Yes, who could forget when hundreds of thousands of professionals, all wearing their big-boy pants, marched on Washington and demanded the right to be fired for no reason. Corporate bigwigs, reluctant to let their little darlings flee the coop, were nevertheless powerless to stop this people-powered onslaught, and they shed a collective tear as they realized that the American Worker was all grown up now and ready to go out and start making minimum wage.

The minimum wage is next! Power to the grown-ups!

Corporate/private patronage and episodic content releases based on player prepayments could solve this problem. It's true the industry would be different and possibly smaller, but not gone. Someone would find a way to make money even if software was free, and the public domain would greatly benefit.

You guys have it all wrong. On matters relating to the music and video industries, duplicate votes are worth exactly as many as the originals.

> ... Before 0?

Good bit colder than it is now. In the sea of Galilee there are sunken cruiseliner with iceberg-sized holes in their hulls.

> ... Before 300 B.C.?

LOTS colder than it is now. The story about the nose of the sphinx being used for target practice are well known, but the story about its earmuffs being used for mortar target calibration are not nearly so well known.

> ... Before 1800 B.C. ?

Wooly Mammoths would huddle for warmth with carnivorous dinosaurs in crowded caves. Titanic ice sculptures of ancient swans dotted the landscape, carved by the frost titans before they left the quickly warming earth for Jotunheim.

I wanted to start a 1ed game but we couldn't find enough player's handbooks, and ebay wanted too much. I understand they used to sell pdf's of the 1ed books but that practice must have let too many people enjoy the game without buying new books every year because they are no longer available.

It's probably the inflatable auto-pilot and the nun with the baseball bat.

If you can figure out how to make this part of a real legislator's platform I will be amazed. There's not too many who want to make life harder for the police, civil liberties be damned. Maybe someone from Rodney King's district.

The problem with your analogy is that it ignores the fact that Apple is a walled garden. A better analogy is: you made a deal to sell shoes in Wal-Mart, and now they've decided to charge you an amount that happens to be your profit margin for shelf space while they introduce their store brand alongside them.

The problem is that the idevices are, if not a monopoly, effectively the only game in town. Good luck getting the courts to fix that. Eventually they'll squeeze too tight and there will be a killer app you can only get on android or some other future competitor device, but who knows when or what. Probably after Steve Jobs steps down someday in the distant future, they've gotten pretty good at this.

There's a good chance that a lot of those 42% won't repeat because they only needed to drum up initial publicity once. Having done it, they don't need to do it again.

They banned smoking in bars and restaurants around here, and maybe all those people are smoking other places, but my shirt doesn't smell like smoke any longer. I find it very hard to believe that consumption hasn't gone down, and maybe some people have quit/not started who otherwise would be smoking today. I'm sure not getting any second hand anymore and I love it.

I'd really like to know if any US carriers allow tethering without ridiculous additional fees. I use very little data, but occasionally need to use my laptop for a task (usually connecting somewhere via ssh) that would be inconvenient on an iphone, and since I "upgraded" to 4.x I can't tether anymore. It's kind of ironic that I probably use less than 1/2GB data per month, but because I want to use it in a way that's convenient for me they want to charge me double for no additional work on their end.

Laws against slavery restrict the free market too. The free market is not an unmitigated good.

PDA? Faugh. I'll use the laptop in my backpack and a CueCat!

With so many outstanding series were canceled after only two seasons, like Firefly, Deadwood, and countless others, is there any hope that the same might happen here? The first Dark Tower book was outstanding, and the next three were all right. The last few were bizzare self-indulgent crap where King appears to have simply transcribed his therapy sessions in the wake of his being hit by a van. The man has never written good endings, let's hope the studios do it for him this time.

Maybe they can get Shatner to play a Shaman who can't stop talking about Chuck Norris's character in the Barrens.