He didn't say that Amazon paid publishers more than the retail price for every ebook; it's quite plausible that for a select few titles Amazon was willing to take a loss so that they could continue to advertise a store where everything was priced at $9.99.

Well, it doesn't seem ridiculous to think that there would be a difference between sitting beside somebody who had just eaten nuts, and being surrounded in a small and enclosed space by a bunch of people constantly eating nuts for the duration of an airplane trip.

Why is this sitting at -1 Troll? The inconvenience caused from being unable to eat nuts pales in comparison to the inconvenience caused by being unable to safely take an airplane somewhere, and it was just silly of the OP to try and equate the two.

This is, of course, all premised upon the allergy actually being this serious, but, given my lack of a medical degree, I'm not going to try and comment on that.

I suspect the executives at Yahoo! don't share your opinion. It's not like they did this because of their personal moral codes; this is probably a calculated risk, based upon the societies public values, intended to increase market share by appearing to be more family-oriented and appropriate. The goal is to spawn conversations such as: "Oh, you're using Google? Haven't you heard about the immoral content it tries to force upon users?"

I don't know if it will work, but it's not like it's downright stupid. Some people will consider this feature desirable. Others will consider the fact that people think they like this feature to be desirable. It's all a psychology game.

That's a good point. Somebody should tell these professional mathematical analysts this, because they probably aren't aware and are just wasting their time.

When the best argument you can come up with for why a skill should be learned is that it would be useful were you to be marooned on a desert island, it's probably time to admit that learning said skill is pointless.

I'm sorry, but that's just patently incorrect. Don't get me wrong, I love Tetris and all, but mobile gaming isn't exactly a terribly novel idea, and had Tetris not helped to catalyze its adoption, something else woudl have.

Personally, I find the host of "OMG, you said you were going to get karma burned and now you have +5 insightful?!?! Clearly your ingenious use of reverse psychology is the only reason your post, which cannot have had any actual intellectual value, has received such favourable moderation" posts that always follow such a metacomment and get moderated to +5 to be much more comical.

I'm having a hard time feeling sympathetic.

From TFA:

And yet she says...

They sound like very dangerous criminals don't they? Thank the lord she had the "incredible" self restraint to go and talk to the gentlemen first before firing the aforementioned shotgun. Here's the clincher, though:

Right, because anytime a white person harms a black person, it's racism. Let's just ignore the fact that white people get into confrontations with one another all the time.

It sounds to me like she's a little crazy (for the shotgun comment,) and probably quite a difficult woman to live beside (given her irrational propensity to insist that this must have been an act of racism.) I'm not saying that the officer was right to do what he did, but I'd be very surprised if, on some level, she hadn't provoked this.

If you'd bothered to Google it, you'd know that Gif can do true color, too.

If you want to fill the void in your vocabulary from the discovery that irregardless isn't a word, try 'irrespective.'

Added bonus: when pompous people try and claim that 'irrespective' isn't a word (probably because they are confusing it with irregardless,) you can smile smugly and inform them of their ignorance.

I don't know what planet you're living on whereupon Apple's products are "probably the most polished in the market today, yet still not perfect." Although they are aesthetically supreme, under the hood, they are frequently quite lacking (remember those iPods that constantly break, the computers that run hot enough to fry an egg, or the overpriced nature of their hardware in general?)

Don't get me wrong - I still quite like Apple (this is in fact being posted from a Macbook Pro,) and they do some things right, such as customer service (example: even though my iPod recently broke and was out of warranty, they still replaced it without a fuss,) their ability to design intuitive interfaces, and their choice to build OS X on top of BSD. That being said, don't let them fool you - despite the fact that Apple products are very slick and incredibly well marketed, the actual quality of the goods is only on par with what other reputable manufacturers are offering.

I would be somewhat apprehensive about using an iPod given their track-records (personally, I've found that iPods rarely last more than a few years, let alone 16!) Granted, the hardware is likely to be better preserved if it isn't getting banged around in your pocket every day, but I would still be concerned about either the iPod having broken, or being unbootable due to battery degradation.

That being said, however, you seem to have proposed an excellent solution if put in its general form: circumvent the difficulties of predicting how to store the data by including a device that can read it. Are there any computer rigs that are liable to remain functional in 17 years?

Farhad makes a lot of good points, but he underestimates the transformative nature of the iPhone. I agree that Google should build its own phone, but it's not about making yet another bespoke handset, it's about building another mobile computing transformation that Apple, with its walled garden approach, cannot even contemplate. It's not nearly enough to be a bit better than the iPhone - any serious competitor will need to take the next gigantic leap forward, and do it before Apple does.