I'm perfectly aware and all I'm saying is this season is a mess in trying to tell the story.

This season is a major let down. Too many sub plots, not enough time. Changing to someone else every 5 minutes has gotten tedious and really isn't making for a smooth flowing story line.

Because we live in a society where everyone deserves everything. And no puppies are killed if you do download it. Solving piracy is pretty simple to do. Instead of threatening to sue, you send them a package with a dead puppy in it.

All this shows is that the judge has no regard for patents and should be removed from the case.

struggle to keep our 50+ year old machines running China has at least two 65k+ ton forging presses.

It's called paying for a service. Does the waitress deserve 20% of the price of a meal because she jotted down an order and filled your cup with water? The service industry charges what the consumer will bare. Not what it actually costs. If you don't like what they are charging then don't go out to eat or use their service. They have no obligation to charge you based on their costs.

Ariane is nothing special, not sure why everyone treats them as if they are. There are a half dozen other commercial launch companies that do the same thing. Commercial space is nothing new. The only thing new is the potential payload including people sometime in the future.

One reason is they don't have to deal with 5 billion calls a day as to why some obscure $1 microphone doesn't behave the way they intend. The kinect does do a better than average job trying to compensate for things and is a good baseline. Just letting anyone try and hook up their crappy 10 year old mic and hoping it works would be a potential support nightmare.

Mike Scully is from West Springfield, I believe his daughter teaches in Springfield. He calls into the radio 102 morning show quite often when he's in the area.

There are actually quite a few things similar that can easily be seen as familiar to Springfield MA. For example, the bridge is remarkably similar to the Memorial bridge. Several episodes mention the Springfield Armory, which Springfield MA is famous for and a national historic site. Mayor Quimby is obviously modeled after certain MA politicians, etc.

Not saying it's the model for the whole town, but to think that Mike injected a bit of his local home isn't a stretch.

He got fired because apparently enough people were upset with his views that it threatened to hit the companies bottom line. There is a subtle difference.