If you're talking about hard goods like washing machines and lawn mowers, their cost with respect to wages and inflation has decreased dramatically over time. Why? Because people value price over quality. And don't consider ten year investments anymore. So, we have cheap washing machines that don't cost much more than they did in 1962 (and that's WITHOUT inflation) that are basically disposable and meant to last 10 years. A washing machine cost nearly $200 in 1962. A basic top-loading washing machine today with no bells and whistles similar to a 1962 model costs a lot less than $1,550 today (the equivalent in 2014 dollars). Or maybe a basic, single-set cordless phone that was $129 in 1982. A basic model today costs a lot less than $330. You can get the same support you used to, but you have to pay A LOT more for it. Why? Because most people just want it cheap and won't pay for quality and support. So the quality and support side of things loses the economies of scale that it used to enjoy. So, you can get the quality and support, you'll just have to pay a lot more for it.

Sure it does. If they had to provide support, they would build in the cost of said support to the price of the software. Instead, you have the option of paying for live technical support on a contract or incident basis if you so choose. You're free to pay for technical support if you would like it.

If you paid for a technical support contract, you'll get a person on the phone to assist with technical problems. If you didn't, you shouldn't expect it. Most companies operate on margins that a single technical support call handled in the US would wipe out their margin on that product these days. Everybody wanted everything cheap. Now we have it.

That's the price the cable networks have to pay for each subscriber with anything more than a basic broadcast package. And they have to include ESPN in all packages except that and aren't allowed to offer it a la carte as per their contracts. So, while it won't show up as a line item on your cable bill, that is the average price ESPN is getting of your monthly cable bill whether you watch it or not. And that's solely for ESPN alone. They often force you to take additional networks as well but it varies by cable provider.

It's pretty common knowledge. It was $4.69 at the end of 2011. [1] And it was $5.54 in the middle of 2013. [2] And this is ONLY for ESPN proper. Additional properties all have their own price (ESPN2 is another $0.70, for instance). By forcing cable companies to gouge all their customers, ESPN is able to pay $2 billion a year just for Monday night football. As cable subscriptions shrink, that model will become much more difficult. 1 - http://www.sportsgrid.com/medi... 2 - http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08...

And a big part of that is the over $60 a year you're spending on ESPN and associated networked even if you never watch sports.

You do realize you're calling me a hypocrite when I never expressed an opinion. That's a bit telling.

There may be some backlash, such as RareBits pulling their app from the Firefox Marketplace, due to Brendan Eich's support of the anti-gay marriage Prop 8 initiative in CA. Eich publicly responded back in 2012. The issue is being discussed on Hacker News as well.

The answer is obvious and pretty simple, both Dropbox and Amazon likely give the Chinese government complete access to everything that passes through those servers in China. That's the only way the Chinese government would allow them entry.

The Q Public license not being GPL compatible made it mostly useless, since the GPL/LPGL was 75%+ of all open source software at that time.

It depends which data center you're in. PortableApps.com has been hosted at Rackspace for years and we had multiple major outtages due to ongoing power issues in the Dallas data center in 2009. The switch from grid to ups was failing and would take the whole wing of the data center out with every server crashing hard. It would take quite a while to come back up. Then we'd have to wait hours for the Rackspace folks to rebuild our corrupted database (fully managed account on a dedicated server). It happened two weekends in a row in June and one other time if I recall correctly, basically costing us a full day of downtime each time.

It's $575 for the 16GB ($630 for the 32GB which is AT&T only at present) and no microSD so you're locked to that size. The customizations options are similarly on the worst-rated carrier in the US, AT&T. T-Mobile, Sprint and Verizon get a black or white 16GB version. That's it. It's $199 for the 16GB one on a 2 year contract, which is the same as you'd pay for a top-tier phone like the HTC One 32GB or the Samsung Galaxy S4 16GB (with microSD so you can add up to 64GB more space on the cheap).

LibreOffice is free to take everything OpenOffice releases under the Apache license and release it under GPL/LGPL 3.0 of their release. Unfortunately, OpenOffice can't do the reverse without switching their license.

Just set gfx.direct2d.disabled=true and the problem is solved. That's what the fix for the bug is anyway (they'll do it automatically with a hardware blacklist). It isn't like Mozilla can force AMD to fix their broken, abandoned drivers.

As always, you can disable it yourself within about:config. Or use an extension like NoScript, etc to disable it per-site. You likely knew this and were trolling as most folks who are whining about this setting change are. Mozilla is removing the disable JavaScript box from Options as a browser without JS turned on is pretty useless today. A ton of sites won't work right. Most web developers don't even bother to check for JS being disabled anymore, nor should they as JS exists everywhere and in every modern phone browser, too. And the 2m people running NoScript no enough to enable JS when a website doesn't work.