Why would you think that? Even in a libertarian utopia you wouldn't always get what you want -- you get what the market can provide. You can express preferences; but in the end, TV would have loud ads because people value the programming more than they hate the loud ads.

As for copyrights and patents, without them, the current television model gets harder to envision, so it's hard to make a direct comparison. But given that copyrights exist, you would expect that commercial-free sources of original programming would start to appear, offering network-like television on a premium basis, and other alternate media sources offering additional options on the internet, as well as home devices designed to circumvent the ads themselves.

There's a part of me that is pissed off at politicians for wasting time with this crap, but a much larger part that is happy they are doing this instead of fucking up more important things with unnecessary regulation.

Looks like the placebo effect is really working!

Facebook wants control of his company back. Some idiots who combined own less than 16% of the company are trying to stop Facebook from moving in.

That's why they call it the Enlightenment. (too easy)

The claim that having tons of different currencies in circulation so that you can introduce anti-counterfeiting measures actually makes it harder to counterfeit is kind of absurd on the face of it.

Don't get me wrong; I would love to have plastic money. Personally, I just wish they'd change the face design back to the "classic" version (conceding a large-print denomination somewhere), and make all the anti-counterfeiting stuff more subtle (e.g. plastic money, clear windows, watermarks, strips, heat-sensitive ink, etc.) rather than make the bills look like play money.

But we're still in a position where a merchant has to accept the oldest, easiest to counterfeit money. The Europeans made the switch once just by saying the old money is worthless after a certain date; but let's not go crazy -- that's happened exactly once, and for a very practical reason that people could get behind. Counterfeiting is not a crime that directly affects individuals until it's detected.

For what it's worth, many of the positions which you think may be undecidable are in fact solvable. Check out this paper (warning, PDF) from the guy who proved that it was NP-complete; it has a bunch of examples of non-trivial setups that appear to be unsolvable without guessing, but actually are. You don't necessarily encounter these in every game, but you might be surprised if you do some analysis before you make a guess.

Regardless, the paper is a good read.

The fun thing about doctrines set by decree is that we're one decree away from doing whatever we want to do anyway. The commander-in-chief can change strategic doctrine at any point for any reason. In a Crimson Tide (the movie) situation maybe this means that a nuclear submarine won't retaliate with nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear threat, but otherwise this does almost nothing to change the actual military capabilities of the United States.

Hopeless to explain jokes, I think, but all the poster meant is that he starred in the movies alongside Sir Ian McKellen -- the balance alluded to is that both the good guy and the bad guy would be knights rather than just the one.

For me, the reason that I am curious about the difference is that I wonder whether there is a much better "secret" phone and a conspiracy to prevent it from reaching the American audience.

Either it's just a cultural bias, in which case I can buy an iPhone and not worry about missing out, or it's a real difference, and I want to know more about these phones that are so much better.

The final possibility is that this is just Wired Magazine, publishing the usual made-up story.

A friend pointed out to me once that one way to think of this whole thing, to make it make a little more sense, is to put the business model on its side.

A company like Google, for example -- most people would say that you and I, as searchers, are Google's customers. Instead, let's say that Google's "customers" are the advertisers, and their "product" is users (or, more concretely, the users' attention). By delivering "products" to "customers", they make money.

So a site that makes no money -- an early-stage dot-com that doesn't advertise yet, what are they doing? They're building up a warehouse of product, in the hope that once they have enough products, they can sell them to customers at a good price.

No drop. It's an illusion. This quarter last year MS recognized revenue from upgrade sales of Vista that had not yet been realized. The amount of growth was normal and expected; MS met earnings expectations which accounted for the difference.