How is this different from corporate accounting? Most businesses budget for the long term based on projected earnings. If those earnings don't come through for whatever reason, they end up with budget deficits.

You won't be prompted for your username/password if you are already logged into your email.

And I believe if you are prompted for your username/password it will be by your e-mail provider, not by Facebook.

Those people don't just live here, they run businesses which create jobs. If they leave because they feel over-taxed, their businesses (and the jobs they create) will leave with them.

In world war II, we racked up a massive debt planning to pay it off once the war was over. There was a clear objective that, once met, would end the need for debt. No such objective exists today. We've been running deficits consistently for decades, and nobody can say when it will end. That's what makes this debt distressing to me, not that it's particularly bad as a percentage of GDP

for a steady economy, we need to get back to the higher taxes on the rich, like the 70%-90% on the highest tax brackets which were helping us pay down the WW-II debt consistently over 35 years until Reagan took office.

After WW-II much of the world was in ruins and trying to rebuild, but the US had industrial resources and a work force ready to produce. We could tax 70%-90% because there wasn't anywhere else you could go to run a successful business and get taxed less. The world has changed since then. If we tried to tax 70%-90% today there are dozens of countries around the world that would quickly become more appealing to those in the highest tax brackets. We've already lost most of our manufacturing industry, soaring tax rates would almost certainly cause more industries to pack up and leave.

The "balanced budget" was a political device. They claimed to have a surplus, but that was only true if you ignored intra-governmental holdings. The public debt, where the government sells treasury bonds to non-government entities, actually went down for a couple of years. What they swept under the carpet was the rising intra-governmental holdings; money from social security payments was being used to fund government programs. They considered that to be one branch of the government loaning money to another branch of the government, so they claim it wasn't really debt (conveniently ignoring the fact that they're still going to have to pay it back eventually).

If you really want this program on your phone then Android is open enough to let you install it, but you'll have to get it from somewhere other than Android Market.

This is the real difference between Android and iOS. I do believe the android market is more open; they're more forthcoming regarding what policies will disqualify an app, and their limitations are less strict. But even if this weren't the case and the android market had the exact same policies as the iOS app store, Android as an operating system would still be more open because it allows you to install apps that aren't in the market.

H.264 may be eternally free for streaming, but not for encoding or decoding. Companies that want to encode video with H.264 to stream on their site still have to license the encoder. Browser vendors that want their browser to decode H.264 still have to license the decoder on a per-browser basis. So you can stream video that you've already got in H.264 to people with browsers that support H.264, but that hardly solves the other issues.

Yeah, I should have RTFA. From the summary I got the impression that this was mentioned once or twice, or perhaps hidden on the terms of use site that nobody would read. If it's in red letters on every page you visit it seems less likely that "reasonable expectations" would hold up.

I'm definitely not a lawyer, but from a quick look at contracts by adhesion on Wikipedia it doesn't look like this would hold up. One of the components they mention is

If the term was outside of the reasonable expectations of the person who did not write the contract, and if the parties were contracting on an unequal basis, then it will not be enforceable

Since a typical user wouldn't expect a site without a paywall to sue them for viewing more than one page, and the user had no say in the terms of the agreement, it sounds like it would run afoul of that element of contracts by adhesion.

That's crap.

If you buy an Android phone you get a good, straightforward user experience without having to do any kind of hacking on it. You have an easy to use app market with lots of apps which is loosely monitored to make sure it doesn't have malware (without having draconian yet poorly defined rules about what's acceptable and what's not). It comes with some apps that almost everyone is going to want, and has a simple mechanism for finding more apps to fit your needs. The experience you get with an out of the box Android phone is similar to what you get with an out of the box iPhone.

If you're happy with that experience, you're in good shape. There's nothing else you need to do. With iOS, if you're unhappy with that experience you're pretty much out of luck. With Android, the operating system will step out of your way. You have the opportunity to screw things up, but you also have the ability to do things the phone manufacturer never imagined (or perhaps, doesn't approve of).

I don't buy the argument that additional freedom is a bad thing.

What are you talking about? And who modded this insightful?

We're not talking about a civil rights issue, we're talking about an option you can turn on or off in your browser. It's not a problem for most people, so they don't turn it off. It's there to be turned off if you like. We're not even talking about getting rid of that option, we're just discussing sane defaults.

Can you give a decent explanation of how this relates to police brutality?

For most TV networks, advertisers are their customers and viewers are their product. It appears to be a profitable business model, but I think consumers are starting to get sick of that mindset. This is one of the reasons I really like Netflix. They may not have every movie or TV show ever made on watch instantly yet, but they treat me like I'm their customer, rather than a product they're selling to someone else.

That was my thought. Microsoft can't very well indemnify against injunctive relief. If Windows mobile violates a patent, and the patent owner is granted an injunction, the manufacturers would still find themselves unable to ship phones with the OS.

But ripping discs isn't really the target here. There are already tools available which can rip BluRay discs in software, without having to read a disc and play them over the wire in real time. More practically, this is targeted at streaming video sources such as video from your cable company, or perhaps for ripping from your cable company's DVR. Those streams are seldom (never?) higher than 1080i or 720p at standard frame rates, so 30fps in real time gets the job done.

I'm not saying 720p at 59.94 is worthless, but 30fps would support the majority of use cases.

It may be a legacy format, but there's a lot of content still available for it, and I can't imagine the cost of supporting it is that high. I have a TV tuner which does on board DivX encoding, and I have about a terabyte of (legally recorded) TV shows. Even if most of the people who would take advantage of DivX decoding are pirates, why should the hardware manufacturer care if it helps sell units? As far as I'm concerned, any media center device which doesn't support such a common legacy format isn't worth considering.