the escape from the wood elves' fortress; in the book, this was when Bilbo finally became a fully trusted, contributing member of the group as he used stealth to sneak the dwarves out in barrels. In the film, the dwarves conduct a battle from barrels they ride like boats. The central lesson that there is something to be learned from the meekest among us is completely overtaken by the desire to have yet another CGI battle-fest.

The Dark Ages is probably hyperbolic, but you do bring up an interesting point: If the issue is that some other piece of information is missing, why not add a supplement containing that information rather than remove this page?

The diesel Fiesta is one of the more fuel-efficient cars of any type that you can buy. Naturally, unavailable in the US, as the only company that seems to bother selling diesels for a purpose other than cargo is Volkswagen.

This one seems REALLY easy to fix. Abolish the TSA, save billions in government expenditure and more billions in lost time and goodwill.

That treads the iffy line between money and speech, and between corporations and people. While what the IRS did was highly questionable, it had to do with the tax status of money given to 501(c)(4) corporations, not the speech of private citizens.

I attended schools with both the line and bubble scan systems. At the time,I assumed it was just a brand differentiation thing. Since using a bubble system with rather large bubbles,I think I would prefer the line since it leaves less ambiguity as to where the mark will actually be scanned.

I think Leo McGarry had a few things to say about the correct spelling of the former Libyan dictator's name. And he's ordered airstrikes against the man's house, so he knows!

Welcome to the future: http://blog.caranddriver.com/s...

Yeah, in that listing where everything was length and we weren't dealing with water at room temperature by the sea, those Imperial units sure were confusing!

I think the real goal would be to have all vehicles self-drive; then they can be coordinated to interlace at intersections, removing the need for stop lights and saving a ton of fuel!

He actually doesn't even get to the part about WHY cold fusion is bollocks. He explains the criteria for a reproducible experiment, states that no cold fusion experiment to date has succeeded in meeting these criteria, and then launches into a couple of ideas about how cold fusion might work before the article just kind of ... stops.

Um, well, this isn't the free market at work. Regulation like this, where powerful officials make laws that clearly select winners and losers are exactly the kind of evil that small government libertarians fear from communism. In a free market, the government wouldn't have some weird power to dictate that a particular consumer good be sold in a special way ...

Could you enlighten the idealists among us as to the "real world" circumstances which necessitate an administration modifying press reports? While there certainly are times when temporary secrecy is needed, the current practice of no disclosure, no explanation, never, steps over the line.

If the idea requires a level of effort to implement that only those large companies can provide, then it's probably something deserving of getting paid for. That implementation is protected by copyright. If, on the other hand, it's simple enough that other people can implement it without a great deal of work, then eventually a free (gratis) implementation will rise up. Software patents are what allow ideas to be co-opted by for-profit companies.