You're thinking of trawling. The modern trolling is the actual trolling, unless you're talking about the Three Billy Goats Gruff (collecting undeserved tolls).

What's horrifying to me is that the writer bothered with the pedantic spelling (like Hawai'i instead of Hawaii) but wrote "appropriate" instead of "appropriately" and "loosing" instead of "losing", not to mention the unusual choice of comma positions.

Agreed. If you have the ability to fix a problem and choose not to, you should not be congratulated for standing on a soapbox and saying it should be fixed.

My phone is my alarm clock. It's certainly been more reliable than any dedicated alarm clock I owned in the past (which would run out of either electricity or battery power. It wouldn't work very well if I turned it off at night.

You missed it. There's no federal sales tax; it's still just state sales tax on the state you live in. In NH, there's no state sales tax, so we don't have to pay any despite this. What does change is that our NH businesses have to collect tax on behalf of other states when you buy from us online. So when you guys buy stuff online from our businesses, they'll now have to collect sales tax for your state. That's why we fought it, not because consumers would have to pay more, but because our businesses will have to do a lot more work.

Three times the value ("treble damages") is pretty typical for a "fair amount" in more sane arenas. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treble_damages

I believe that's supposed to be showing when humans were attacked, prior to the events of the book.

http://xkcd.com/955/

You must have missed this one: http://games.slashdot.org/story/12/10/29/154207/valve-linux-better-than-windows-8-for-gaming

It's certainly an unusual shape for a snowflake untouched by human hands.

Linux is free. How are we the product in that situation?

We have 3 Xbox 360s in our house, one per person, from when we all lived separately. And we have 3 Gold memberships. I've already converted my desktop computer to Linux and am working on building up a game library on there (mostly Indie Bundles so far, but I've Kickstarted games like Dreamfall Chapters for the future), because I fully expect Microsoft to do something awful in the near future. I'm even preparing for the likelihood that it could be in this very next generation. And you can't expect Sony or Nintendo to be significantly better.

I use Microsoft's "Cloud Save" functionality, and its outages when my internet is working perfectly have been infuriating. I have no faith that they can manage to make an outage-free service, and I don't want my games console to just refuse to work when I want to use it, even if it's the middle of the night on a weekday.

Let's say I work at a company that makes a good, useful software product, which is the best in the market. How can I convince them not to patent my solutions, so that I don't contribute to a system that rewards people like you do the detriment of people who would succeed on merit?

Is that what you think this is? It seemed to me that it was a solution waiting for a sufficiently heart-wrenching problem, like how they doubtless have all the "Cyber-Patriot Act" stuff just waiting for an opportunity (Rahm Emanuel crisis style).

And if you're successfully charging high prices, other businesses/entrepreneurs will see that there's a lot of money to be made and are more likely to spend money trucking in more, helping to increase the supply. You wouldn't get as many generators trucked in at the normal prices. Capping prices makes outside people less likely to rush additional supplies in, because there's no big payoff.

How is this hard to understand? It's why (even though it's still suboptimal) capitalism makes a more efficient economy than centrally-managed price controls. Additional supply shows up where it's needed, because that makes people money.