I'm glad this was fixed, but for several days I had a bricked device (you ended stuck on the activation screen, with no option to skip that process) and in a situation best summed up by Cory Doctorow: “Anytime someone puts a lock on something you own, against your wishes, and doesn’t give you the key, they’re not doing it for your benefit.”

That's a rather short-sighted perspective on things.

Old library catalogs and databases, which are still around, work this way. The problem is that unless you've been trained to do non-intuitive things like omit initial articles from titles ("Old Man and the Sea" instead of "The Old Man and the Sea"), they don't work. This causes far more problems than an expert searcher grousing about having to occasionally add back in +/- operators to search for a known it

The webm video kept sticking for me (right around the part about sacrificing convenience . . .) so I found the TEDx Talks video.

Here's a similar gem, made by Steve Case in 1997, in response to gripes from people unable to connect to swamped AOL servers after their switch to unlimited hours:

Just as you would be sensitive about using a public phone booth if others were waiting in line to use it . . . try to show some restraint at night during the next few months when we're in this transitional mode.

In other words, it's your fault for trying to use what you've paid for.

Was a university's primate research laboratory. They were doing studies on addiction. So you had these metal cages, not much bigger than the monkeys, just stacked together in a room.

Assuming you guys are talking about McCain's 2008 Presidential campaign, that was indeed before the Santelli rant, which happened on 2/19/2009.

Yes, point taken... "My entire profession" should be "Libraries" above.

As a reference librarian, my main goal is to be Bablyon 5. I'd love it if we succeeded in creating a powerful enough search and retrieval tool with an intuitive interface that negated the need for library user instruction. My career mission is to work towards this ideal. It would, just as how B5 succeeded in its mission so much so that it was no longer necessary, make a large part of what librarians now do obsolete.

I'm a librarian. My entire profession would not exist if not for similar provisions.

Remember all the outrage over colorizing Casablanca in the 1980s? There were even congressional hearings that warned of the dire consequences of unmitigated technology (someone even imagined at the time dead actors being re-inserted in new movies, unthinkable at the time). Sounds crazy....

This is biology we're talking about, "all" almost never holds. Most insect diversity then (like now) was probably under 1cm in size.

Believe what you like, but some trivial homework will show you Zootaxa is a very real journal (it's the leading publisher of new taxa in the world).