I think his argument is that Walmart would be much less valuable if it paid a living wage and was not subsidized by the taxpayers.

I did not like that picture the first time I saw it because I thought it was an overly busy collage. Then I realized that it was one single picture. Finally I realized that if I stood outside at night and stretched out my arm as far as I can, my thumb nail would cover up enough sky to hold at least a dozen XDF pictures.

I don't think I've ever felt so small before or since that moment.

You're right that simple living is affordable near the poverty line, but you won't have access to healthcare or college. And you definitely can't swing it if you need to pay for daycare because both parents work.

If this life extension came out today it would already be too late for me to live a long time as a young person. And if it took 20 years for this process to become affordable for me, then I will be well past middle age and my parents will be quite old.

The previous price hike happened at the same time they announced that they were going to split the streaming service (Netflix) from the DVD by mail service (Kwikster?). There were going to be two different web sites, two different user accounts, and no integration between them. Fortunately, they realized that this was a stupid idea and cancelled it. I don't know why this isn't mentioned when reporters cover the backlash from their previous price increase. The split bothered me a whole lot more than the price increase.

You would be surprised at how many deaf people listen to music. It ends up being heavy on the bass so that you can feel the beat physically instead of just hearing it.

That comment brought back a bad memory from a calc 2 course I took in college. The professor was ancient. On the first day of class he refered to a silent film actress who never was able to make it in the talkies.

One day he was going over a problem on the chalkboard. A student asked how the professor got from one line to the next. The professor threw up both hands and exclaimed that he'd never be able to cover the course material if he had to go over every trivial detail. He then angrilly filled up the entire chalkboard at the front of the classroom and half of the board on the side wall with the "trivial detail". You could have heard a pin drop, the entire class was stunned into silence. The professor clearly knew math, but he sure didn't know how to teach it to freshman. He was much too advanced.

"The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag" is a great book on this subjet. I was both amazed and horrified by the descriptions of the gulags.

A couple of months ago I read Consider Phlebas. I loved the setting which Banks created, but I didn't like the characters. They seemed generic, and I couldn't bring myself to care about them. How is the character development in the other books in the series? Does it get better, or is Banks mainly a world builder?

I think and hope that you are right. Shortly after I bought a telescope a friend made a comment about how I had gotten into astrology.

Somehow you have missed the point of network neutrality. It has nothing to do with granting "the lowliest customer" the same bandwidth as the greatest. It is about making the ISP treat the same type of traffic the same regardless of source. Meaning that Time Warner (my ISP) can't charge me more for streaming video from Youtube or Netflix than they charge me for using their own streaming media service.

115k unique visitors on our site this month, and ~70% of those were using IE. Heck, IE7 is 49%!

The majority of PC's still running XP are found in businesses, where they are kept up to date and locked down in a domain. There isn't a need to do mass replacement of PC's like there was in the past. We're replacing XP with 7 by attrition.

You are right on. My high school social studies class taught us that Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" was an example of muckracking journalism. We didn't read the book, but only a short paragraph or two about the unsanitary conditions in the slaughterhouse. I decided to read the book for myself a few years later, and that's when I realized the real story was about how the workers were exploited as badly as the cattle. The bigger story about workers rights was completely ignored in high school.