Plus, you can't ignore the mirth there was to be had with AOHell. Many a troll was born in the AOL chat rooms...

It would do us well to get somewhat used to the idea of bartering for the things we need. When economies collapse, everyone falls back to the barter system. Not saying that the U.S. economy is on the brink or anything (although it's certainly a lot closer than it was 30 years ago) but most younger people seem to have no concept of bartering for goods and services or look at it with incredulity. My uncles, all older tradesmen (carpentry, electrical, plumbing) all worked on the barter system occasionally over the course of their careers, especially with other tradesmen, where it's a lot more common for people to work out deals like that under the table. They're retired mostly, now, but they still do the odd job here or there, usually in trade (my carpenter uncle, for instance, recently did a small job for someone in exchange for a few cords of seasoned firewood).

While I can't ignore the tax-dodging aspects of arrangements like this, it's hard for me to see a negative in reviving the barter system to a certain extent in the collective consciousness. Maybe it would even have a positive impact on wastefulness, when people realize that the stuff they're tossing might be worth something they could actually use in trade to the right person. This guy started trading with a single paperclip and ended up eventually getting a house. Obviously not typical, but still demonstrative of the value in trade.

Pretty much this. Although, I admit, Australia seems to have problems with bullshit bandwidth caps that we don't have here in the U.S., generally speaking, so I can see how this could be a non-viable option.

This will probably blow your mind, but there are actually different places where one can purchase bacon here in the U.S., across varying levels of thickness. My grandmother used to get hers from a local butcher in Philly that cut it twice as thick as the average Oscar Mayer crap you'll find in a chain grocery store. Also, I prefer my bacon chewy, although I admit I am in the minority.

Don't know if you guys only get once choice over there in Europe or what, but there are vast differences in local cuisine across the United States. For instance, I would almost kill a man for an authentic, New York style pizza, but alas, I am stuck in the upper-Midwest where everyone prefers the goddamned Chicago style that requires a knife and a fork to eat. Also, I haven't had a proper cheese-steak since I left Philadelphia 20 years ago, although many, many places sure advertise their own piss-poor version of "Philly Cheese-Steaks".

They should really trademark that, like France did with Champagne, so that those of us that have actually had an authentic Philly cheese-steak (on Amoroso rolls, of course) no longer have to be insulted by places passing off their own steak-um bullshit as a cheese-steak.

The implication was that there shouldn't be regulation as concerns insider trading and I felt that needed to be addressed directly.

Come on, you can't tell me you missed those implications in that post. "Why do they have the SEC at all...?" "Why is "insider trading" illegal?" "Why shouldn't people be able to get inside information and then make well-timed stock trades?"

Just another bitch about the government cloaked in thoughtfulness. I feel those sorts of posts demand retort.

Because insider trading is only profitable if someone is being scammed, i.e., the guy that doesn't have the insider information.

The more information all actors in a given market have, the healthier it is. Insider trading goes directly against that and makes a market unhealthy, as no one will participate in a market that allows bullshit like that to occur because they're probably going to get screwed by someone in the know.

You can't really say Caveat Emptor when one of the parties in a trade had no fucking clue that $STOCK was going to be worthless in 3 days because the company is getting ready to go bankrupt and nobody but a select few knows.

I'm curious what exactly makes a user "active". I know so many people with Facebook accounts that abandoned them ages ago...they didn't go through the bullshit hassle of deleting the account, but they stopped logging in.

This is one of the reasons why I really wondered about Facebook's valuation being accurate or not. I know for a fact that I had multiple accounts (before I deleted them), so to FB, I was 3 separate people (work, play, and politics). I know many other people that have a work account and a personal account to keep their private lives private.

Based upon my own off-the-cuff observations in my circle of friends and family (obviously not scientific, but just for the sake of estimation) I would guess that 2/3, maybe 3/4, of the active users are actually real, individual people. When you're talking about 900 million "active users", that's 225-300 million bogus, worthless accounts. How would an advertiser know that they were targeting ads at real people and not an alternate account? How would they know that all their "likes" were legitimate potential customers and not someone just fucking around on a throwaway account they don't care about?

The mobile customers are probably legitimate, I'll grant that, because most people aren't going to tie a troll account to their mobile device. But that still leaves 450 million accounts that are very questionable in my opinion.

I know Facebook would never really release numbers on the numbers of people that have abandoned their service or the number of potentially duplicate/troll accounts because it's just negative publicity with no positive gain for FB in doing so, but it would be nice to know if I'm completely off my rocker or if I just happen to know an inordinate number of people that have multiple accounts.

The thing I don't understand with Netflix is why the fucking PS3/360/Wii clients are so godawful. Why the hell do they not just give you a goddamned alphabetical list of everything they stream? Because it would be too easy for people to find what they really want to watch?

I refuse to watch Netflix on my Windows PC because fuck silverlight in it's stupid ass, but the arbitrary beshittedness of the console clients has me utterly perplexed because I can think of no reason why they would release a client like that in the first place. It's ridiculous that I have to use a 3rd party site to browse their offerings like someone that isn't only interested in shows related to the last goddamned thing they watched or some ridiculously specific categories ("Ooh, let's browse the 'heartwarming family films from the 80's' category, that's bound to have a wide selection to choose from for streaming!").

A much larger problem is going to be the rumored requirement of a cable subscription in the near future. That will be the death of Hulu and those bittorrent figures will jump back up again immediately after.

Thanks for the tip...