Agree with you on this. The "Oil Giants" likely have their own scienctists who say they can calulate the benefits of their products. Let's compare the benefits and the costs and see which comes out ahead. I suspect the benefits might appear to be more tangiable than the costs.

I use a text-based browser too for similar reasons. I found that NetVibes has a special page: http://wap.netvibes.com/ that seems to work for me. I just signed up today so I can't tell yet if it's good enough to replace Google Reader.

Probably because at the rate they wish to tax per mile, the bill will be so huge that it would be a burden for people to pay it. Better to tax people in small increments over a long period of time than to hand them a huge bill all at once.

There was another story that I read today indicating that Nintendo had to stop running Wii commercials because there is more demand for the system than they can supply.

Funny how a few months ago people were claiming that the Wii bubble was about to burst.
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/12/169203

I agree with your point, but not your rationale.

I'm *gasp* 35, and for as long as I can remember music has been freely copyable. Radios with built-in cassette players could often record "free" [1] music directly from the radio, without any external microphone. One radio station even spent Sunday nights playing entire sides of LPs.

The CD era made it even easier to make high quality tapes. It was easy to record, and in some cases the quality was better than a mastered cassette. Some of the "portable systems" [2] could actually calculate optimal song orders to put as many tracks on a tape as possible.

My point is that at least two generations have grown up with the ideas of "free music" and "freely copying music". Right or wrong, it's a part of the American culture. The sudden appearance of DRM when freely copied/format shifted music has been permitted for decades is a culture shock, and is only turning people away from the big labels.

1: Sure, someone was paying for it, but to the end user the only costs were electricity and cassettes.
2: aka boom boxes. I'm a child of the 80's.