Absolutely, and considering the human race has denuded the landscape of trees in many places, the Earth is undoubtedly much slicker than it would be had we not existed
We could litter the landscape with millions more turbines and I would suspect we would still not be back to the break even point..

The thing is that all those other things (e.g. missing buses) are real. You wouldn't have an expert car driver press a button and the wheels get replaced with skis (unless it's James Bond) in order that he could carry on chasing someone through snow. We know that cars don't work that way.

And this isn't the 60s any more when operating a computer meant going into a temperature-controlled room. Millions of people know what they do and that you don't need a slow-moving progress bar to move money from A to B.

There's a few plot devices to do with computers which are real and which I've never seen used in a movie. You could have a buddy cop scene where Bruce Willis is teamed with a geek and the perp deletes the file off his phone and the geek explains how it's not really deleted, just lost and proceeds to undelete the files. Or a sting where someone changes some router settings to use a different IP address so that they can get their password. You could still make it dramatic but use things that are real.

Why do we have to live on the surface? Let's move in underground, should be plenty of room and my impression is the geology is fairly stable although I could be wrong.

Or we could just dump that entire "market". I use scare quotes because the people in it do not have any capacity whatsoever to take delivery of the goods or to actually provide them on demand (other than to order someone else to send 'their' commodity to another destination). In fact, if even a tiny fraction of what they buy and sell were actually delivered to them, it would be an un-mitigated disaster.

Howsabout if company A needs a commodity they buy it from one or more producers of that commodity?

Our economy would be better off if every commodities trade resulted in a 'roll of the dice'. If your number comes up, you WILL take physical delivery of the goods before you can sell them. Bought a million barrels of oil? It's gioing in your swimming pool, bathtub, pots and pans, and the doggie dish! If that won't cover it (and it won't), we fill the basement until it overflows onto the lawn. If you wanted to play big bad oil distributor, you should have built a tank farm. Bought 20 tons of pork bellies? It's going to get a bit smelly around the ol' estate if you don't find a freezer fast!

So, no, we do not need parasitic day traders except to maintain an imaginary market that gets in the way of productive people.

when "upgrade" means "click a button a wait for all your software to update to the latest versions", i'd say most ubuntu users are quite fine with it. if they were requiring everyone to do a fresh install every 6 months it might be different, but they dont.

how well the in-place upgrades work I'm not sure - but I'll find out in 6 months time wont I?

Here's the big thing for you: the differences between the Android 1.5 SDK and 2.1 are actually quite small. 1.5 to 1.6 was mostly some animation classes, accessibility, text-to-speech and sending SMS. 1.6 to 2.1 was things like using Webkit's storage, live wallpapers and Telephony strength.

The vast majority of apps written today could comfortably be written against 1.5.

After awhile, it'll cease to have any networking support. Even the browser will turn off. Who knows -- it's proprietary. They might even have a logic bomb in there that after a year, it erases all your savegames, stomps on it's own dick, and declares war on Panama in your name, all while throwing the reds in with the whites and focusing microwave energies into your freezer to make your ice cream all melty.

The opening game should be Beat Hazard if this manages to come together. :) How I've become so addicted to this Asteroids like Steam game that produces "levels" based on your individual mp3 tracks with pulsating visual feedback effects to nearly give anybody a seizure. Welcome Steam!

This is a good start, but it needs to go further. I probably wouldn't be interested in paying for every baseball game, but I would be interested in paying less just to receive the games of the teams I care about. Same thing with football. I'd be interested in DirecTV Sunday Ticket, but not if I have to pay however much it is for every team, when I only really care about Green Bay.

Yeah...what part of "this note is legal tender for ALL debts, public and private" doesn't a branch of the government understand?

I wouldn't. I lived in the US for a while, and the streaming from Hulu was the worst I've seen for years. Not a patch on youtube, for instance.

Wouldn't that just equal the original dollar amount of what was counterfeited and put into circulation?

With good enough lawyers, everything is legal.

Not really. It's only a crime to access a computer unlawfully, not tell someone how to. Unless, of course, you're inciting them to or advocating criminal activity. Case in point; it's perfectly lawful for you to own a gun or a chemistry set, but not shoot someone or detonate an explosive.

Yeah, say that with a straight face to the guy demanding the root password because he read "it was important", and you got a call last week from him asking you to change his desktop wallpaper because "it got stuck". IT admins not going in for that kind of non-sense is a compelling reason why large sections of the internet don't slide off the side of the planet in a dribble-like fashion.

This guy was responsible for critical public infrastructure -- infrastructure that kept working for months after they fired him. They broke it repeatedly after gaining access, and it took hundreds, if not thousands, of billable hours to repair the damage that happened when those owners and their "designated agents" got their hands around the gooey core of the network.

Justice is about harmony, not law and order.