You're forgetting one major infrastructure problem that in my opinion plagues apps: mobile data plans. Most fancy games and apps these days are at least several tens of MBs big - I've seen ones which hit the 200MB mark. Most people - even in the developed world - don't have a mobile data plan of more than, say, 1GB per month. If one single game eats up one fifth of that data plan in no-time, that's a very big reason for me NOT to buy it. Sure, I could go home and use my wifi to download said app, but that kinda defies the concept of mobile, doesn't it? ISPs keep talking about speeds, fancy 4G/LTE etc, but the speed of mobile internet isn't really the problem; it's the limited amount of volume that is the bottleneck here.

which won't get you anywhere if you ever decide to venture out of the US.

I'm afraid to say, but there are loads of gene patents out there. SO yes, half your body belongs to some kind of corporation or another, and hence so will your clones (with the added bonus that the cloning technique itself probably has been patented a million times over)

Even though jezus christ, mohammed, buddha et al are all long dead and we can never provide evidence they were potentially damaging to society, does not mean their heritage hasn't been very very very damaging indeed. Need I remind you of the concept of crusades or jihad? In another example of religious-induced suffering, followers of the usually-so-peaceful buddha recently stormed and burned muslim villages in Myanmar, purely and only because the residents of those villages were not like-minded buddhists. ALL major religions have the alarming attribute of being potentially very harmful to society.

In a truly 'free' market there would be no such thing as patents or the International Trade Commission in the first place. Since patents - unfortunately - do exist, we need some kind of regulation. If companies really have a great invention, I'd think they could better just keep it really secret the old-fashioned way: Coca Cola never patented anything, yet even after all those years nobody knows its recipe and reproducing Coca Cola is therefore effectively impossible, just to give an example.

Not necessarily. Some so-called variable speed of light theories postulate that c could have been up to 60 orders of magnitude bigger in the very early universe than it is today. This would solve some problems in cosmology, and form an alternative to cosmic inflation theories.

As said, it takes only a few lines of code to fix this "bug". Not really hard. Just set a fixed amount of time for the response. Besides:

Is there any situation where interpreted languages are actually faster than said other languages? ;-)

Hmm... interesting observation. It is, however, flawed in the details.

Devising a system with a different currency for information sure as hell is necessary. The radical solution however, is not reputation exchange. Because then you'll come to the age old question of what's good and what's bad. In each culture, one's reputation would depend on different factor. Even factor that would up the reputation level in one place, would downgrade the reputation in the other. Not very useful in terms of international trade. However, I quite like the idea of something other than money the currency. I'd propose something more or less like the following:

People start out with a given number of credits/kudos/whatever-you'd-like-to-call-it. To get some kind of information you'd need to sacrifice a given number of credits. Giving information away would lead to receiving some a certain amount of credits. So in order to keep receiving information you need to GIVE information away as well. In such a way you prevent people from downloading huge amounts of data without giving something in return. On the other hand, you would ensure content creators give their information away, because otherwise they would not be able to receive information in the future (and everybody wants/needs information, right?). To ensure this not falling into a normal money system, one could propose a system where the cost of receiving is lower than the benefits of giving. So one would need to give more information than one receives to keep a positive account balance. Say person A and B have both have 1000 information credits. Persons A has some information that person B wants. Person B " sacrifices" 750 credits to get this information, while person A only receives 500 credits in giving this information. For person B to keep receiving information from person A, he has to give away his acquired information to another person (person C). It might seem like a normal money system, but whereas the usual systems focus on "acquiring as much as possible" this information-credit system more focusses on "giving as much as possible". Entirely different economy.

FYI, i live in a country where fireworks at national holidays are organised into show by city governments. Though not as testosterone-heavy, these shows are generally much more beautiful than your average neighbor trying some shit in his garden. Simply because some *real* pyrotechnicians work out those shows. Maybe you should try that in the US too ;-). And if you really need to please some urge to blow up something: just buy a block of dry ice, throw it in a bucket of water, close the lid, and KABOOM. Much bigger bang than any fireworks can do, plus it's entirely legal xD.(and the CO2 will just sublime away, so nobody will even know what happened).

FF might save your data in a crash, but in doing so it gets tantalizingly *slow*. I usually have 10+ tabs open at any given time, but on the next restart, when FF restarts and tries to open all tabs at once it just slows down and down, quite possibly clogging up the machine in severe cases. The end result: most of the time I'm just hoping for the "well, this is embarrassing" message ;-).

At 9:26 in the short version. You clearly see two children in the right front seat in the van. You really don't have to watch carefully, it's pretty damned obvious! Then at 12:05 after they shot the van one guy says "Ah, yeah, look at that, right through the windshield. Haha!" It's just cruel, I don't have any other words for it. Very cruel, and the guys that did/ordered/covered this up should be put to trial. You just dont shoot at innocent people trying to help wounded folks. It's inhuman.

I don't think these were marketed in the huge way Apple does with the iPad. Consumer products never grow big unless they are marketed. The iPad --- and the clones it will undoubtedly spur --- might not be new in the technical sense of the word, but for 99.9% of the world population, it will. Perhaps the world wasn't ready for tablet PCs 10 years ago, as the netbook also has only been vastly popular for the last few years. Ten years ago, people were just getting used to mobile phones equipped with camera's, they couldn't see any need for tablet computers. These days, that's changed. E-book manufacturers make ever greater profits, our mobile phones are basically wearable desktop computers, its only logical that tablet computers are the next big thing. Apple comes with this iPad at precisely the right moment, AND it's got the right sense of marketing. ;-)