So I used to agree 100% with all the above, but then I got a Nook Color for Christmas. While the things you say are true, the problem my Nook solves (that I didn't realize I was having until the Nook came along) is that of storage space. I read 1-2 books a week, and although Amazon loves me for that, I am running out of space to put them all. So instead, I fill a microSD card...and I can store plenty of books on one of those, and plenty of those on a bookshelf.

Oh my God, I'm going to die alone, and STUPID.

Okay, so I may be reading this wrong, but...

The FBI is a police force, tasked with upholding the laws of the Federal government. They have badges, guns, the whole thing. They are a part of the Department of Justice (or were, anyway), and are now part of the DHS. This is a Federal agency that takes its power from the Executive branch. That is to say, the Office of the President. They don't report directly to him on a day to day basis...but their director does report to the director of DHS, who does report directly to the POTUS.

I know our liberties aren't what they used to be, and I thought that they were eroding faster than ever, but I'm definitely going to start calling them the deceleration of Independence.

I disagree. In the original Rainbow 6 games (even leading up to the most recent ones in Vegas) the characters in your squad could take at most a glancing shot and be harmed. Their effectiveness dropped remarkably. If they got hit again, or were unlucky enough to be hit critically, they were dead. Not revived-at-the-end-of-the-mission knocked out, but dead. Your explosives expert takes a sniper shot the the head in the first mission? You better learn how to dismantle bombs, because he's gone. The characters that only got scratched during the mission took a few "weeks" to heal ,meaning they were ineffective in the following missions. It made for a more tactics-based game, instead of "I'm gonna run into that room and spray bullets at anything the moves" type game.

But one of the top 10 web sites on the Internet has the explicit mission of summarizing authority. A source such as the fake Elsevier journal can show itself to be unreliable, but a new journal published by Elsevier can rise to a perception of reliability based on those journals published by Elsevier that aren't fake. But a source needs a publisher to take a chance on it in the first place. It's like a credit history: you have to have a bank take a chance on you in order to build up a reputation of reliability.

Bleach is the nuke that people who are serious about killing bacteria use to clean their counters with. Antibacterial cleaners are the things the amateurs at home use.

If you can satisfy the pros that they don't need to use bleach on their counters then the only remaining reason for anyone to use an antibacterial cleaner on his counter at home is superstition.

That actually sounds like a pretty good business model for company. Might need a little more time for the ebook market to really take off, or it might take a lot of luck to get to the point where you could also be the printer and let Amazon do the distribution to cover both physical and electronic markets, but it might work. I've been a freelance copy editor, and all the work I did was long-distance. Not a challenge at all. It might be nice to be in the same room with an editor as they're trying to explain to you why the first three chapters have to go, and the last three chapters should come first, or whatever, but even that's probably doable long-distance.

One potential risk is you'd start out this way and find yourself gradually expanding to take on the same roles as a traditional publisher, either because your clients ask for it or because there's profit in it, until you're just like all the others. (Just ask my former boss, who bought the web half of a print/web design company, and now spends most of her time on print materials like annual reports, just like the company she split off from used to.)

By this definition isn't plastic "a highly viscous liquid" as well

Microwave should fly right through chicken wire, no problem.

In a magnetic field, as is done with plasma.

I don't think your analogy is quite right. The man in the story lived in the city, and he's just as vulnerable as I am. Most of his cohorts probably are in cities as well. Those 'desolate' regions that you talk about in China are very desolate. Computers are cheap in the cities, but there's a vast disconnect between the cities and the country. Most country dwellers in China are trying to move to the cities because there's more opportunity there. My point is that this isn't necessarily something to fear.

The variable sized / changing position of the virtual keyboard seems like a bad idea to me. I wonder how accurate the demo video is meant to be.

Come on, Mr Burns would never be convicted. He can buy too many good lawyers. He could probably buy the judge too.

cool, can we now have ctrl+alt+backspace to restart the xserver back in x.org please?

one of the main arguments was that we could use the never-working sysrq+blahblha combination to do the same thing..