But what winds up happening is that people come out of the woodwork to pick up the banner not because they believe in the validity of their complaints, not because they insist on devices and only using devices that live up to free software standards or that don't suffer from these same issues, but because they have to have something to hate. In this case, it's Apple. "Wait, Apple's popular now? I can't like them anymore! I have to hate them irrationally! I have to be different like everyone else!"

All the while, talking past the very real complaints and issues with a device like the iPhone -- which I totally love but simply can't bring myself to own -- and instead focusing on disliking a device simply because it's popular. That kind of bandwagonism weakens the case for open standards, and does nothing to convince any company, Microsoft or Apple, to embrace their users instead of pretending they need to be protected from them.

@Angryrider: more content costs more money, frankly.

Even though I have no real love for TokyoPop - they treat their artists and writers like crap.

"OMG I CAN SEE THE WIRES!"

Classic. :)

That being said, it's definitely a great list. I think I should brew some tea.

The reason we're even having this discussion is because the amount of manga that makes it to the United States is one thing, but the amount that the masses manage to consume and the amount that manages to get into popular culture is a ridiculous fraction of that. There's enough manga of different styles and different genres to go around, we just don't see it on every corner like we see superspidermutantcyborgcaptainwolvercyclophotchickinspandexiamthenightman in every department store.

As with any import, the problem is exposing American consumers to the wide depth and breadth of manga and anime available, and then getting past American consumers' stubborn desire to not have to read a translation or anything longer than 10 brightly colored pages. I know I'm being cynical and I know I'm blowing it up a bit, but seriously - it's just absolutely clear that the folks who think "it all looks the same" and "it's all the same stuff" don't know the breadth of what's produced, and it's almost ridiculous to say "it all looks the same" and in the same breath say you read Marvel or DC comics.

Not EVERYONE in the Local Group is headed for each other, gravity and entropy are two completely different things and I think it's kind of misleading to lump them together that way. At the same time, the whole "two things spinning together" is a good analogy though. :)

Andromeda and the Milky Way will indeed collide, and galactic collisions take place on the timetable of hundreds of millions to billions of years - additionally, galactic collisions take place with very little disruption to specific star systems - don't think that in some several billion years our Sun will have a super close neighbor or will collide with another star - the density of galactic material (stars, planets, gases, other bodies) just isn't high enough for a galactic collision to mean anything catastrophic like stars running into each other and exploding or something like that. So frankly, when Andromeda and the Milky Way collide, it will take eons to complete, and anything on the scale of our observations likely won't even notice.

I just haven't seen proof positive of that in years. Work voicemail is atrocious for all of the reasons Arrington (and everyone above) have mentioned. Personal voicemail is atrocious because more often than not people say "call me back" instead of leaving any real information (eg, recruiters who call saying "I have an opening you might be interested in, call me at-" without telling me anything about the opening), and so on.

Sadly, caller ID replaced voicemail a while ago.

Before we descend into a discussion of saving v. investing, let's remember that it's important to keep a balanced portfolio of investments in risky and non-risky items as well as cash savings that you're sitting on top of!

Now that being said, I'm going to get back to sorting out that zero-percent Kevin mentioned. I really need to get back into the swing of saving - ever since I changed jobs I've been meaning to take that Money Day LH suggested:
[lifehacker.com]

I just haven't gotten to it!

[www.tvaddicts.tv]

No vouch for how official those DVDs are, though. :D

In other news, TCPMP is the only thing that makes my old Palm Tungsten T3 usable anymore. :D Pop some videos on a memory card and I have a portable video player!

Poor Laserbeak!

"Impossibly small" is likely a press re-word. Scientists don't say "impossibly small." Nothing is "impossibly small." In fact, if we lived in a microscopic world, trucks would crash into walls, fly apart, and reassemble perfectly on the other side of the wall. that's quantum mechanics for you. But the odds of that? So incredibly small they're not worth considering. I mean odds of 10-to-the-negative-thousands-power percent. That's a lot of zeroes.

The same applies to the LHC. This isn't risk analysis anymore, it really is fear mongering by folks who don't understand the research. It's totally cool to have imagination and wonder about the effects of something ridiculously crazy like that, but when you start trying to convince people with empirical evidence to the contrary that your suspicions are correct simply because there is some hideously small probability of the case bring true, you've derailed yourself from the train tracks of legitimacy. :)

@first question posed in post: Yes. Manga is a medium, not a style - I for one am more than tired of people - especially Americans (this is where the definition becomes OUR PROBLEM) who downplay American, European, or any other artist that uses the Japanese-inspired style in their own work and creates work with similar size, shape, and in media that would lend itself to being called Manga..only because they're not Japanese and the artists and writers aren't from Japan. It's getting well and truly ridiculous.

@Meiran: DramaCon is PERFECT EXAMPLE OF THIS. Svetlana Chmakova is a brilliant author and artist, and yet her work gets called out as "not manga" somehow because she isn't Japanese. It's no mistake that she wrote in an encounter between a black comic artist and a rabid Naruto fan to illustrate this very point into Dramacon (was it volume 2 or 3? Either way - it's only 3 volumes, and it's too much fun to not buy them all and read them together!).