And just because some gay author has a knee-jerk reaction about his book being labeled adult does not a systematic oppression make. Hasn't the world had enough hysterical nonsense trumped up without documented evidence? (I'd ask that question of it was Mac users complaining or members of the NRA.)

A friend of mine has a son who is a major department head at Amazon, and he's gay. So I have to point out this is not a witch hunt against gays. So get off that argument or you'll lose credibility. If you don't like adult materials being put behind a wall, then boycott them. But you better boycott eBay and a lot of other places too. Being a journalist, I'm against censorship. And yet I also have to point out people have no right to tell any store what they can and can't sell. Amazon is not alone. So, check things out or you're as big a hypocrite as you claim Amazon is.

Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it's this veneer - that the designers are handed this box and told, âMake it look good!â(TM) Thatâ(TM)s not what we think design is. Itâ(TM)s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. â" Steve Jobs

NetFlix is nuts not to go with Quicktime and h.264, or some of the new web technologies that don't require any plug-ins at all in HTML 5, CSS animation, etc. Silverlight is a joke, will never become ubiquitous, and will NEVER replace flash, let along become a modern standard.

You obviously don't understand the issue. They are not trying to copyright facts, but the expression of those facts, which is, in fact, copyrightable. A photograph would fit this description. And it's clear a photograph can be, and should be, copyrighted. As long as this is a capitalistic country, the ability to make money from one's own efforts must be protected.

How do we know trillions of big bangs and eventual collapses haven't occurred> More than trillions? Nobody would be around to notice until life appeared. So, as Stephen Hawking has said, the way the universe is has nothing to do with our perception of it (anthropic principle a modern version of Plato's cave?), but has everything to do with we're here because this particular universe happened to be the one that came into existence that did support life? A scientist friend at the Salk Institute and I have talked about string theory over and over and we simply find it an absurd idea that has no connection to reality. It's a thought experiment that hasn't yielded a real explanation for anything. So anything derived from string theory is going to be flawed as well. The fact that you can come up with an explanation for a universe that doesn't require a creator is no more proof than waving a book in the air and declaring it the infallible word of God because the book itself says so.