Cry a little louder and harder, bitches! We can't hear you from way up here on awesome mountain! What's that? You're mad and are going to form an open committee to discuss ways to retort in a GPL-based, socially pluralistic manner? In three years time, you'll have a shoddily constructed riposte AND a donated-by-Cory handkerchief with which to wipe away your salty tears? Keep debating, pansies! I'll be figuring out a way to put some TRUCK NUTS on my iPad.

Yes you can, by withholding said profit from them. I refuse to buy games at new prices unless I know in advance the game is completely worth it... for that there needs to be a basis of trust that goes back some games. Once i've been screwed by a mediocre game that's made even crappier by requiring activation/disc inserted/internet connection I see this as a reduced value for those games... DRM devaluates games. I won't refuse to play it, but I will wait until it hits the bargain bins (and that can be surprisingly fast sometimes).

Adding blu ray to your account now costs from $2 extra for the 1 disc at a time plan to $5 extra for the 4 disc at a time plan.

Xmission has standard residential UTOPIA bandwidths of 15 Mbit/s and 50 Mbit/s - up and down. The end user links are all 100 Mbit/s Ethernet (over fiber), and you can get a 100 Mbit/s "business" connection if you want.

UTOPIA's member cities are: Brigham City, Cedar City, Cedar Hills, Centerville, Layton, Lindon, Midvale, Murray, Orem, Payson, Perry, Riverton, Tremonton, Vineyard, Washington, and West Valley City.

CAPSING random WORDS doesn't make your ARGUMENT stronger.

The real problem is that most of the big themes in classical SF require vast amounts of energy. And that's not happening. There hasn't been a new source of energy in fifty years, just marginal improvements in the old ones. This matters.

That's why space travel is a bust. With chemical fuels, it will never be more than an overly expensive, marginal enterprise. The better '50s SF writers all knew this; read Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold the Moon". They just assumed that, somehow, the energy problem would be cracked. Didn't happen. So space travel remains an expensive ego trip for countries and billionaires.

Industrial civilization is only 200 years old. 1808, the first time someone bought a train ticket on a commercial railroad and went someplace, is a good starting point. Industrial abundance, being able to make more stuff than people could consume, only goes back to WWII.

During most of the 20th century, "progress" was a big theme. We don't hear that phrase used much any more. The number by which one measures "progress" for the average Joe, "per capita median real income for urban wage earners", peaked in 1973. (Median income, not average income; the average is biased by wealth concentration to rich people.) Back then, a guy without a high school diploma could get a job at GM and make enough to buy a house, two cars, a boat, and an education for his kids. That's over. (You don't see that number mentioned much any more. It was heavily publicized back when the US boasted "the highest standard of living in the world".)

Now we're starting to run out of energy and raw materials. Nobody serious thinks there's enough left to sustain current output for another century, let alone bring China and India up to US levels of consumption.

It's hard to write good SF about "the great winding down". It's been done, but it's not read much. The glory days of SF coincide with the period during which "progress" was a win for the little guy.

That's why SF is dead. The plausible future sucks.

IMHO, this is dangerous. These days, if people see it on the internet, it's true until proven false. Of course in many newspapers that's also the case but it's much easier to come down on them like a ton of bricks and get people fired for spreading lies. Not so with a blogger. They aren't employed by a company generally who can reprimand them for not fact-checking and even if you get a court order to shut them down they'll just move the content to a different place.

There is no other fauna shown on his desert homeworld that is "about two meters" Everything was much larger or much smaller, even in the remastered edition.

$700K/yr for software support and hardware maintenance isn't really out of line for a high-capacity system with 99.999% uptime.

Maybe they don't need that level of reliability, but if they do five-9s, they will probably find that whatever system or group of systems replaces it will have similar support costs.

Yes, there is.