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

This is my justification for deletionism.

Wikipedia's social processes work best when Wikipedia is a tertiary source. It is not a good repository for primary source information (although WikiSource can work), because we don't have the type of processes built in at preserving or verifying the meta-data of primary source material. It is not a good repository of secondary articles (that is, original research) about primary source material. Secondary articles belong in a place that has fact-checking as part of its mission somehow: a newspaper, a peer-reviewed journal, etc. Wikipedia is a tertiary source: we summarize and synthesize all the secondary source material into a coherent whole.

As an example: if you are a researcher and have found a new letter between George Washington and Benedict Arnold in somebody's basement, you should get it checked out by other people competent at verifying it. Wikipedia would never simply accept you typing out the contents or scanning in an image. It is not competent at verifying such a letter. If you are a researcher and have a new theory about George Washington, you should publish that theory in a scholarly journal of historical research, vetted by other historians; Wikipedia is not the place to argue for that new theory. We're simply not competent at evaluating it. Wikipedia can come along afterward and describe the debate in the peer-reviewed journal, but it's not good at the peer review in the first place.

When the subject is not George Washington, but rather Joe's garage band, this breaks down, because it's impossible to be a tertiary source about something which there are no secondary source materials. What if it turns out there is no Joe's garage band? Joe doesn't even own a guitar? There is no Joe? Even a really bad music magazine would probably suss that out, but Wikipedia wouldn't, because we don't (and pretty much can't) have a good process for editing secondary articles like that. And if it's pretty much impossible for anybody at Wikipedia except Joe (if he even exists) to verify it in any way, then the Wikipedia processes can't work on it.

Wikipedia has to draw the line somewhere (do we want 366 articles on "What Joe ate for breakfast on January 1, 2008", "...January 2, 2008"?) I think a good place to draw it is at our core competence of being a tertiary source.