[Citation needed]

I'm going to go out on a limb here and venture to guess that I'm like most Mac Mini owners in the sense that I already had a working monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and determined that spending an extra $500-$1000 for an integrated display and couldn't care less about the Mac Pro because I'm not even close to taxing the Mini with my day-to-day usage (hence no noticable increase in value.)

Says who? I thought they were different tools for different purposes. Tablets are designed as consumption devices, whereas PCs are designed to be more general-purpose and production devices. There are many people who are perfectly capable of performing the task they need done on a PC, even if they don't know the difference between bash and sh

Just because a tablet is designed to be a consumption device doesn't mean that it has to be associated with Fisher-Price

Because this fails under two scenarios:
Scenario (1) - Out-of-state drivers/cars registered out of state (e.g. university students who have Mom & Dad pay for registration & property taxes) driving into/through the state
Scenario (2) - Oregon residents who have the audacity to drive their vehicles out of the state

While it's not perfect, taxing gas has been a very practical approach to dealing with the tax issue. Now that we're looking at electric vehicles in addition to liquid fuel, perhaps a similar approach would be to meter charging stations and tax on that?

I will venture that you were never an Excel power user then.

Real power users figured out the keyboard shortcuts to access nearly anything in the menus. Surprise, surprise that 99% of those keyboard shortcuts still work or work with very minor altercations. Freezing window positions in excel is Alt > W > F > F instead of Alt > W > F. Pivot tables are Alt > D > P. For commands which aren't in the menus, you can throw them into the shortcut bar, a.k.a. "Quick Access Toolbar" and then use keyboard shortcuts to access those commands (this is what I did for Copy as Picture.)

If you want more real estate space, you can minimize the ribbon (which gives you an extra ~5 rows, significant when using a 12"-15" laptop screen) and still access everything through the same keyboard shortcuts.

My favorite Dell customer support experience had to do with the floppy disk drive getting jammed. We tried pushing the eject button, but couldn't depress the button to release the floppy. Despite the fact that this was clearly a mechanical issue that should still be able to work when the drive is unplugged from the computer (and hence not have any power), the rep still insisted that we:
1) Restart the computer & report what errors were showing up in the Add/Remove Hardware window (hint: there was no reported error)
2) Uninstall & reinstall the drivers for said floppy drive
3) Unplug the computer from the wall, wait n seconds, plug computer back into the wall, then repeat #1 & #2

After going through this process, the rep concluded "Well, I don't have a clue what could possibly be wrong! I suggest you mail the drive back to us so our specialists can take a look at it and give you a replacement (which is what we immediately asked for when we finally got in contact with a person.) here is your RMA number...."

And this was when we called their customer support for enterprises!

I keep seeing this, yet I haven't personally experienced this frustration (and I use the hell out of Excel every day.) Initially, yes, I was annoyed that I couldn't find what I was looking for within the menus. Then I noticed by accident that 99% of the old (i.e. 2003) keyboard shortcuts still work -- they're just not advertised. Alt+E+S still brings up Paste Special, Alt+D+F+F still applies auto-filter, Alt+I+W still inserts a new worksheet, &c. The only real frustration I've had is that some of my macros needed some QA during the conversion and pasting pictures of graphs into PowerPoint is pretty ugly.

I can't comment on Word because we don't really use it in my office, but I'd gladly gain the extra functionality in Excel (multi-threading (huge win for me!), data sets greater than 65K rows, increased memory limits, the list goes on) for the little bit of frustration that I've experienced.

The site seems to be a waste of energy when alternative sources exist with a much greater volume of activity. The prime example that comes to my mind is the Iowa Electronic Markets. I understand the Big Ten rivalry, but why reinvent the wheel? Do they honestly expect to get valuable commentary in conjunction with the votes?

Those are good ideas. The primary one I want to tack on is something which informs me where parking is available.

We (the United States) already have one, it's called the ATF. I'm not sure about our Mexican cousins, however.

On a sidenote, Wikipedia states that the US consumed about 300 tonnes of cocaine in 2010. This bust accounts for 2 days worth of cocain consumption in the US this year.

That was one of the goals with meego

I disagree. My suspicion is that most people would rather put up with the slightly slower service and the customers who feel that this will impact their experience will add another disc to their plan. Chances are it's a minority of Netflix customers who watch more than one or two discs per week. The one-per-week customers will not have a real impact to their experience.

When PMP's have up to 64GB of storage, the issue is more about convenience than quality. I'd rather be able to drag&drop my flac files than have to convert from flac to another codec or maintain two libraries of music.

There are plenty of ways to track people that are on the server side instead of the client side, so noscript can't prevent everything

The more likely theory is that computers continue to live longer and have reached the point of "good enough" that end users do not feel compelled to replace a working, 6 year old computer.

I'll grant you the notion that the pretense for this software is immaterial, largely because the lessee does not have any way of knowing when the software is being used (e.g. if the defendent has an employee who is using said software maliciously.) However, your first point is invalid for the following reasoning:

Cameras can take pictures of the person using the computer. Those pictures can be provided to law enforcement, who should be able to compare said pictures to photographs in their records (e.g. DMV, prison systems, government employee databases, etc.)