I saw Goody Stallman with the Devil!

Fish can't get to the body. It'd be in a regulation US Navy body bag specifically made for burials at sea, and loaded down with lead weights. It'd definitely be hard to find though.

Microsoft owns a chunk of Facebook, so I doubt it.

I'm not sure it works that way. I don't think XBL points are like the gold standard. I mean, you pay $20USD for however many points-- say 500 (Totally made up numbers here, but $0.04 USD per point). The transaction is done at that point, and Microsoft banks the cash, even if you don't spend your points for six months. It's not like you buy your premium horse armor for 415 points, but Microsoft still has to keep $3.40 in escrow to cover the "value" of your unspent points.

In my opinion the number one reason to do this is to decouple the idea of physical value from points. You don't have $3.40 in your XBL wallet, you have 85 points, and when you spend those 85 points to buy some pretty pixels on your screen you're not thinking about the fact that it was once $3.40. The second reason is exactly so they DON'T have to do what you're saying-- have fractional portions of a customer's unspent money laying around. If you still have $3.40 in your account at some point and you stop playing XBL, you're going to try to finagle a refund. When you have 85 Points it's easier for you to let go, because you're already been separated from the idea of it having physical value. The third big reason is that it allows a microtransaction model without paying tons of credit car processing fees. They'd rather sell you 1000 points up front even if you only spend them 100 at a time, rather than pay 10 times the processing fees using credit cards up front for every purchase.

Nothing to do with driving. It's a god given right not to pay taxes, and then complain about the deficit to GDP ratio. Too many Americans don't realize that taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society, and that the US has the lowest taxes of any industrialized country in the world.

Then the execs would claim it was "a new genre that didn't stand the test of time," rather than saying, "it was a fragile new idea that we raped over and over until it could only sit in a corner; clutching its knees in catatonic horror and soiling itself. Next please." The fans didn't abandon music games. Companies like Activision took the fans for fools and pumped out overpriced garbage.

I'm in the market for an ereader right now. I've considered everything from the Kobo (I'm in Canada) to the iPad; weighing the pros and cons of LED screens versus eInk, etc. I've decided to buy an eInk device for a few reasons (I'm a heavy reader so I benefit more from the specific pros of those devices), and I'll do so in the next month. I mention this in case Jeff Bezos is trolling Slashdot, because I won't be buying a Kindle, and the reason is almost 100% because of the lack of ePub support. I don't want Amazon telling me that they will deign to allow me to borrow Kindle books from libraries. I want to be borrowing the ePub books that my library is already lending anyway.

I've pretty much ruled out the Kobo because of the difficulty of entering text (which I don't see myself doing very often, but it's plausible), and so I've decided I'm most likely going to be getting a Nook. I'm in Canada. There are no Barnes & Noble stores here, but the device works fine if you don't need 3G support. This means I'm willing to make a 6 hour round trip to buy a device from Amazon's competitor (to skip dealing with high shipping fees and Customs crap) because of one feature that could have easily been added in software updates by now, and which they seem to be totally obstinate in not adding. You don't need a partner program with 11,000 US libraries when you can just add ePub support and, poof, suddenly your device can work with what thousands of libraries are already doing.

I think Amazon is suffering from Not Invented Here syndrome, and if they're not careful they're going to get thrashed in the market they invented. They'll end up like Diamond and Creative, who were early to the MP3 player market right at the time when the demand had bubbled up to that magical point where a device can really take off, but got destroyed because another company did it better.

Artificially inflate version number? What the heck does that even mean? It's still going to be "Firefox 4" when it hits release. No one stupid enough to care about "it's version 12!" is smart enough to be downloading a beta. It's not like they're pulling a Slackware or something and going with Firefox 7, or worse, Firefox XP, or Firefox 2011.

Do you know how much kinetic energy a train has moving at 250mph? What, do you want terrorists hijacking trains and driving them into skyscrapers? Why don't you love America? :(

force a radical shakeup of the frieght companies operating priorities

Do you like drinking orange juice while it's still fresh? Do you like being able to buy a mango in Boston in December? Then don't fuck with the railroads. I'm in Canada in February and I can get fresh pineapple, and if you fuck with that I WILL CUT YOU.