Actually, no. Commercial bulk mail gets most of its discount from pre-sorting. The POSTNET barcode has always just added an additional (and much smaller) discount to the bulk rate, but has never been required.

Starting in 2013 (though this date has been pushed back several times already) POSTNET is being phased out in favor of the "Intelligent Barcode" system, though I'm not sure if the barcode will actually become mandatory at that point or if POSTNET will just become invalid.

That - or rather, the difficulty in "going legit" - is the real issue here.

People tend to take the path of least resistance. In the past, I've bought some TV shows off of iTunes. Also bought a few on Xbox 360 Marketplace, and a few off of Amazon's service.

You know what? The iTunes ones don't really work anymore as I decided I no longer wanted to use iTunes. The Amazon ones don't work either after I switched away from Windows. The Xbox360 purchases technically still work, but only on the Xbox which sits in my bedroom, when almost all my TV watching is done in the living room.

The bottom line is that PURCHASED media is limited, crippled, and aggravating crap.

Compare to the piracy route: go to Bittorrent, search. Click on the little magnet. Wait for a bit, and a regular media file shows up. Whatever quality I want. I can copy it to my Android tablet. I can stream it over to my AppleTV running XBMC. I can play it on any of my computers in the house. It just works.

Essentially, but people who actually PAY get an inferior product.

Compare to music now: I buy virtually ALL of my music, because music is generally not copy protected anymore, and the legit sources are easy to use and priced right.

http://xkcd.com/927/

For better or for worse, tons of infighting and quibbling over all sorts of different things IS Linux. If I wanted a really nice, polished Unix system that had an authoritative body managing everything to make sure it stays that way, I'd just use Mac OS X.

What you're arguing for is basically like walking into a nice restaurant and claiming that they'd make so much more money if they just reduced their prices, and to do that they could cut some ingredient quality and pre-cook some foods to save time and the like. Eventually you get to the point where you've recreated a Taco Bell out of a nice restaurant - and that wouldn't even be a problem except that if Taco Bell was what you wanted, there was already one right down the street.

Let Linux be what Linux is. There's plenty of us who enjoy it just fine as is. Heck the ONLY thing I might get from an increased user-base would be more games, and I'm already doing most of my gaming on consoles anyways, so it's a moot point.

Yes. It was also mostly the AAA titles that ran that much, and then only at launch. I had an SNES and lots of games, but the vast majority were still purchases at $50 or less. Street Fighter 2 Turbo was $80 and was the only game at that high of a price that I ever got (it was a Christmas gift).

There are lots of us that went through organizational effort to ensure that our start menu was properly categorized and organized. If I installed a new program it typically went to one of several categories much like you see on a modern Linux install (Accessories, Games, Multimedia, Productivity, Utilities). For people who put in that extra effort to keep things clean, everything post-XP has been a letdown.

With the paths that Microsoft and most of the big Linux distros have been going down lately, I'm actually looking at just buying a Mac Mini for my next system.

You're a little high on that estimate. I got my first "IBM Compatible PC" back around that time (I had had a Commodore 64 for a few years earlier) and there were plenty of options under $1500, with many hovering around $1300. The one I ended up getting was from Montgomery Wards and was on sale for $999. It was a Packard Bell 486SX 20Mhz with 2MB Ram, 80MB hard drive, WIndows 3.1, and SuperVGA graphics. Didn't even have a modem, sound card, nor CD-ROM (though all of those things were later added, in addition to bumping the RAM up to 6MB and the processor up to a 486DX 75MHz via an Overdrive chip). Still, this was the first machine that that I connected up to the internet from home with.

They were a lot cheaper than what you're thinking. Still high by today's standards, but not quite as bad as your post would indicate.

Yep. I started using the internet in the mid-1990's when it had a few years on it but still wasn't quite universal like it is now. When one of the teachers at school was showing this cool new technology they were even describing all the now long forgotten things like Gopher and Finger. The main thing I saw that kicked off widespread usage was simple: "unlimited" usage policies.

Nobody really was interested when you paid for an AOL account and got 5 hours online. They weren't interested when they bumped that up to 20, 40, nor 80. People really didn't seem to bother much until they were told "Here, use this all you want.". Having the average price of a dial-up account fall from $30-40 down to $10-15 per month certainly didn't hurt either.

Its kinda funny though that now that as a society we're hooked, it's trending in the opposite direction. A cellular data plan is typically $30+ and has limits that you can actually hit pretty easily with normal usage patterns.

Huh? Not only are there very hilly areas of the US, the continental US is home to 2 different major mountain ranges (Rockys and the Appalachians), along with smaller groups here and there and additional ones in Alaska that we won't count simply due to the low population up there.

We have plenty of terrain difficulties here.

Bottom line - to get around here you have to drive quite a bit. The cities just aren't built for mass transit not to mention that even with high gas prices its still more economical to live outside the city and commute in than to live in the city (rural property costs are that much lower).

A lot of the current stuff DOES have me looking at more efficient transit, but realistically its still personal transit because that's all thats feasible in many areas. I likely will be looking at a lower powered motorcycle as my next vehicle purchase though. Its not hard to find some of those that get over 70mpg. That will be used as much as possible whilst the car is reserved for trips with more luggage than the bike can handle or during inclimate weather.

If you've read any PETA stuff, they generally are. Its an unreasonable goal so they don't attempt it all at once, but its pretty clear that they view any killing of animals (even for food) as wrong.

Its not even about a slippery slope in this case as their goal is well defined - its just that they are getting there incrementally.

Shooting across a public highway isn't a crime. Hell in South Carolina when dog driving for deer you're legally allowed to hunt ON the public highway and shoot the deer as they run across the road.

You have to understand that in rural areas there are a LOT of "public highways" that see VERY sparse traffic (as in a car might drive by every 20 minutes or so even during the busy part of the day), and there is a strong pro-gun/hunting tradition. Don't make assumptions. You might think "OMG they be crazy!?!!?!", and thats fine, but try to stay out of our affairs. We generally like our lifestyle here and have no issue leaving the "blue states" to their own ways if they agree to leave us to ours.