You don't understand. Ferengi workers don't want to stop the exploitation, we want to find a way to become the exploiters.

-Rom. Star Trek Deep Space Nine, "Bar Association"

What makes this interesting is that one can so easily see the future of RIM so far out. All things considered they're doing well - they're still making a respectable profit and phone sales are near their peak. Yet at the same time they're almost entirely coasting by on momentum, as they haven't released a blockbuster product in quite some time. RIM may be fine now, but they have next to nothing to keep their customers over the long term, and that's their problem.

Who decided that?

Mother nature, unfortunately. Men can father kids at virtually any time, but as a woman if we don't have the first kid by the time we're 30 we're behind the genetic curve. After 30 it gets much harder to have kids, and by 35 it's an invitation for birth defects.

Of course if you don't want kids you don't have to settle down quite so soon, but for health purposes you should make a decision fairly early. Otherwise it's IVF and praying that your kid comes out okay.

This just in: having someone collect facts, check them, and then present them takes time and money. Free news was never sustainable, it's just that until recently it wasn't attainable. News will always have a price, be it paying for your paper or having someone else pay for it by inserting ads. Unfortunately advertisers are discovering that online advertising doesn't work, so we'll probably have to settle on the former.

Regulators should have never allowed the Hitachi acquisition to happen. The HDD industry was already over consolidated.

Hitachi wanted out. There was going to be three HD manufacturers regardless. The difference was whether the company was sold for some value to another HD manufacturer, or effectively dismantled and sold piecemeal for pennies. This wasn't the case of a large HD manufacturer purposely trying to buy out another to reduce competition, it was low margins picking off the weakest of the bunch.

I think you misunderstand me. I'm not saying men should settle down for sex, I'm saying sex is why men settle down. They have sex with a regular partner and over time develop long term bonds with that person, and that's why they settle down. But if men don't need sex, then they have very little reason to interact with women and eventually settle down.

Using sex to get what you want is not what I meant, and I completely agree with you that it's the wrong way to operate in a relationship.

Agreed. It's not the end of the world by any means, but as is often the case there's some truth in the middle, particularly for porn.

Futurama's Don't Date Robots gag wasn't entirely wrong. At the risk of reducing my gender to an object here, the impetus for men to enter into stable monogamist relationships with women is the companionship of and sex with a woman. Over time stronger long term emotional bonds develop, but in the short term the hook is what we can do to satisfy the seemingly bottomless well of male lust.

Porn changes that. I would like to think sex with a good woman is still better than doing it as a solo activity, but at the same time I know I can't compete with porn from a variety perspective (I can't be blonde, brunette, 18, a MILF, and asian all at the same time). And to be clear I do like a good (or dirty?) porno now and then myself - it's something I enjoy sharing with my fiancee - but it's something we can do together that strengthens our bond. I know he's also wanking it on the side (what man doesn't?) but at no point do I feel like he's avoiding the opportunity to have sex with me, in spite of the ups and downs of a relationship. But can a guy still have some kind sexual gratification without actually interacting with a woman? With the incredible amount of porn available these days (and increasingly complex toys), absolutely. And that's the issue.

At least from my perspective it's something that has already changed relationship dynamics. I've been fortune to meet a wonderful man that is my fiancee, but for many of my friends they have not been so lucky. We are all at an age where we should be settling down and forming those long term commitments, and while my friends are ready, the men they should be forming those commitments with are not. It's not that the men aren't there financially or even emotionally, but from the perspective of someone entering into one of those relationship, so many of the men simply don't see the need for a woman. They go do things together as guys while rarely interacting with the girls, and apparently that's all they ever need. And I absolutely think porn plays a part in that because their sexual needs are being met elsewhere.

Is porn bad? No, clearly not. But there is such a thing as too much of a good thing, and I believe we've reached that point. As things stand we're going to end up with a lot of awkward middle-agers in a couple of decades, who will have never formed a long term relationship either because they shortchanged the original impetus to do so (men), or because there were no partners for them (women).

TL;DR: Porn not all bad, but too much porn means men never settle down with women because they don't need sex.

WD20EARS has been discontinued, which is why it's so expensive. Its replacement is the next generation WD20EARX.

How does HBO know Why I'm not watching the show?

When no one subscribes to the network but the DVD sets are flying off of the shelves, they'll know.

The Oatmeal also demonstrates why most people have no problem stealing things: it's easy when you can rationalize away the problem.

HBO is only interested in selling the show to you if you subscribe to their service. They don't want to just sell you the episodes at a fraction of the price of a monthly subscription. This is HBO's show, it is HBO's right to make that decision.

The right thing to do is to not watch it. Not pirate it and then try to justify it. HBO did not want to sell it to you on your terms, therefore you have no right to watch the show. And it's not committing piracy that tells HBO that you're unhappy, it's not watching the show that tells HBO you're unhappy. If you steal the show that just tells HBO you're too cheap to pay and that they should do more to stop pirates.

The measurement of a moral person is that they can do the right thing even in difficult situations. The Oatmeal only demonstrates that people can't do the right thing unless it's convenient to do so.