At the post office?

Your internet service is all 4G and random WiFi?

You use the NFL -- a viciously protective, extortionate tax-exempt monopoly -- as the standard for celebrating raw, unbridled competition? In a way, I totally agree. That IS the American ideal end-game of "free-market" "competition."

"My point is that One World Government is a horrible idea. Alternatives are good. Being able to vote with your feet is the last refuge."

An excellent point, but that last bit ended with WWI.

And sapience is pretty much the only thing we can point to when trying to claim humans are "better" than other animals. Take away that yardstick and we may as well be experimenting directly on humans.

Rather telling that the same vanity is used to both support and oppose the act in question...

No, but short of standing in the middle of the street, most places people think of as "public" are in fact private property and the owners are well within rights to demand you turn that shit off and put it away or go play in traffic.

The household survey on which unemployment figures are based has nothing whatsoever to do with benefit claims.

Please stop.

Warren Buffet is the son of a four-term congressman who owned a stock brokerage and gave him his first job. He graduated high school in Washington, DC while his father was a sitting member of congress, then was promptly enrolled at U. Penn to study business.

Please stop spreading this "started from nothing" bullshit. It is a myth.

No, no, no, you let your tedious "DBAs" think they're right and do all that "normalization" and "tuning" shit they keep yammering on about (whatevs), then get the new shiny so you can blob the whole fucker up and never have to worry about anything but said "SELECT * FROM FOO." It's great because our developers no longer have to talk to our DBAs about "optimizing" all that dynamic SQL our webforms were generating. The DBAs are now screaming about resource utilization, but, HELLO, they're the ones who insisted on building all those freakin tables in the first place when everyone knows you just need one to throw in all the XML. Idiots.

The fact that he nearly single-handedly got the entire world to stop calling people "con-men" and start referring to them as enviable "social engineers" is his most staggeringly astounding accomplishment. That he now seems to have parlayed that into /actual/ social engineering is frightful.

"Its Hopper digital video recorder can record and store prime-time content from the four major networks for up to eight days. And the Autohop feature lets viewers skip advertisements completely — rather than fast-forwarding through them — at the press of a button."

Okay, half of that is relevant, the other half (hell, the whole thing) feels like it's pulled straight from the ads for it.

Ironic, no?

Same for Colorado. Labor is tax free.

This. A million times this.

I work a small startup MSP maintaining the networks for several small businesses. There are two of us. My average work day will have me dealing with everything from Exchange 2003 on Server '03 up to everything on an SBS 2011, with SQL, Sharepoint, and about 30 client specific apps (medical, CRMs, etc) in between. I honestly don't have the time to memorize Powershell. I know it's important, and it's something I'm working on, but when I sit down at the first machine running Exchange '07 that I've seen in 4 months, I don't have time to remember which cmdlets exist and what they are and how to syntax them, so I just open the GUI and hope I can get what I need done without googling the shell commands.

Is this ideal? No. Is it practical? Absolutely.

Yeah but we're talking about the server market, not the desktop market. In a consumer workstation it may be impossible to buy a blank machine, but it's very easy to do in the server market.

You weren't paying for a me.com e-mail address, but rather for webhosting, idisk, and basically all of the other stuff that's now free in iCloud, and the me.com e-mail address came along with it.