Wait, what? So we need to have a nice high tally before we can stop being stupid?

Actually, it might be more apt to say they want to have their cake... and my cake... and eat them both.

I suppose it makes their lousy network actually look as bad as it really is, but why else should they care? Didn't they do away with unlimited plans? If you're paying for the data, why should they give a damn how you are actually using it... unless of course, they CAN'T actually supply the data and bandwidth they are advertising. It's like selling lollipops but saying that you can't give one to your friend. If you run out of lollipops and want to buy more, ISN'T THAT THE WHOLE POINT??

Seriously. I mean why not skip the electrodes and simply DRIVE SLOWER.

While it is true that you can take someone's picture in a public place, USE of that picture is another matter. As soon as he publicly posts that picture associated with his name as photographer, then he opens himself to lawsuits regarding personal likeness. This is why the press has you sign wavers. They don't want something coming back at them later for any reason.

And did he also get permission from every singe person the camera captured? If he didn't, he's screwed.

That's because they only have to pay for the hosting once (or once a month/year/whatever) and not by the hit. How many spammers would stay in business if they were charged $1 per email address they spammed?

Google is successful because it has managed to hold onto being the premiere search engine and then selling the keywords that it sees are the most popular. "Word of mouth" has literally almost *nothing* to do with it.

By "reading reviews" you mean in regard to ebooks, certainly, but SOMEONE is going to be first and is going to have to fork over the stupid $.99 to find out if what the author claims is super amazing awesome ZOMG!.. is really just crap. It gets more complicated because the author can log in with a different account and post 5 star reviews and praises to muddy the water. If a spammer only gets one or two sales before someone posts a negative review, then they still win because they are doing this on a massive scale. They've got like a thousand crap books out there, all getting 2-3 sales. And those books don't go away, they just sit there in the listings wasting people's time and bandwidth.

Interesting, because the spammers are making money by putting out 1000 useless "books" that may only get downloaded 3 times each before people catch on and post negative reviews. But that's still 3000 "sales" at $0.70 each (70% profit), or $2,100. But if Amazon absorbed the first $10 of *each book*, the spammers would get nothing and the industry would be a far better place. Of course, that will encourage comment whoring, but that's nothing new to the system.

Amazon does not simply "promote" and market goods and services. They get PAID to promote and market goods and services... and paid quite well. The fact that you don't understand this shows a complete ignorance of the industry. User reviews may push you up in a list of similar products, but you still have to be seen first. How many click through's do you think you would get on the 50th result page from Google?

Bullshit. There are people "publishing" 50-100 "books" a day that are utter garbage. And I don't mean that it's bad writing, I mean that it's rip off recycled crap. There's so much junk flooding the market that it makes actual works indistinguishable from everything else. The only way these works get found out is if someone actually pays for it and reads it, and then bothers to comment. Even a $1 entry fee would do wonders to limit this. The WHOLE POINT of Amazon is it's ability to find products and see reviews before you buy. If you can no longer do that, then why not take your legitimate work and use the rest of the free web for self advertizing, serve the file yourself, and keep 100% of the profits?

Content doesn't rise to the top because it's "worthy", it rises to the top because it has positive reviews. Whether those reviews came from adoring fans or solid marketing is almost irrelevant.

Sure, paper can be corrupted, but how many of your ebooks are going to still be readable in 100 years? 50 years? 10 years? I have paper books on my shelf that are 50+ years old and look nearly new. I also have thousands of ebooks stored on CD's that are now in a a format that is completely useless without hours and hours of conversion (if it can even be done any more). In another 50 years, my paper books will probably have yellowed a bit, but will still be going strong. My ebooks on the other hand will almost certainly be stored on a medium that I can no longer read, and in a format that is long dead. Unless I take great pains to backup and convert my digital collection every 5 years or so, it's almost a certainty that it will be useless plastic by the time I pass it on to my kids.

MMO's like WoW are constantly at odds with themselves. They want the world to be "dynamic" and changing based on the user's decisions, but they can't just make everything happen at random. There is always a *story* that must be followed. They want the game to be challenging, but ultimately the point is to sell subscriptions and make money, which means the game has to be 'simple' enough for the lowest common denominator. Players who constantly get their asses handed to them are likely to leave. Winning is fun. Losing sucks. My four year old daughter can walk through WoW and end up with a level 85 character. Where's the skill? Playing at level 5 is just as "hard" as playing at level 85, you just have more colorful gear.

Personally, I'd like to see more *consequence* in games like WoW. They're not going to be able to break with the "go out and kill X number of Y" type quests, but it would be cool if in doing so, you became more and more "known" to various intelligent groups of beings. If you picked on the ogres too much, they would start anticipating your arrival, or use group tactics to squash you. It would make you think twice about simply questing through the game in a predetermined manner. It's still "fair" because it's entirely based on your own decisions about things. They have "reputation", but other than making someone an enemy, there are no other consequences. Who cares if they hate you... you were going to kill them all anyway.

All this says is that 15% were one of the top 10 FOR HIS APP. This makes the very large assumption that people who were paranoid enough to buy his app are going to be fooled and use the same password that they do to lock the phone. They very well might, but his app doesn't prove that.

Maybe *your* computer uses 7W "off"... My Macbook Pro is using less than a W sleeping (non-hibernate).