Thank you for a well thought out response. I've been losing my faith in the /. community lately and you've rekindled that in me.

I take my hat off to these kids who are showing real resolve against a system that would rather they just give a little to get a little.

America will not always have boom times but there is no reason to have a society where not being born into wealth means having to live in a state of fear where 99% of the populace is one health issue away from bankruptcy.

Just by the way here, comparing the Makerbot to a mill is not valid. The Makerbot has a 2'x2'x2' footprint and can sit on a coffee table.

Unsuccessful troll is unsuccessful. Yay far /.

There is something to be said about information density in character based languages. A short sentence in Japanese can expand to a paragraph in English simply because concepts are more dense than phonetics. If I had a hard character limit for a message I would much rather say it in a character based language; it's be a lot more efficient. To make a blanket statement like that is just foolish.

I agree completely! My first was a Lamy Safari and at $25 it really hit the Neat Tool mark for me. There's something about writing that works well for my mind and physical copies can't be lost with a simple rm -rf.

Learning new things all the time, thanks!

I do like the NoScript wildcard https enforcement though, its got a slightly different use.

Thank you sir! I've been looking for another extension to force the Firefox searchbar to user Google SSL for 30 minutes now.

Why install another extension when I already have good old NoScript.

Who or what is a Taylor Momsen?

Also: News flash, people try to use misleading titles to get people to their ads.

Yes, very much so, in a Carl Sagan "wow the universe is big and we're small" kind of way, not a Steven Hawking "don't talk to alien strangers" kind of way ;)

Time for people to start demanding municipal broadband from their communities. Local government is going to be less self-interested in limiting packet speed than monolithic Comcast and AT&T.

Most of the time these technologies don't work or don't have a sufficient level of customization to make them useful. Cellphone predictive text (not smartphone) has been pretty bad for years, especially for short words (did I mean "he" or "if") and it doesn't get patched. The only solution is to buy a new model which makes me wary since I'm already expected to just make due until something better comes along. Yes, Android and all that but I'm talking plain vanilla cellphones.

Does it make me a technophobe to not want a camera recording me all day while I use a computer, just so the machine can simulate things that my brain already does?

I'm one of those people that will just listen to Last.fm and whatever music I already have. To me this reads like "Warner To End Any Chance of People Being Exposed to their Content".

Good luck with that, as parent pointed out, it seems to be going great for the newspaper industry.

I worked at a small company that just make due with the annoying WGA messages. It's rather embarrassing when it's a machine used for customer presentations but the boss didn't want to pony up the Microsoft Fee to make the thing legit. That was a Windows XP Home machine but even with the WGA messages the machine still did the basic stuff the owner wanted.

Other than no upgrades what else does WGA disable?

Then we end up in this same situation.

Lately Nintendo, and Microsoft weirdly, have been more receptive to releasing Japan-only games in the US. I just bought Tatsunoko vs Capcom for the Wii which has a bunch of characters I have never heard of from 1970's anime. Microsoft is dipping their toe in the water on this as well by releasing Mushihimesama for the 360 without the usual region protections; the damn thing costs $75 to import from Japan but it will play on a stock US 360. It looks like they are recognizing that there is a global market for "niche" games.

The iPod touch can play music, play movies, show pictures, run apps, surf the web, and do email. For all but the first of these activities a larger screen is a massive improvement. If the iPad were truly nothing more than an oversized iPod touch, why does anyone think that would be bad or pointless?