How do you watch collegiate or professional sports if the game is blacked out online because it's being shown on national or regional pay TV? And what would be a good substitute for MSNBC's Morning Joe Brewed by Starbucks, which one of my relatives claims is worth $60 per month to her?

Anonymous Coward wrote:

It's not maccodemonkey's inability as much as the median voter's inability.

Bluster leads to votes, and votes lead to legislation.

But it's probably in another room, and the general public has no desire to connect it to a television. Or it might be in use by another member of the household.

When does Song of the South or Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea come to Netflix?

Netflix no, LoveFilm yes.

You can already get ponies on BitTorrent.

Perhaps the news is that AT&T isn't going to slam customers to a voice and text plan if they happen to insert the SIM into a device whose IMEI says "phone".

Even if you don't ever plan to change a username, a username makes a poor primary key just for performance reasons. In MySQL, for example, primary keys should be kept short because every index will have a copy of every primary key. If your primary key is userid, only the table itself and the index on username will have usernames in it. But if your primary key is username, every index will have usernames in it, as will other tables. Given the long usernames that are possible in popular web applications like MediaWiki (200+ characters = 600+ bytes of UTF-8, compared to 4 bytes for a userid), I can't see any reason to make the username a primary key.

Then you must have missed these three stories earlier on Slashdot.

When someone reports your allegedly illegal porn to the FBI, of course you take action to keep the FBI from taking down all WMF sites and arresting people.

In your hypothetical, if Google Checkout would use a separate parallel currency, to what other currency or currencies would it be pegged? Money is only good for what it buys, and retailers need to buy from their suppliers using the currency that the supplier accepts.