Even more than this. I actually read the article (surprise!) and, while the article calls sales a double-edged sword, nothing in there seemed to actually support that claim. The biggest claim seemed to be that lowering the price drives the average price per game down. Which is... bad, supposedly? It didn't explain how. The rest of the article talked about how lowering the price attracted more eyes and more sales, which shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who's taken a basic econ course. It also talks briefly about how a sales chart, such as for the iPhone app store or Xbox live, can be self-sustaining. Which makes sense... but I'm not sure I see the problem. The games gets on the charts, people buy it, the game goes higher, more people buy it, after enough time has passed everyone interested has it and the game sinks off the chart. All that should show up as is a bubble in a chart of revenue.

The other comments were how lower prices can actually generate the same, or even higher, revenue which, once again, shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who's taken a basic econ class.

Honestly, the most interesting thing I got out of there was the comments about just how well Valve knows their market as far as price-points go. The actual argument about sales being double-edged seems... rather vacuous.

This has come up a few times in this thread so far and, while it'd be technically right, I can't help but think it's missing the forest for the trees. Yes, in an ideal situation, an external antenna will be better than an internal one. But, as Apple has kindly demonstrated, it's far easier to mess with an external antenna.

Basically, while the maximum reception for an external antenna may be greater than the maximum reception for an internal antenna, the range of values for reception on the external antenna, combined with the ease of dragging the actual reception closer to the minimum number on that range for an external antenna, might make an internal antenna far more functional; especially if the difference in maximums isn't really that large.

That's the thing, though. As far as I'm aware, they've absolutely failed to set any kind of precedent that might even be remotely in their favor and they've completely failed in instilling any type of fear in anyone who might think about pirating music. All they've really done is cost themselves a good chunk of money while flushing any type of good reputation they had down the toilet.

If I had to guess, the reason we're not looking into it is because the law of conservation of energy would smack anyone who tried. If you're expending energy to make energy, at best you'll break even. For all practical purposes, you'll probably have something like a 3:1 or 4:1 ratio of energy expended to energy created, if not something far worse.

Is this really a surprise to anyone? I'd wager the day for the vast majority of people goes something like "wake up, work/school, home, sleep", with the removal of work on Saturdays and Sundays and the possible addition of church or something on Sundays. It's not really that hard to predict something that consistent.

The problem with using anecdotal evidence for things like this is everyone has a different story, solely because everyone has what essentially amounts to a different computer. My laptop, a Lenovo Ideapad Y530, has issues with the brightness controls in Ubuntu and OpenSuse. Fedora ran perfectly fine, surprisingly. OpenSuse couldn't even connect to my wireless network correctly, though I'm not entirely sure whether that was a PEBKAC or OpenSuse itself. Contrast this with Windows 7, which installed perfectly fine, found every single device on the laptop, and then promptly went out and handed me a program that handles energy-usage more efficiently, straight from Lenovo. And people who say Linux works perfectly fine with any hardware you can throw at it have quite clearly not spent any time trying to get obscure wireless cards working or printers that CUPS doesn't handle perfectly working. Obviously that's all anecdotal, but it's worth showing just how much it contrasts with your story. In reality, both OSes have issues with hardware. At least with Windows, all you generally need to do is hunt down a driver, whereas with Linux it can easily amount to a weeks worth of work.

That'd make you, what, 46ish? Give or take (probably give) 4 years? Should I get off your lawn? ;)

Most people I've talked to tend to use one program to watch movies and another separate one to play music. Mostly because, as you noticed, most programs designed to play movies tend to have annoying quirks when playing music and vice versa.

Sounds about right.

I'm just assuming the April Fools Joke is that it isn't one and that it'll be left in place. Of course, if they don't leave it in place, they'll have fooled me, too.

I don't think I can come out of this a winner.

Because I use OpenDNS I figured I'd look into this. Apparently the intent of this was to prevent spyware on some Dell computers from completely filling up any typoed addresses with ads. This link goes into more detail:
http://blog.opendns.com/2007/05/22/google-turns-the-page/