It's not that they aren't legally allowed to do that.

The "chutzpah" is the fact that they're running that ridiculous ad campaign that makes them out to David versus Apple's Goliath. They only started pretending to give a shit about anyone else because they want the public to back them, when in reality it's just two giant, greedy companies duking it out.

...when for years and years they couldn't be fucking arsed to put a second button on their mouse.

That's why everyone goes to church, not just atheists.

Striking out on your own would be far more practical if we had universal healthcare, like every other first world country.

Holy shit, I'm wired after 3 cups. I can't imagine 25.

I think the real problem with his work is that he's completely willing to sacrifice almost everything in favor of whatever scene in the movie he currently wants to happen even if it ruins other aspects of the movie. For example, in The Force Awakens I was generally okay with the story up until the attack on the Death Star (or whatever it was called, but it's the new Death Star so whatever) begins and it fires its huge burst of energy across the galaxy that is somehow going to hit the target in a small amount of time and the rebel forces are also able to almost immediately travel across the entire galaxy while being on comms in real time.

He did something very similar in the first movie of the Star Trek reboot, when Nero destroyed Vulcan. Given how long the Enterprise was in warp before they dumped Kirk off on that ice planet, Vulcan should have been significantly farther away, but instead it was in the same relative neighborhood as the distance from the earth to the moon, because it was more than just a dot in the sky.

I choose to believe that these particular scenes aren't strictly canon, but are dumbed-down, flashier versions of what actually happened (for instance, Spock could have been carrying a portable subspace radio and heard of Vulcan's destruction that way). Starkiller base could have had a way of firing a weapon through hyperspace, but in the movie scene it was more flashy and dramatic to have it look like it must all be happening in the same solar system.

As long as I can come up with a plausible version of what happened that works in universe and still makes sense in the context of the story, I try to just let this stuff slide.

...then google's customers will stop preferring google. They may be the dominant market force right now, but things can change pretty fast in the tech industry.

Part of the reason that people use google is that they have policies stating that when a user clicks on a link, they see the same stuff that google sees. In other words, google provides the kind of search results that people tend to want. If they start favoring paywall sites over users, then upstart search engines like DuckDuckGo or whatever would be more than happy to snap those users up.

Yes, it's high time the FCC restored my right to have my local monopoly ISP block whatever traffic it wants, because nothing says freedom like not being able to access the content I want to access.

Your guys in congress don't give two shits about a free market. They care about their corporate lobbyists.

It's not always pretty as the consumer either. If these companies close to taking a loss on each sale of their products, the only thing they can really do is reduce product quality, so as consumers we'll have more previously trustworthy brands start selling garbage products, which in the long term can be more expensive, because you have to replace your stuff more often.

Disabled by default, then enabled by default, then mandatory, then not able to be worked around. Give it time.

So a subreddit that bans people for having dissenting views is bitching that a private company banned their subreddit, ostensibly for their dissenting views? I wouldn't have any sympathy for them even if they weren't a bunch of fucking nazis.

Someone, please come up with a rationalization for how the subreddit's banning of dissent doesn't count because it's different when reddit does it.

Exactly. Government is bad. Any idea that involves government is bad. In cases where the government consistently does something better and cheaper than private industry (like health care in every other first world country), government is still bad because government is bad.

What's important is that you conclude that government is bad first, and then figure out how you'll reach that conclusion. Otherwise, you may actually come to a different conclusion in some cases, which would be wrong, because government is bad.

Microsoft Exec Urges Windows 10 Linux Compatibility Layer Developers To Try Native Windows 10 Code

I mean, after all, you've switched to Windows. Why go through all the extra trouble of writing code that would run on Linux? We've got some wonderful vendor lock-in for you.

It really depends on whether the Justice Department is run by someone who will decide to prosecute (hint: in a month, they won't be).

...but it's difficult when the rest of the world (including the people who are ostensibly trying to solve the problem) is busy conspiring to convince them that IT isn't for them.

Girls tend to as much of an interest in math and science as boys until fairly early on in grade school (I feel like it was 3rd grade or so). It seems to me that there's a lot of cultural pressure -- much of it from women -- pushing young girls away from STEM fields and into other areas of study. The aforementioned people who are ostensibly trying to solve the problem are blaming the IT industry, when in fact this happens much too early for the supposed culture of IT to have much of anything to do with it. Get girls and young women interested in IT and get people used to seeing them interested in IT, and the cultural issues will age out of the population as young IT professionals grow up used to being surrounded by both men and women.

The trouble is that the primary group of people looking into this issue is that they start out with the conclusion that men are uniquely at fault for the gender gap in IT and then go looking for evidence to support that,