I'm sure the beavers appreciate your input. Let me assure you, extensive thought goes into dam design.

Both the short (edited) and full (unedited) versions are available on the front page of the site they released it from.

Not everyone shares the same motivation / principles you do. If your principle is: "respect the author's stated wishes", then it would seem hypocritical to complain about GPL violations but not other copyright infringement. If your principle is: people should be allowed to copy everything freely, it's perfectly consistent to not complain about people infringing copyright in a way that facilitates further copying, but to complain about people infringing copyright in a way that makes further copying more difficult.

They'll get how long you stayed on the page and were actively reading it.

I know there's the problem of submitting the taxes to the jurisdiction, but if the problem of figuring out what the taxes are is so hard, they could just include the sales tax in their prices, and then submit taxes based on the maximum tax rate to each jurisdiction. So, if some state charges 9% sales tax, they could just charge everybody 109%, then send 9% to every state. That way, they'd be freed of the administrative burden.

I'm willing to bet that if they were required to do that, they'd discover pretty quickly how easy it is to collect variable levels of sales tax across various districts.

If google offered completely free netbooks, people would use them as disposable, costing google tons of money. Even subsidized hardware like game consoles relies on the fact that the consumer is putting some investment in, so they'll probably increase their investment over time by buying games, and not just throw it out and get a new one every month because they feel like it.

I think the complaint is that the requirement for a Mac computer is a business requirement for Apple to make money, not a technical requirement in order to run the software, except in so much as Apple cripples their software (from the end-user's perspective) in order to achieve their business goals.

A lot of public transit users feel the same way about cars. I live in a city, and the cost of private parking spaces is pretty high. The city mandates inefficient land use patterns: every landlord *must* provide parking for their apartment complexes. So, effectively, I'm paying for a parking spot--a pretty expensive thing, whether I use it or not, because god forbid they raise parking prices to a price point where the car-drivers would actually be paying for the land they use...

Been tried. Apparently it doesn't work: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1425321&cid=29926417