Where is this fabled competition you speak of? You must not live in the US.

Right, except for the part where when the state brought in outside consultants to try to determine WHY things were so off-tilt, the consulting firms (yes, more than one) told them they didn't have the staff in house to properly scope the project. When Lawson was made aware of this, she simply gave more money to Oracle to provide contractors who could scope it for them. NOW she's claiming it's the state's fault for not scoping... MY HEAD HURTS.

Read a great article on it a couple months ago and am struggling to find it :/

And your job pays you over and over again for the work you did your first day on the job? Or do they expect you to keep producing additional work to get paid?

This isn't a salary cut, it's the reality for everyone with a job. You don't get paid indefinitely for something you did 50 years ago. There's no reason that copyright should be any different.

Was accused, not convicted, but why let the details get in the way. Copyright has become bastardized to the point of exhaustion. Copyright's original intent was to allow the creator to make money off their works for a set period of time at which point the works would become public domain. As with everything else in this country, the right and powerful decided that we really shouldn't actually have public domain, and convinced congress to just keep extending copyright's time limit to the point where it's basically non-existent. By the time something hit public domain these days, it's so irrelevant so as to be basically worthless in almost all cases.

Copyright never should've been allowed to last longer than the creator's lifetime (and quite frankly I think the original 14 years plus another 14 was more than enough). Anything more is simply a bastardization of the original intent. You *MIGHT* be able to convince me that it should be extended to cover their spouse's lifetime for the rare circumstance in which an artist dies prematurely, but outside of that... it's all a corporate money grab.

Your point being what? The wireless carriers today manage to provide service with the bands chunked up. Allowing more bands from a single tower simply means all those devices are consolidated onto less physical infrastructure, saving everybody money in the process.

So just like with wireline, why is this even a problem? Why don't we have a the government owning/controlling the entirety of the spectrum and have service providers simply provide service across ALL bands? Why are we chunking it up for private companies to "own"? It would seem to me that if all spectrum were available, everyone would win. More devices per tower, fewer towers needed, more competition in the marketplace. The simple fact that you have to be able to purchase spectrum to even join the game means the end-game is yet another monopoly.

Nothing except ZFS, DTrace, crossbow, a fully featured SCSI target stack, and on solaris an extremely robust partitioning infrastructure. Here we are 9 years later and Linux still doesn't have a good answer.

Just spread cheese brine like they do in Wisconsin. This could be done with ANY milk or septic truck. They HAVE to have a couple of those around.

http://www.jsonline.com/newswatch/milwaukees-latest-antidote-to-icy-streets-cheese-brine-b9995766z1-223291751.html

While the agreement details are still secret, the rumor is that part of the 10-year licensing agreement between Google and Samsung included Samsung agreeing to cease developing it's own app store, UI overlay (touchwiz), and OS (tizen). They may have it out again in the future, but I doubt Google really cares if Samsung tries to go a different direction in 10 years. Android will be so entrenched they won't make any headway by then. And to be quite honest, I think Google WANTS Samsung to kill off everyone else. It will give them the leverage to demand they get consistent OS upgrades rather than the hodge-podge of versions they currently are stuck dealing with.

Ya, you have your history of events backwards. Samsung created Bada in 2010 not too long after Google started going after third parties who were including their apps without approval (read cyanognmod). Google acquired Motorola in 2011 AFTER Samsung started creating their own OS and their own ecosystem to compete directly with Google. Samsung continued down that path until this year, interestingly enough, just after the holiday season in which the Moto X started picking up steam. I'm guessing when Samsung saw VZW approve kitkat for the Moto X almost immediately after release, they saw how screwed they were going to be going forward. As a consumer, when your choice is Motorola with updates immediately after release and minimal bloatware, or Samsung who can be upwards of a YEAR later on VZW and an interface that you either love or hate, the choice is pretty easy. I can tell you I've personally steered at least 10 people away from Samsung and onto a Moto X after letting them play with my phone for 5 minutes and showing them that the spec sheet doesn't always tell the full story.

The Moto X was actually an outstanding phone. I dumped my gs3 for one. I think the real end-game here was getting Samsung back in line. Motorola phones were selling enough units to raise alarms at Samsung. It's not like Samsung was in any danger of losing their stranglehold on android phone sales in the short term, but long-term with Google's backing it was only a matter of time until Motorola started taking significant chunks. End result: Samsung has supposedly agreed to dump it's custom UIs and custom applications and fully embrace the Play store and the Google ecosystem. It seems unlikely the timing is just a coincidence.

http://gigaom.com/2014/01/29/report-samsung-to-hold-the-touchwiz-on-future-android-devices/

So who is? He's the first candidate that gets touted when a libertarian talks about politicians who "get it".

But it's working so well for Russia...

I'm assuming Ron Paul isn't a libertarian then? Because he wants to eliminate the FDA and the EPA entirely. The private market will take care of pollution via a means of fines that would be imposed by... well I'm sure there will be private citizens who regularly test drinking water and then if they find any abnormalities track down who the offender is so they can be tried in a court of law by... some other rich person who wants to take them to trial. Right?

That's because the House budgets all included the elimination of the national healthcare mandate: that wasn't a legitimate budget, that was their way of claiming they were just looking for compromise.

That's the equivalent of a Democratically controlled House passing a budget that eliminates all military spending. I'm sure the Republican Senate would amend it and send it back rather than tell them to pound sand. Right?