As long as Blizzard is making money off the auction house I'm not playing D3. I gave them the benefit and bought it once, but there's no way I'm falling for freemium-in-disguise again. I'd much rather pay a monthly fee and have the game actually be balanced correctly. D3 was fun for a while, and had some good innovations, but it also had some glaring flaws and the auction house alone would've overwhelmed any good qualities it had. When there's a profit motive to making the game worse, you can count on a mediocre-at-best product.

Depends where you get your milk. There's a farm pretty close to me that sells milk and you can go see the cows wandering around in a field grazing. They may not be 100% as happy as some theoretical happiest cow, but I find it hard to picture anyone finding a serious problem with it who isn't espousing some extreme fringe ideal of animal freedom and independence.

All of that is to say that someone might be a vegetarian for animal welfare reasons and drink milk from such a place and that would be logically consistent.

My understanding is that greasemonkey adds scripts that modify the page, rather than modifying the incoming javascript, but I don't know much about how it works under the hood, perhaps I'm mistaken. Even so, there is nothing illegal about running greasemonkey or sharing greasemonkey scripts, is there? Which means that changing the license for the page's javascript doesn't add anything from a legal or practical standpoint.

What meaningful freedom? You can't easily take the source, modify it significantly and use it on the site no matter what license they give you. Yeah, you can hack your own library into the page, but who really cares at all about whatever insignificant javascript the government is using to validate their form. I can kind of see making some kind of fuss about obfuscated javascript (because then it's hard to know what your computer is about to do, if you're the paranoid type), but most javascript is only obfuscated by being poorly written. Either that, or it's condensed for very practical reasons of bandwidth conservation.

While it's technically true that content existed before DRM, it's not actually meaningful the way you phrased it.

DRM used to exist in the form of the natural laws of the universe. Copying a book by hand with a pen pretty effectively meant you weren't going to be distributing it very widely. Copying a TV before the advent of the VCR was effectively impossible for almost everyone. Moreover, the inherent physical impediments to copying data was a far more effective form of DRM than anything that exists now. Technology has broken medium-inherent DRM, and now content producers are trying to build it back up in software. That's not meant to be a judgment on whether DRM is good or bad, just pointing out that in the general sense of something that prevents information from getting around, DRM has always existed.

Who is going to certify the chemicals they use for these smells? I barely trust the FDA to certify food additives, I'm not sure Iike the idea of sitting in a movie theatre inhaling whatever chemicals this company found that smells like strawberries and gunpowder.

They also have less market value than a bag of tulip bulbs, at the moment. A bag of tulip bulbs don't come cheap (for most reasonable notions of "a bag of tulip bulbs")

ASL (American Sign Language) is a full-fledged (i.e. forgein) language. You can learn to speak it poorly by just transliterating your english into signs, but it doesn't even use the same word order in all cases. Just signing along with what you say in English doesn't make you fluent in ASL.

Erasing accidental flamebait mod

Well, if someone is reading a bunch of hate speech I might be made uncomfortable by that. A page with images of cross-burnings and hangings and the like could very well make me uncomfortable to be there. Yet that does not justify censorship. There's lots of things in the world that will be upsetting to someone. Pornography happens to be upsetting to a larger number of US citizens than most things, but, as always, unpopular (and politically dangerous) speech is the only kind that really needs protecting to begin with.

Some important distinctions to make are between coding, design, and production, all of which are parts of the experience. Maybe the point of graphical programming environments isn't only to cater to the pure programming experience you're talking about, but also to give people the opportunity to experience the fun of designing, and seeing their ideas come to life.

As a kid learning BASIC on TRS-80, I did not care in the least about coming up with a clever algorithm. Deciding what to make, creating it and seeing it work was the fun part. For some people, the clever algorithm may indeed be the only fun part of programming, but for me (even now, as an adult and a professional programmer) there is a lot of satisfaction to be had in the design and production parts of the job. Coming up with clever algorithms and solutions definitely is fun, but so are the other parts.

You're essentially arguing that the process itself is all that is, or should matter to people, but I think that misses an important part of any creative enterprise.

Also, as a kid, that sense of "wow, I just made this computer do something it didn't before!" was a pretty rewarding feeling. I think new programmers probably still get some of that.

I'm prepared to believe that the wireless companies do their own gouging of customers, but cramming is about third-parties charging your account. What this settlement aims to do is hold the carriers responsible for those third-party charges. And they should be held responsible, but this isn't quite the same thing as the carriers just charging you random amounts themselves.