I'm just surprised that it's taken everyone this long to see these tactics in politics. Microsoft has been teaching them these techniques for over a decade.

It all comes down to trust. Who do I trust?

• Microsoft? No way!
• Google? No reason not to.

You couldn't pay me to use a Microsoft service of any kind. I overwrote my last Microsoft partition at the stroke of midnight, January 1, 2000. My computer life has been so much more aggravation free since.

I had the Japanese equivilent, the NEC 8201. It was my first computer, bought with my summer job money when I was in high school. I took that with me everywhere, typing in programs from monthly Japanese computer magazines (learning programming and how to read Japanese at the same time).

I still have my 8201, but it doesn't boot up any more. I wish I understood hardware, because I'd really like to let my kids get a feel for what computing was like 28 years ago.

There were articles earlier in the year saying that the Leaf could be used to power the home in case of emergency, or to give back to the home that is powered by the sun by day and Leaf at night. I asked a guy at the local Nissan dealer when I took my La Festa in for a checkup if I could just have the battery system without the car. He looked at me strange and asked why? I told him that I was looking into alternate energy systems (wind and solar), but none of the solar packages being sold store the power; they all redirect it to the grid. I've researched storage systems, but everything I've found were a mess of old car batteries arranged in serial and parallel. If the Leaf has a single package that can easily connect to the home to charge and discharge, it would be a great help here in Japan since Fukushima went down. (This was still several months ago when energy restrictions were still in effect.) I don't think the guys at Nissan know what a great little package they have there for other uses than to power a car.

Countries outside of the U.S. have no problem offering high speed unlimited data at affordable prices without any of the problems that the U.S. carriers are claiming. And the best deals are often on mobile! And, yes, there is heavy audio and video traffic in other countries as well.

I started learning XQuery (for native XML databases) before turning 40, but it was after turning 40 that the whole beauty of the language overtook me.

There still aren't that many XQuery programmers out there, and their demand is on the rise. So learning a new language with a lot of potential and very little current competition may be what you need. Your functional programming skills will be very helpful with XQuery.

For starters, the Open Source eXist DB project is great for getting up and running with a native XML database and using XQuery. There are a lot of tutorials, deep documentation, and a very responsive mailing list.

I remember Lee Iaccoca in the late 1980s going before Congress asking for tariffs against Japanese automobiles because, "It isn't fair. They [the Japanese] work harder [than Americans]." I was shocked and bewildered by his statement. Is he saying that working hard gives one an unfair advantage over the lazy? Is he telling Congress that Americans are lazy? How can that be an argument against anything?

When I see someone whining about things that are "not fair," I can't help but remember Iaccoca's plea.

Sounds like the plot to Pacific Heights. I didn't really like that movie just because it sounded too plausible, like too many people would run out and try it.

I disallowed MSN bot via robots.txt many years ago. Shortly after Bing started up, I started getting hits coming from Bing. I checked their forums to see how to disable Bing from crawling my site, the instructions hadn't changed - disallow MSN bot. Each time MSN bot came along, it got robots.txt, then apparently went away (that IP address didn't repeat).

Since I couldn't stop Microsoft from linking to my site, I got my revenge a different way. I wrote a filter to check the referrer; if it came from Bing, I redirected to Google with the same search parameters. Most come back from Google a minute or two later (after their confusion wears off?).

I don't care so much about the legality of what Microsoft is doing. It's just plain wrong in my book, and I'll happily lose potential hits to my site to see to it that they do not benefit from this underhanded behavior.

Connect a steel nail with wires to the two ends of two 1.5V AA batteries. Try to hold onto the nail with your bare hands. You won't last long.

Gee, I hear Louis Black when I read your post. You didn't spit all over the screen as you typed that, shaking a finger every now and then, did you?

That comment made my day. How true, how true.

The article fails to mention anything about the annoying problem that all of these services (iTunes included) don't allow those of us outside the U.S. to view any of these shows. Stupid exclusive deals for possible future foreign releases prevent worldwide distribution and force many expats to turn to bit torrents.

If it's greed that drives the producers (and copyright holders), I do hope that they someday realize that they can earn more by allowing people outside of the U.S. timely access to their shows through legitimate channels (like iTunes, Hulu, etc.) than through exclusive tie-ups with other dinosaur companies that think the same way they do.