Exactly! Back in the day, you had two options: (1) subscribe or (2) buy a single magazine or newspaper. Now, there’s no equivalent to the newsstand for digital media.

To be clear, Google will still be storing copies of the pages they crawl. They just won’t be making those copies available to end users.

Microsoft tried to shanghai me to the “new outlook”. When I realized the scope of what they were trying to do, under the guise of a simple software update, I was floored. I don’t even think Google, with all of their Borg-ish tendencies, would attempt such a blatant hijacking of user data. The privacy implications are profound.

This situation seems analogous to when air travel started to take off (pun intended) and existing legal notions of property rights had to be adjusted. IIRC, a farmer sued an airline for trespassing because they were flying over his land. The court ruled against the farmer because to do otherwise would have killed the airline industry.

While this is amazing and all, it’s always seemed to me that this approach of using hundreds of laser beams focused on a single point would never scale to be viable for power generation. Can any experts here confirm?

I’ve always assumed this approach was just useful as a research platform – to learn things applicable to other approaches, such as tokamaks, or to weapons applications.

It amazes me that there are so many people who buy a printer, are offered this “pay $x a month for Y pages” type of plan, and say yes. I mean, sure, HP sucks, but they wouldn’t be able to get away with such slimy business practices if there weren’t so many people willing to pay.