Yes, but the reason why "cost" played a role (believe it or not when the cancelled Concorde it was breaking even give or take) was because it was limited on what routes it could fly because of, well, you guessed it, "sound".

...before you have to rent it

That's not even remotely true.

What amazes me about 2nd amendments fanatics is that thought they will go on and on about their individual freedoms and the wording of the amendment itself, what they fail to recognize is that Uncle Sam and Co. (the States) have EVERY RIGHT to regulate the purchase of firearms.

Switch to the 1st amendment, which is regulated ALL THE TIME. Just because you have a belief you want to express, doesn't mean you can't commit libel. Doesn't mean you can use it as an excuse to not serve African Americans or make a gay couple's cake (lower courts have decided this issue already and I suspect in June so will the SCOTUS).

So strictly speaking, the Gov't and/or States absolutely have every right to tell you that you don't get to buy missiles or nuclear weapons. End of story.

Rights are indeed regulated. Get over it.

Coming full circle, what many "lefttist morons" such as myself would like to see is not taking away anyone's guns, but rather regulating them sanely: Get rid of the gun show loop hole, better background checks, restrictions on magazine capacities to mitigate damage, and of course better healthcare for our mentally ill. And do at a national level since we need consistency and cooperation among the States so bad actors can't exploit borders.

Piracy has been around forever. Where there is any distributable media whether that is software, music, movies, what have you, there will be pirates. Grrr...

But that's not the problem...

Fundamentally, the Internet coupled with digital media has eliminated the need for the overhead costs incurred by conventional brick-and-mortar distribution models.

The way media is distributed directly effects the revenue model:

If I have to create a plastic case and a small metallic like circle and ship it across the country to stores in order to share poka classics that is going to cost more than just offering it as a digital download.

Newspapers are dying for this exact same reason, distributing just news is not enough to bring in readership that attracts advertising revenue (its all online).

I will reiterate: The Internet has changed the way distribution of media occurs thereby directly effecting the revenue models of all the major industries. Get with the program.

Mr Wayne should not be fighting piracy, he should be working with his publisher to discover new ways to get his books in distribution chains that make sense in this new economy.

In classical Slashdot fashion, "I for one welcome our new Kindle overlords."

I totally agree, I have one and even signed up for the developer kit. It was an interesting architecture to say the least, they had a LifeOS platform that run a C-like scripting language under a VM called Pawn. The architects I believe stated that Pawn provided a very fast execution environment but made *programming* simple enough for hobbyist and even non-geek types.

My issues were mainly they didn't release anything after the Pleo itself. I mean they were some holiday behavioral editions but that's about it. I really wanted them to release a PDK so I could come up with my own behaviors to really make my Pleo my own. I think its a fantastic idea, albeit with most fantastic ideas, the barrier to entry is typically high.

One thing though, they should open source LifeOS and/or the PDK if they can't sell it. I think a community run RTOS focused on behavioral modeling and extending the model via a simple expressive language and user generated content is fantastic. I even suggested to them in a long survey I filled out as an owner of the first adopter that they should allow folks to exchange behaviors via the web and create a virtual Facebook for rotobotic toys and their owners.

Its a winner and way ahead of its time...but yet again the business model around it needed to be ironed out.