Ah, yes. You don't have room for interesting stories without a minority protagonist.

If you are interested in having minorities spend their money on your comic books, a minority protagonist is probably more interesting to that audience than yet another white dude.

like impose a moratorium on new expenditures until the economic crisis is over?

Great idea! Slow down economic activity until economic activity speeds up!

Exactly, why the censorship?

Because the kid is going to have to learn to evade on-line security systems one day. Best that he start that at home, with an early lesson on sneaking around Dad's proxy server.

Kidspeak is good for language learning. My kid is working on the French, but there are a bunch to choose from: http://www.transparent.com/personal/kidspeak.html

It seems to me that this will result in a large number of extra miles driven by people who would have otherwise changed their driving plans on the fly if they had a working cell phone. People will instead drive someplace, find out plans have changed and that they need to drive someplace else, and then drive there. Those extra miles driven are going to be cause for much extra traffic, traffic accidents, and traffic fatalities.

No it doesn't. The media reflects what sells. Any correlation with social values is purely coincidental.

But isn't "what sells" a reflection of our social values? Not the social values we claim to have, but those we actually have? The stuff wouldn't sell if we didn't value it socially.

I know of a solar system that has 8 planets. Used to have 9.

Geothermal has a minor issue with causing earthquakes.

and until I switched to Michelin tires, was getting 50-54 mpg

Same with me on my 2003 Civic Hybrid. I got new tires and my gas mileage plummeted.

Which begs the question, why aren't the gas-saving tires much more available than they are, on both hybrids and non-hybrids?

No monthly cost to our group. Once its bought, the ongoing operations cost comes out of someone else's budget.

We pay a one time $40 per gigabyte as the capital cost of acquiring the storage. There is no monthly cost. I think $40 is still way too much.

and no disadvantages.

The disadvantage is in the opportunity cost. You could have spent the time you dedicated to memorizing words to becoming better at math or, I don't know, figuring out how to get laid.

Well, obviously they also need a grammar checker too. "Your" and "there" are spelled perfectly fine in your example, they are merely misused.

Btw - viewers are very rarely "customers". Certainly for TV programming they are not, the advertisers are.

And yet, my cable bill arrives every month...

If a life form existed on earth with oil based protoplasm rather than water, you wouldn't need the dispersant because that life form could live inside the volume of the oil as opposed to upon the surface...

Like maybe some of these buggers?