Depending which version of Christian craziness you subscribe to, it could be 1000 years of chaos and suffering before things really actually end.

That's eventually not going to be relevant. Operating on the assumption that all DRM is eventually cracked, ebooks can't stay locked down for long. So once they eclipse paper books for the average person they'll be widespread on torrent sites in DRM free versions, and all for free. The transition phase will be a little rough, but only if you insist on being an early adopter and want free ebooks. I'll probably get an ebook reader one day, but not until the free selection is as wide as digital music downloads on torrent sites are today.

Now, average readers won't know how to crack DRM or download books for free, but that's ok because them paying for books will subsidize us being able to read for free. And you can always do your part and spread the word to as many needy people as possible. And there's always the library.

The future is actually quite bright for readers and ebooks :)

Because we want them to use some of their record profits to expand coverage and capacity so they can both promise and deliver unlimited data. They really shouldn't be given a choice considering much of their infrastructure was either paid for by the government or made possible by a government granted monopoly.

Without that health care bill, I wouldn't have health care at all right now. I have a pre-existing condition and can't afford coverage but I get to stay on my parents plan a little longer and then will have an insurance plan fully, or mostly, subsidized by the government. There are bad parts about the plan, mainly because it didn't go far enough toward a true public option, but it has helped many people like me.

From what I can understand about BitCoin is that all the "easily mined" BTC is gone, and now you need a powerful GPU cluster to actually get anything substantial. It's analogous to the rivers and streams running out of easily panned gold, now the only people still being able to extract it are the large scale hydraulic mining operations who are able to invest in the machinery to get at the gold locked deep underground in the rock.

It reminds me of the adage about the difference between cults and religions; a religion being a large and popular cult, and a cult being a small unpopular religion.

It looks to me like there is a small, but not insignificant, and growing community of people who will gladly accept BTC as payment for goods and services.

Belief that it has value, the same illusion that makes our USD based economy run :p

At least if we all had the same faith in bitcoin it would be impossible for the government or central bank to devalue our currency, effectively robbing everyone of their savings.

In OS X at least the only "ad" is the button to Add Credits, which I guess allows me to call normal phones from Skype, which isn't something I'm interested in. Although, there's still PLENTY wrong with the new interface. I'd rather have the last version's UI even with an ad than this horrible one window mess they cobbled together. I'm hoping MS reverts to the previous version now that they own it.

Everyone I know still uses AIM as their primary IM protocol, although I don't know anyone who uses the official AIM client (is there still one?). Had to go with AIM early on because that's where everyone else was. I use Adium in OS X, Pidgin otherwise, and since they can both handle any protocol you could care to name it doesn't make sense to change my screen name every time a new one comes out. Skype has somewhat replaced AIM, but mostly we only start up Skype when we want to voice or video chat, when we are just using instant messaging it's still AIM, which most of the people I know leave running all the time their computer is on. Skype hasn't replaced that functionality for some reason.

You're modded Funny, so I'm glad most people got that this was sarcasm, but for those who don't, conservative opinion has become the norm, at least in American major news outlets. Conservatives dominate cable news (Fox is the most watched), radio (a dozen or so popular conservative opinion shows with a greater audience than anything the left has), print (what's left of print anyway, The Wall Street Journal, NYT is now also owned by News Corp.), the internet (Drudge, et al). The insanity is that despite almost complete blanket control of every media outlet in the nation, they repeat the lie that conservative views are oppressed so often and so urgently that many people fall for it. It's akin to Christians in the US (the vast majority of people) complaining that they are an oppressed minority beset on all sides by various powerful groups that are actively seeking their persecution. It's just not happening.

Fortunately, there's a third option other than playing by their rules or not playing at all. Play by your own rules. There are many sites to download ebooks and audiobooks for free without DRM. I recently graduated college and didn't pay a dime for text books, found downloads for almost all of them and the ones I couldn't I just used the library's copy, and made photocopies of pages I needed to take. The corporate model can be broken by simply ignoring their screams for money. Paying for content is so 20th century. We're living in a time when an Ethernet cable gives you access to every piece of media and content you could ever want or imagine, and all for free.

Since I don't recognize the legitimacy of copyright, licensing, EULAs, or software patents, and make a point to not follow them, I'd say my views are pretty strong. Using copyright as the basis for protecting free software (GPL, et al) is a hack to make a bad and immoral system somewhat more tolerable, but it's not the only way things could be done.