I don't think you understand how this works. It happened to me, so I know.

I have an IPad. I have purchased many apps, and each time it asks me for a password. I let my 7-year old daughter use the IPad, confident that she could not purchase anything because she did not know my password. I downloaded a game for her, one that her friend had told her about, called Tap Zoo. The game was free; I put in my password to download the game, and then gave her the IPad so that she could play. Later that night I got an invoice from Apple for "gems" and other things to the tune of $200.

She did not enter any passwords. She thought that she was using game money to purchase these items. It turns out that Apple cached my password for 15 minutes, and that allowed her to make real dollar purchases without entering a password. I had never heard of the setting to "turn off in-app purchases" before. I did not know I even needed to know about this. There is no obvious "log out of iTunes" button anywhere either.

The game designer obviously used this flaw as a business model -- no one in their right mind is going to allow their kids to spend hundreds of dollars on crap in a kid's game. The game and others like it is clearly geared toward this kind of inadvertent purchase. At the very least, Apple should disallow in-game purchases by default, and when you turn it on, it should let you know about the 15 minute password thing. It did not. Thankfully, Apple refunded my $200. But it shouldn't have happened in the first place. Every experience I had with the IPad up until that point was that a password was necessary for purchases.

This is kind-of like the old "900" numbers. Any business owner knew to put a "900 block" on a phone that employees had access to. So the crooked companies schemed with the phone company to create a workaround -- call an "800" (free) number and say "I agree to the charges" and the service gets billed to the phone number, and the phone company says "pay the bill or we'll shut you off, but sorry, we have no control over the charges, we're just the billing agent". Someone is always looking to scam you in ways you don't expect.

This is just capitalism in action. This is a variation of the "free rider" problem.

The logical extension of restricting entire countries because you can't derive revenue from them is to block *any* group of users that you can't derive revenue from if you can figure out how to do that.

The corollary is that you want to attract customers who you *are* likely to derive revenue from, so you create content to appeal to those groups.

If the marketing geniuses figure out that senior citizens are "unprofitable" as internet consumers, maybe that means blocking that group. Of course, that will probably anger people who realize that someday, they will be old and will therefore be blocked, so the strategy could backfire. It's a lot easier to block people from, say, Africa, because that affects someone else, a group that most consumers can't picture ever joining. It's also a group that can be blocked as a group without sacrificing valuable users.

Condensation on windows is not a sign of a poorly ventilated house. Condensation forms when humid air comes in contact with a much cooler surface. So, for example, if you have no storm windows on your windows but you are running a humidifier you will get condensation in the winter.

Vinyl windows will actually reduce condensation because they are like built-in storm windows. The inner pane isn't as cold as a single pane of glass -- yet vinyl windows also reduce airflow, meaning that ventilation is reduced.

That part of the study just doesn't make sense.

Micropayments don't mean 1 cent per page, or per day. They could mean 1 cent per month to visit a site. Or 25 cents per year.

I agree that people don't want to worry about racking up charges -- but that does not mean that they don't want to pay for things. I worked for a dollar store chain, and when things are $1, people don't take the time to think "is it worth it". But when we introduced $2-5 items, they balked -- even though the deals were very good -- because $1 was below their radar, but $2-5 was not.

If I had to pay 1-5 cents per month to each site to surf the web, the amount is so small that I wouldn't bother to meter myself.

The big question is, is the content worth it? The next big question is, if IMDB starts charging, is the difference in their price versus the value provided by the next free competitor worth the switch? For many, it will not be, and IMDB will profit.

Yes and no. Items from the 1920's are still protected by copyright even though the parties creating this content were doing so under the understanding that maximum protection length was 28 years with a *possible* 28 year extension if renewed. Items created under that law could revert back to that length. Items created from 1976 forward were "life of the author + 50 years" (which seems insane -- copyright shouldn't reward an artist's descendants, the USA is supposed to be a meritocracy, not an aristocracy).

I agree with the premise; 15-20 years seems like a reasonable balance for copyright. It gives the creator a good period to profit from a work, and gives the public the right to use the work after this period has expired. The vast majority of published work is generally economically unviable, so this wouldn't adversely affect too many parties.