You could just as well skip guitar lessons and guitar books as well. What's your point?

The game is a good option for self learning. I'm not sure what point you are trying to make.

What percentage of videos linked from McCarthy's site infringed copyright?

A single act of linking to copyrighted material is not criminal, but if you systematically do it, aren't you "inducing infringement?" That's copyright infringement under current law.

Now, I don't believe that this should be criminal, but it's hard for me to believe that encouraging and aiding infringement should be perfectly legal. I just believe that McCarthy should be facing a civil suit rather than a criminal one.

On a side note, I love how the linked article blames this on "conservatives." What does the Obama DHS have to do with conservatives? It's like he believes Bush is still President or something. Actually, we should start that as a conspiracy theory.

Obama is just a puppet!!! Bush is still President!!!! (Hey, people believe in 9/11 "truth" and Obama's "Kenyan birth," right? This isn't that much more unbelievable.)

The FCC loses... because the FCC *always* loses. They've lost every major case for the last fifteen years.

Many obscure games have been highly influential. The entire rogue-like genre is obscure, but has been extremely influential in games like Diablo.

Time Warner offers broadband, but they do not serve the entire country. Nor was Time Warner ever interested in serving the entire country. AOL was essentially a marketing company designed to market Internet access to the entire country. Without that, AOL was not going to survive.

AOL died because it was impossible for them to transition from dialup to broadband. While they could easily serve the entire country with dialup, it was impossible for them to do the same with broadband because broadband access is controlled by an oligopoly of companies who knew it was in their interest to keep tight control.

AOL died when the open access rules died.

There is no parallel to facebook because there is no oligopoly who can keep facebook from upgrading their website.

Actually, that may turn out to be the dumbest thing I've ever written. The lack of net neutrality rules could kill facebook just like the lack of open access rules killed aol.

Even if that doesn't happen, I would not eagerly invest in facebook. Of course, I said the same thing about Google when they IPO'd, so what do I know?

Every corporation has a charter from the government...

And if the phone company is the only one allowed to lay phone lines to your house, I would call that a government granted monopoly.

You seem to be saying that employees and customers don't *already* pay for government services that businesses use.

drudge makes money by having outrageous headlines. "Spielberg picks Laurie to play Lincoln" doesn't make him any money.

Many schools have a rule that you cannot use work you did for a prior class.

Honestly, I think /.ers are hugely underestimating the draw of sports. ESPN has already made a huge investment in 3D. ESPN3D is a huge draw for sports fans.

It's going to take time to catch on though. HDTVs didn't take off overnight either.

Not all Americans get drunk every time they drink.

You are right about cigarettes though. Those who smoke, smoke a lot. The percentage of the population that smokes has been going down for the last few decades though.

I don't think that there would be a big increase in marijuana consumption after legalization. It's already available pretty much everywhere. Where I live, there is a huge drug bust every six months or so. They'll bust a truck just completely filled with marijuana. And my thought is always exactly the same. The drug cartels wouldn't send truck loads of marijuana if most of them didn't get through without a problem.

I personally don't smoke marijuana, but it's not hard to look around and see that prohibition is a failed policy.

We can't have secret treaties become law in democratic countries. It would be the end of democracy as we know it.

There's not enough data for that to mean much of anything. Additionally, the Republican party radically changed their platform with the Reagan revolution in '80, so any data before that for Republicans is especially meaningless.

Also, http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2008/10/republicans-democrats-and-stock-market.html