If you're Home Depot, no ... while it's important, those few milliseconds of lag and somewhat less native UI isn't a primary business concern.

If you're trying to take on an 'A' player like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc, or trying to establish a new service, yes ... your experience has to be as optimized as possible to stay / get ahead of your competition.

Did you mean Disqus? So I guess unlike a lot of other users who have complained in comments to this story about Google's, you want a web search engine to correct your spelling.

Could you explain why Disqus are more "scumbags" than other comment section hosts? Or could you explain why all comment section hosts are "scumbags"?

Mixed with the sarcasm and the editorial I'm having a tough time extracting the position you are advocating. Or more importantly what you are disagreeing with. The point above is that you can't sue patent examiners. Your position seems to be that patents should be subject to a more complex and hostile review (i.e. a much more expensive review). If that's your point I'd agree. Otherwise you are going to have to represent.

If only your "Exhibit A" wasn't mostly selective golden memory tinted by rose colored glasses. The "great uplift" was indeed (mostly) great - if you were a white collar worker in the city, or an industrial worker with a union. For the laborers down on the farm, the topic of discussion, not so much.

And even then the "great uplift" wasn't powered by smaller profit margins or worker's rights - it was powered by rising salaries, employment, and consumer spending. (Emphasis on the last.) It couldn't last, and it didn't.

 

Or is your argument really that there fundamentally aren't enough physical resources for everyone to get high quality goods ?

My argument is that you're fundamentally clueless to the nature of the discussion, and confuse nebulous and abstract "high quality goods" with the reality of agriculture.

The phone I already have doesn't support music. If I switched to a smartphone, the carrier would refuse to activate it on my present plan, instead putting me on a plan that costs $300 more per year than what I'm currently paying. Even in the GSM ecosystem, where a SIM is mandatory, carriers can and do automatically add a data plan to a voice-only SIM when it is inserted into a smartphone.

Sure it does; you'd be extracting this carbon out of the air, or from a process stream that would otherwise dump to the atmosphere. Best case you have a net zero carbon emission, worst case you're using the same carbon twice (industrial waste stream to vehicle fuel to emissions) which is still a significant reduction.

Plus it cuts down on other pollutants, eliminates the environmental damage from oil extraction itself, eliminates emissions from the refining process and possibly reduces transport energy costs.

They just need to scale it up... easier said than done, of course.
=Smidge=

I have much more meaningful discussions on G+ than I do FB, partly because the number of followers on G+ is less, so less crap.

That's a function of the people you allow to post on your feed - not the platform. Or, to put it another way, you can't have meaningful discussions on FB because you're an idiot who hasn't bothered to learn how to prevent unwanted people from posting on your page or to limit a particular discussion to a defined subset of people.

Don't blame the platform because you can't be bothered to figure out how use it.

Did they stop making clip-on Bluetooth keyboards for phones or something? Amazon still appears to have slide-out keyboards in stock for iPhone 6.

It failed because anyone interested in joining couldn't join because it was Invite Only, then they stopped caring.

And even if you did manage to get an invite - odds are, most of your friends didn't. And even if they did, G+ was very feature incomplete - basically a graphical twitter interface and very little more.

Pretty much every I knew eventually got an account because "someday everyone will have an account, and then it will be worth using"... But even though Google finally opened the gates and let everyone in, nobody really switched over because "well, most of my friends haven't so I'll wait". Google is still waiting for that day, pretty much everyone else has given up.

Supercomputing? HAH!Linux is so fucking weak that it can't even support my super-server with 12 GPUs PER BOX.

http://www.top500.org/statisti...

In 2011 Cray deployed a Linux supercomputer with 9600 GPUs and from that point on Linux has been able to handle essentially infinitely many. I think you may want to read up a bit.

Because an iPod touch is small enough to put in an armband so you can listen while you jog. Android tablets typically don't run smaller than 7 inches without being designed (and priced) for use with a cellular network. Or should people just buy an entry-level Android phone and use it without a SIM?

FM radio stations pay (the company that represents) the songwriter. Internet radio pays both (the company that represents) the songwriter and (the company that represents) the recording artist.

I figured as much. But how would the DNS server on your home or small office network, such as the one built into a home Internet gateway appliance, find a recursive resolver? Or would it need to be a recursive resolver?

I base that on the unwillingness of the businesses wanting to pay higher wages which would solve this issue. Or am I incorrect about this?

Like almost everyone else, you're blindly blaming the business and ignoring the other half of the equation - the consumer. How much will Joe or Jane Sixpack pay for a pint of strawberries? That ultimately determines how much the business can pay the picker.

You can't have low prices, high quality, and high wages for the worker - pick two.