2.50 for a movie? .50 an episode? 0.02 a song? Do you have any idea how many songs you would have to sell to make a living as a musician at that rate especially with people gouging your music sales? Assuming you make all the profits from your songs, you would need to sell :

40,000 dollars per year / 0.02 dollars per song = 2,000,000 songs / year

And every OS should be installable directly into the motherboard SSD chip. It should be as fast as the motherboard allows. 60GB of SSD cache ought to be enough to install any OS.

Really, it's so great that you believe things. I'm glad you have belief. Back in the real world, facts matter, not belief. What percentage of authorized tappings were abused? (Note we are not talking about warrantless wiretapping, which is bad, but not the topic here).

For me the ultimate file manager in KDE is Krusader. Give it a go if you like two-pane approaches.

It might be stolen property.

The slashdot crowd of course is going to lambast this decision. But if you take time to think about it rather than reply with a knee-jerk reaction, it really isn't that unreasonable.

What is required to host thousands of emails online? - A web server. Presumably they have one of these, but is it just a simple website at some hosting company and not very easy to configure or mass-upload to, and perhaps with a limited storage quota? Is it their same server they had in the late 90's that might choke on 24,000 files in one directory?

- How do you convert the emails to individual files which can be hosted? Convert to PDF perhaps? File -> Save As? Either way, it is going to be very labor intensive. Perhaps the email system is old enough that it is even more difficult and time consuming?

- How long do you have to store the online files? Every day they store the files on the server costs them extra $. And every person who downloads the files costs them extra $.

- What type of technical knowledge is required to put all of the pieces together? To a slashdotter it might seem trivial, but a town of 30,000 reachable only by water and air is not the type of place who will employ public servants with the technical expertise of a slashdotter. Their IT staff might consist of a guy who knows how to replace a monitor and reformat Windows XP. They may outsource all of the rest of their IT functions at an hourly cost to the state. All of these email requests are probably going to some poor secretary who has a hard time opening her own email.

- Who should have access? IANAL, but this is a foia request so I presume anybody in America, but is Alaska required to make government documents readily available to the governments of North Korea and Iran? If not, who is going to setup the security to prevent unauthorized access?

Remember, this is a foia request which Alaska has to respond to, but they have no incentive to make it easy at their own taxpayer's expense. It is far cheaper and easier for a small town government office to tell people to come and get the information than it is for them to make it easily accessible over the internet.

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

The part that actually gets on my nerves are the people who are rabid in enforcing the GPL are often the same people who support piracy of closed source software, or breaking into companies networks to prove some lame point

For every $1 of food stamps creates ~$1.40 in economic growth while the economy is slouched.