That is the curious thing. I actually don't hate answers.com, and it every so often does answer a question I've had. But I don't need to log in to see those answers. The people logging in, presumably are mainly the content-providers that write the articles that earn them nickels and dimes a time. As I see it, this is answers.com willingly eating itself to get the last dregs from the business model.

Have you heard of batteries?

Batteries.

I for one, welcome our new intellectual aristocratic overlords!

Too soon?

You own our phone? Or your phone owns you, battery charging boy?

You should read up on gulags, ghettos and concentration camps to see what people do and did when other people controlled them. When one horrible person makes another horrible person, must it damn the victim?

Ho ho. I got beat left and right for stuff I did as a kid. This video is so much BS, bunch of wormy liberals complaining about a real person taking control of their family, after their daughter has stolen stuff off the internet. Yup. That's what I thought until I watched about a third of it before I couldn't stomach any more.

I'm for discipline, and I'm for corporal punishment, but that was a sick individual getting his kicks punishing his child. You lose the moral battle when you curse as much as he did, when you seem to enjoy it as much as he did, when you won't stop even when your child is a weeping wreck in front of you.

What sort of parent looks back on that I thinks they've helped mould their child into a good citizen?

There's a lot of talk about how she only showed this after he took away her toys. Because you expected adult, rational behaviour from her? Yeah, that's how she was raised. Wasn't it?

I don't normally get angry at Random Q. Internetguy, but that wasn't an Internet meme, that thing you just saw, that was the repeated, planned, brutalization of a child by her parent, and it was appalling.

Needs Zork.

E-ink is fine in sunlight or bright indoor lighting, but a backlit screen has many valid advantages as an e-book reader screen. A crappy analogy is that some shoes are designed for indoor use and some for outdoor use. You can use either wherever you like, because they all cover your feet, but you'll be making compromises.

I do about three quarters of my reading on Kindle and a quarter on a Palm TX - yeah, I'm in need of an upgrade but it's an ideal adjunct to my cross trainer. And don't tell me backlit screens are bad for your eyes - it's like claiming music is bad for your ears when you have the volume turned up to eleven. Read gray text off a dark background with brightness at minimum and you have a display with similar contrast to e-ink that you can read in bed with the lights out. I swear so many people who claim to hate reading off a backlit screen have used some pretty program that attempts to emulate a bright white page and slapped it across their face like Geordi's visor.

Watching the video and reading the letter do give a fairly reasonable opposite view from the last article, that has nothing to do with the merits of science or religion. But, ya know, you would have thought a Christian would have turned the other cheek, forgiven his enemy and just released the damn video to get his message across. Christians never seem to remember the forgiveness thing.

But universities have discovered that PhD students are cheap, highly motivated and disposable labour.

I find the subject of higher education in the US perplexing. We can all agree that more and more people are being encouraged into higher education, but as more students have entered college the costs, rather than coming down as you would expect, have risen dramatically, far out-pacing inflation or increases in income(remember when that was a thing?). In these sort of anomalous situations I usually figure the explanation can be found by following the money, so can anybody point me at an article that does this? My theory would be that corporations must ultimately benefit from the research being done by the professors who would otherwise have to teach - that job having been taken over for the most part by their PhD students.

Dammit, I hate when people do this. I forgot Miner Wars.

Um. X Rebirth will be out next year. Until then there's Evochron Mercenary.

Or Frayed Knights on PC or Undercroft on IOS.

Arguably very few novels turn a profit. Writers write them when they get home from their real job, pouring their heart and soul, but more importantly their time into writing. Working a second job at McDs would generate a greater overall profit than writing. They do it because they enjoy it.

The barrier to entry for writing a novel is stunningly low. Anyone can do it. Look at NaNoWriMo next month to see what I mean. Anyone who funds a writer through kickstarter is an idiot. The average, old school publisher selected novel makes the author around 10 grand over the space of five years, with most sales in the first few months of publication and maybe a year's worth of sales to pay back the advance - pulled out of my ass numbers but broadly speaking in the ball park. That's equivalent to around three or four months paid work to most people, yet so many writers think they'll be able to write the next great American novel if only they took a year off work. Doesn't add up.

J A Konrath defends the 99c price point, but long term it's unlikely we'll see more people reading novels because prices are low. You go from a $20 (or more) hardback/$10 paperback model to a 99c e-book model and 80% of the money leaves the industry. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but even if you cut out the publishers, writers will still be paying for editing and promotion. Overall writers will make even less money and the majority of rewards will still go to a select few making their real money from tie-ins, movie deals and assorted side projects.

Then don't give your money to the douchebags trying to trademark a common word, ie Mojang. Scrolls is also a pay to play, card trading game, so good luck with your choice!