So Jehovah's Witnesses were right about something for once?

How was it the "cover story" if that's almost exactly how it's worded in the constitution of Slashdot's home country? Let's compare:

"To promote the public good by protecting the interests of creative people for a limited time" --bdwoolman

"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries" --Framers

Eventually authors will run out of distinct works to create. See "Melancholy Elephants" by Spider Robinson.

In the diatonic scale, there are seven distinct intervals between pitches, and rhythm can be approximated as either a short or long time from one note to the next. This leaves fourteen possibilities for each note but the last, as the last note has no next note to make an interval or duration meaningful, or 14^(n - 1) distinct melodies of length n. But a song was deemed an infringement for having matched eight notes (Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music, the "My Sweet Lord" case). This sets n = 8, or 14^7 - 105 million distinct melodies. There are already far more people than that on this planet.

My former employer used to get dinged for stating in item descriptions that other payment methods were available.

For a little over a dollar a day, users of Wi-Fi-only device can buy a cellular radio with a Wi-Fi router. You could think of it as a cell phone that doesn't make calls because it's only designed for tethering.

I took Joe_Dragon's comment to mean that the vast majority of rail service outside Boswash is freight, not commuter service.

So one service that Facebook provides is identity disambiguation. I never thought of it that way.

And a limited application selection. The advantage of a netbook is that it runs pretty much every PC application, up to and including developer tools, and I use my Dell Inspiron mini 1012 to work on hobby coding projects while riding the city bus to and from work. With the iPad, on the other hand, it has come to my attention that Apple maintains a list of several categories of application that it will never approve. Such applications can be used only remotely, and having to connect to the Internet to do so defeats the purpose of mobility unless you're willing to pay hundreds more per year for cellular broadband. A lot of other Slashdot users have given Apple a free pass on this, claiming that "nobody" needs any of those applications, but if even 1 percent of the population wants each of 15 things that a policy bans, the policy has hurt 15 percent of users. (Incidentally, that's why the feature creep in Microsoft Office has continued: though people tend to use only about 1 percent of the advanced features, each user has his own 1 percent.) Even Android, which is far more open about where the user can get applications, lacks a 1 percent that I use regularly: the ability to split the screen down the middle and see two different things.

Microsoft recently rebranded Hotmail as "Outlook.com", probably to overcome just that disadvantage.

PROTIP: Vim has spell check.

Not as much as you might think. Quick: Guess what mode the third and fourth generation game consoles, such as the NES and Super NES, always ran in. Answer: It was text mode, just with customized colored fonts.

The markup that makes a document accessible to the user of a text terminal is also likely to make the document accessible to users of speech interfaces or braille displays.

True, argumentum ad populum is usually a fallacy. But sometimes it isn't. Economies of scale in manufacturing is one case. As the masses have moved from "netbooks" (10" laptops) to tablets, it has become more difficult for a happy netbook user to find a new replacement for failed hardware. Communication platforms are another case. If people aren't willing to make their writing available through an open technoloby such as an Atom feed but instead prefer to lock their communication inside the closed systems of Twitter and Facebook because everyone else is doing it, one has to join what everyone else is doing in order to be able to communicate with everyone else.

If YouTube didn't exist, then to what video sharing service would people be uploading videos shot on an iPhone and edited on an iPad?

The last time I checked, eBay specifically forbade using a cheque or postal order to pay for an item that a buyer has bought. Which existing major online stores do allow using a cheque or postal order?