Let me introduce you to Mr. Charles MacKay, author of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Published in 1852. There is indeed nothing new under the sun.

From what I've heard, QWERTY wasn't designed to slow typists down, but rather to try to stop commonly adjacent letters being adjacent on the keyboard.

I think a glance at the top row is enough to disprove that -- qw/wq and yu/uy are the only uncommon two-letter combos, while extremely common ones like we, er/re, rt/tr, io/oi, and ty are present. There are even several common three letter combinations -- wer, tre, ert, rty, and poi. If you expand to include vertically adjacent keys, you'll find even more.

I know that was a joke, but even with the tax, it'd be cheaper to shop online.

I've always thought it'd be neat to turn the Zork series into a top-down Zelda style game.

Somebody obviously never played pirated computer games in the '80s. The "cracker" who had defeated the copy protection on the original software would add a splash screen with his name when he distributed the game. Similarly (although perhaps not strictly digitally), you couldn't just hook two VCRs together and copy a film you rented at Blockbuster onto a blank tape.

More to the point, every artist on Amazon's MP3 store (which is most everyone now) is offering DRM free music, albeit at 256 VBR with no lossless option. How is it news when an artist does the same thing through his own website, unless he also does free/donation pricing a la Radiohead and NIN?

What's wrong with charging your friends for helping them? In high school, when I was the only kid around with a PC, I'd charge $5 to type reports for people. My friend Mike, who was the only one of us with a car, expected people to chip in for gas when we went anywhere. Friendship doesn't overcome basic market forces.

You're overlooking the fact that vaccines are not 100% effective -- they don't always take, and even if they do, they can wear off over time. If enough parents decide to abstain from vaccinations, not only are they putting their sprogs at risk, they're putting people who've had their shots at risk.

If there is no connection why do we see so many stories similar to mine?

Repeat after me, "Correlation does not equal causation." This is a basic scientific principle which anyone geeky enough to post to /. should be familiar with.

Yahoo isn't the marketplace, and the market isn't damaged when a company fails. In fact, failure is often good for the market, though you wouldn't know it listening to the Bush and Obama people.

Unless I've missed it there is one thing that none of them do as well as Firefox and that is block ads.

That's only because they didn't test Lynx, which blows away even Firefox.

But Lynx has the best pop-up blocking in the industry, 100% prevents cross-site scripting, and reduces most ads to small text links.

Don't some ISPs intentionally drop packets as a way of blocking/throttling bittorrent? I can see how the statement that in such a situation packet loss is noticeable to users is true.

(and no, I do not count a company that publishes Halo fanfiction "books" to be a publisher.)

You mean Tor, the publishing company that puts out Vernor Vinge, Charlie Stross, Ken MacLeod, Robert Charles Wilson, John Scalzi, the Wheel of Time, and Malazan in addition to Doctorow's latest book?

There are many reasons to think Doctorow is an intellectual lightweight, wannabe Jacobin, and all-around poseur, but this ain't it.

No it's not. Gutenberg deals primarily in books published prior to 1923, with a few more recent items where someone screwed up the renewal. That means the vast bulk of science fiction and hard-boiled novels are still copyrighted (Gutenberg has maybe a hundred sci fi books if you don't count Wells, Verne, Burroughs, and other pre-Gernsback writers.).

In fact, there's a website, Munseys.com that specializes in hard-boiled abandon-ware, though Conde Nast has gone after them several times for publishing ebooks of things that haven't seen print for decades.