Ha. I like that--I'll start asking for that. Although I'm always nervous about sending them my actual real mailing (home) address.

The last (and first) time I got a fake cashier's check I called the police both locally and in the town where I was supposed to send the money. Their response was that they couldn't do anything because until I cashed the check (for which I was liable), no crime had been committed.

Long story short, there's no way to catch potential fraud without the victim risking going to jail as well.

Ridiculous.

"Everyone's favorite tablet"? Really?

I think a more accurate description would have been "the tablet that as far as 90% of the population is concerned is only a rumor of something will end up being more expensive than I can afford anyways, so they really haven't bothered to care."

Holy crap, $2.50? You must either:

1. live in a big town where's it's seriously impractical to get to the library
2. not enjoy the library atmosphere

Our library is between my house and my office, so dropping by to pick something up/drop something off is no big deal. Previously, it was in walking distance of the office, so I could hit it during lunch, so getting there is never a hassle.

I grew up in a small town with a tiny library. But even then, I enjoyed the feeling of being IN a library. I'm not convinced I'd pay money to avoid that feeling.

I'm pretty sure they can be. I know they can be licensed (the Droid family is under the Apache license, iirc). Regardless, I know you can't legally distribute fonts unless they're under some sort of share-alike style license (Free Software licenses, CC license, etc). That's why there's such a big stink about this @font-face thing in html5 (or the new css or whatever it is).

Gotta agree with Consolas--all programming issues aside, lowercase "g" is gorgeous.

If only Consolas wasn't a M$ product. Or to put it the way I really think, if only Consolas was open source...Since it's not, I use Liberation Mono on a big screen and Droid Sans Mono at home.

Agreed. Unfortunately, I have quibbles with the rest of the browsers as well.

• Opera != FOSS
• Chrome and Epiphany's customization and extension selection suck
• IE. enough said
• Safari = Mac
• Midori, Kahaekahakehshaz and Konqueror are all unusably buggy (or were last time I checked)

If Opera would open up their code, I'd dump Firefox like a bag of rocks.

Oh, the only other thing FF is great for is web development: Firebug is irreplaceable (although I haven't yet used Opera's DragonFly). For every day browsing, though, I run a FF profile without Firebug--it drags Google Aps (reader and gmail) down too much, so I'm sure I could get by just using it when I'm coding.

People download and distribute music out of greed or convenience.

I agree.

But if an author creates and publishes a work in part due to the incentive of a copyright, then he was greedy; a copyright is merely a way to make money, after all. If he was incentivized wholly by other reasons, then he doesn't deserve a copyright, as it would be a wasteful restriction on the public to grant him one.

Both sides act out of greed. There's nothing particularly wrong with this.

That has nothing to do with the development of Mankind.

I disagree.

First, the more widespread a work is, the more likely it is to survive in the long term. Many books only survived to the present day because they were widely copied. Many of those copies were destroyed by accident or deliberately. So long as at least one survived to be copied again, however, the work lived on. Sadly, many works did not survive; languages died out, libraries were burned down, paper rotted away, and often we're lucky just to know some of the titles of these works that were part of the development of mankind, which were lost forever.

Second, society benefits immeasurably by having more works created and published, and by having works which are free for anyone to obtain and use as they like, including at no cost. I think we can agree that the ideal world would be one in which everyone who wanted to create and publish works could, and anyone who wanted to read those works, and possess copies, and make their own versions or adaptations or translations could. Everyone could have all or at least most of human knowledge at their fingertips, for free, ready to be used to make some more. Realistically, we can't have this. But we can strive for it at least.

Copyright is basically amoral. It's a purely utilitarian system. But if there is any morality, it is on the side of the pirates, who use and spread knowledge, and not on the side of the copyright holders, who seek to restrict access and use of their works for mere money.

There are actually quite a few. For those that don't know them, here's a good list of the 4 I've learned of

Why do you need to multimedia dock to use its alarm function? It comes w/ an alarm clock app. I've been using it as an alarm clock for a few weeks.

The Droid is as good, or better, than the iPhone as far as UI goes. There are some quirks and some annoyances but no more than the iPhone. Also, the open nature is more friendly to tinkering, of course. The speed of the phone alone is reason enough to get it over the iPhone IMO.

Can you point out where they do that exactly? I'd like to parse their language to see if they're actually doing something unconscionable.

That aside, do people go around talking about murder with caveats of self-defense? No, people say "don't murder!"

It's cut and dry ... Reagon was an illuminati selling us out to the UN.

i 3'd omni. the scifi stories were awesome (like gravity's angel about the SSC) and i still keep a bunch of issues lying around.

It was midichlorians. Happy now?