I am on a mission to demote usage of the word 'consumer'. Interestingly, in your quotation Henry Ford uses the much more apt term 'customer'. The word consumer, to my mind, is degrading. A consumer sits at the end of a tube. A customer is someone who might walk through the door of your shop if you go about your business right.

Good point. It has made me see the GPL in a whole new light. It is a pyramid scheme, and a cunning one at that.

For crying out loud, people will feel uncomfortable about everything. Recently it was on the beeb that some people complained that a presenter on the children program was not properly two-armed. A commenter rightly pitied the parents that can only handle fluffy bunnies, and a great majority pointed out that they had yet to find a child that did not shrug aside the non-issue. What at all is there to feel uncomfortable about? And why on earth would you bring sex into the equation for the present subject. Love, anyone? When two people marry, is it in your opinion just a license to have sex?

It is not degrading. It depicts vibrancy, spirit, hustle and bustle. Have you actually seen it? For an interview with Loveleen Tandan, the co-director, see http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/oscars/article5772395.ece The crew that made the film very much seems to have lived and worked together as a team. Storytelling is universal and knows no boundaries, and movies are not tourism commercials. Have you seen trainspotting, a movie more in the director's backyard? I think it is pretty impressive that Slumdog went on to win Oscar accolades, and that those voting looked beyond their own backyard. I'll make sure to watch the movies you mention though.

I used to be on linkedin, but got tired of duplicating information that is already in my CV and on my website. Then linkedin has a way of nudging you towards filling in ever more stuff (previous employers et cetera), if I remember correctly perhaps even with some daft reward system. It has both free and paid-for services, and I very soon ran into the limits of the free service. Many of the establish-a-link e-mails I received felt tedious and some people like to farm links like, well, link farms. But first and foremost these days I wish to control my footprint on the web, especially regarding the type of information that linkedin requires. Hence I withdrew. It may well be that if I were unemployed or simply looking for another job linkedin could be useful. To me the uncertainty in the rewards and the cost of playing are too large.

The summary sounds decidedly stupid. I assume that sentencing was for the punching, kicking, and knife threatening as well. Alas, the stupidity carries over to the fine article itself. Hopefully the verdict itself was saner. That said, money is not so different from virtual property, so that aspect makes perfect sense.