#24: How could he not notice? Sheesh. It clearly says "hard", "malt beverage" and lists the alcohol content. Since when does regular lemonade come in beer-sized glass bottles anyway? How could he not have known what it was?

Have you ever had Jones Cola? IBC Root Beer? Non-alcoholic drinks are served in beer bottles sometimes, and I wouldn't be surprised to see lemonade served that way.

And if you ordered a lemonade for your kid, would you be inspecting the bottle for its alcohol content? Of course not, you ordered lemonade.

From what I understand, he enabled features that were already present on the card, but unsupported under Vista. For example, you could listen to Dolby Surround in XP, but not in Vista. Creative had told their customers that enabling those features under Vista wasn't possible (for whatever reason). So when Daniel said "You totally can! Look, see?" Creative's response was "STOP STEALING OUR FEATURES >:( " which was such a ridiculous claim, their user base went into rebellion.

There was also some iffiness about the method by which he enabled the features, which involved replacing part of the public driver with part of a proprietary Dell driver. But while that may seem like more of a legitimate claim, that wasn't what Creative was raising a stink over.

"oh well, i still don't get this online books thing. reading a book off a screen is no fun at all."

Actually, Magus, I'd say that's the point. Nobody likes reading novel length text off of a screen (why else would they be trying to push e-paper on us?). But this is a way to let you read enough of the novel so you know you'd rather be reading it on paper. Then you go out and buy it.

I'm surprised they pulled the podcast, if that's true. He'd said in his "Adventures in Sci-Fi Publishing" interview that he had a special clause in his contract clearly saying that Crown couldn't stop him from releasing a free audio version of the book. I wonder what happened.

Fluxx can be an interesting party game, but as mentioned above, there's no real strategy to it.

Now, if you want a REAL card game version of Calvinball, look no further than 1000 Blank Note Cards. It's got the same draw-a-card/play-a-card rule, except the deck starts out mostly blank, and players fill in the cards with whatever they want as they go along.

Ivan256: I'll see if I can phrase this so I'm actually saying what I mean...

Basically, Big Media types use copyright to make money from content created by the hard work of other people. I don't begrudge them making money, but the fact that they want to do so without acknowledging the original artists is more than a little slimy.

The writers, on the other hand, are the ones doing the hard work to creating the art in the first place. So it seems more appropriate for them to reap the fruits of their labor than upper management.

So it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, as one is creating art, while the other just profits from it.