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In assessing the degree to which there may be a gap between the cost of a college degree and its value, a lot depends on what you assume about the people doing the evaluation. If we were all strictly rational long-term-income-maximizing automata, a college degree would still look like a good deal on average. After all, you make substantially more by the end of your life. Let’s call this the efficient market theory of college pricing. But as we have recently discovered much to our pain, markets aren’t always efficient. A more reasonable theory might be that most college students and their parents simply don’t do this calculation. They take it on faith, with perhaps a sprinkling of anecdote and experience of generations past, that having a college degree is worth the investment prima facie. This evaluation would be helped, of course, by the fact that there can be very good reasons to go to college other than pure economic pay-back. But at the very least, I suspect that the number of people who would be willing to get a degree knowing that it may not pay off for quite some time would be significantly smaller than the number of people who are getting their degrees right now.

There is a reason why you are a film critic, Mr. Ebert. You know film. You know film and appreciate it deeply. You understand what makes a good film. You have written countless articles and books on film. You have even written a great film. But one thing must be kept in mind at all times: You are not a video game critic.

I believe if one is going to present choices or issues in games as ethical, those choices have to matter in the game world. But I get antsy when games present me with choices that clearly open one door while closing another, as I want to see all of the game’s content, since I’m unlikely to go through it multiple times.

“The Internet is a great place to spread a message, no matter how silly it is,” Mr. Gates said, adding that although his goal was to get 1,000 comments, the response was “way more than I figured would actually review milk.” Marguerite Copel, a spokeswoman for Dean Foods, which owns the Tuscan milk brand, said it was impossible to be offended by the lampoon. “Milk is an important part of Americana,” she said, “and if people can have fun with it, why not?”

Open course material on the Internet may be free, but getting it there definitely isn’t. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the principal financial backer of the open educational movement, has spent more than $110 million over the past eight years, with more than $14 million going to M.I.T. The cost of re-creating the educational experience is high. Only 33 of the 1,975 courses posted by M.I.T. have videos of lectures. Another hundred or so contain multimedia material like simulations and animations. The rest is simply text: syllabuses, class notes, reading lists, problem sets, homework assignments.

In the light of economic reality, nothing is free. Someone — be it an advertiser, an administrator, an investor or an entrepreneur — is footing the bill for every one and zero that’s electronically transmitted across this great Internet of ours. And at some point, most of those folks expect to see a return on their investment.

And just as we’ve grown used to paying for music through apps such as iTunes and getting cheap access to films online through Netflix, it’s about time we suck it up as consumers and start paying for the bandwidth we use, from web hosting to online storage to site creation and maintenance. As we all know, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

We would stroke their steel dolphin-like bodies in museums and honour them as symbols of a daunting technical intelligence and a prodigious wealth.

We would admire them like small boys do, and adults no longer dare, for fear of seeming uncynical and unvigilant towards their crimes against our world.