I think you would enjoy Neil Gaiman's work less if it weren't edited and I'm sure you like cover art too. Maybe you enjoy having places like amazon.com to buy books from and without a publisher's marketing effort you might not have even heard of Neil Gaiman.

The $20 price isn't all profiteering, there are a lot of people who work on creating and selling a book and they don't work for free.

"PayPal's move is unlikely to result in many more people boycotting the company, as most knowledgeable on-line users will have been refusing to use them for years for a wide variety of abusive practices."

I don't think that the word most means what the submitter thinks it means. Either that or the submitter is implying that if you don't boycott Paypal you aren't knowledgeable.

Why is this moderated Funny?
Wouldn't Interesting be a better fit?

Because all companies restrict themselves to .com and other organisations stick to their respective .org, .net or .edu?
Because all US based domains are registered under .us?

I don't think .xxx is going to change anything at all, especially if ICANN introduces custom TLDs for sale.

Wikipedia suggests that a third of Telstra was worth $14bn in 1997. The current market cap of Telstra is $41.8bn (which actually suggests that the company is worth less today than it was in 1997). Telstra's total assets run to approximately $37bn. The Government still owns about 10% of Telstra through its future fund.

$11bn would be about 26% of the total value of all Telstra's stock or 29% of the value of its assets.

IANAL but analogies rarely hold any legal water because the laws that govern each activity are completely separate.

The Missouri statute quoted above includes the 'reasonable grounds to believe that he has authorization' provision and I doubt that any sexual assault legislation would have a similar provision.

Whether or not a court would find that Google does have these 'reasonable grounds' is too complicated a question for me to more than guess at. It may be that the onus is on Google to prove that their belief was reasonable or alternatively there might be precedent about what constitutes 'reasonable grounds' that is applicable to the case.

Of course unless Google is charged with violating this particular Missouri law the question isn't particularly relevant.

A reply to your aside: It's not the encryption between me and my mail server that I'm worried about (that's easy to control), it's the lack of encryption between my mail server and wherever the mail I send is going. How many mail servers are configured to talk SSL encrypted SMTP? I know about STARTTLS but do mail servers generally try and use it?

While I'm not sure if the act's definition of access would require two way communication alternatively I'd suggest that Google could claim that they had reasonable grounds to believe that they were authorized to access the network based on the lack of encryption on the network.

After looking into it a bit, I must admit that the book does actually look a good attempt to give an unbiased introduction to common fallacies in economic thought. I guess you can't judge a book by its cover (or title in this case)

I don't know anything about Joseph Heath or his writing but a title like "Filthy Lucre: economics for people who hate capitalism." doesn't make it easy to believe that it is a balanced accounting of the basics of economics.

Many if not most Australian ISPs maintain large transparent proxy servers to meet this requirement. It worked really well in the past before streaming media became big, between youtube and bittorrent standard caching schemes don't seem to cut it. Even with many of the big CDNs having an Australian presence there is only so much good that local caching can do.

It sounds more like they use the MW4 3D engine to visualize GIS data. If they instead talked about IP Geolocation rather than "GIS navigation" I might believe that they're in advertising.

Don't forget marketing, publishers will try to get a book publicity in the form of advertisements, reviews and premium space in bookstores / ebookstores.

The Jennifer Morgue isn't a science fiction novel.
If you would like to try Stross' science fiction I would suggest Accelerando (available free online here: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/accelerando/ ) or if you prefer near future science fiction Halting State would be worth a look.

I don't understand why everyone is against metered data costs whether it be on phones or one their home connections. Electricity and other utilities are metered by use and it doesn't seem to provoke the outrage that metering of data connections does. Adding metered data usage could make the iPhone data plan cheaper for light users. The concept of metered usage is not inherently any less fair than unlimited usage plans, it all depends on what price structure they propose. If unlimited data is $30 but 1Gb/month is $15 then the average iPhone user is saving money, on the other hand if instead the pricing was $1/Mb obviously the users would be losing. It's clearly too early to be worried, why don't you wait and see what happens? Why shouldn't the people who use a little data on their iPhone pay less than the people who use a lot?