Well, to be fair to Jobs, it's been scientifically proven that something on an Apple product is inherently 70-80% more Awesome (or is that iAwesome?) than the same thing on a competitor's product. So, by only marking iBooks up 50%, it's still more Awesome per dollar than what you're getting on a Kindle!

What's up with the front page troll post? Worldnutdaily and Rawstory as sources? Really?

Care to detail that a bit? I have a Pre, though I'm not a palm fanboy by any means. I've had it more or less since it launched and it seems to be a pretty solid little device so far as my experience has gone. The browser is good, the GPS is handy, Wifi works, 3G data speeds seem to be fine, there are a fair number of apps available for it (and palm seems to be fine with grey-market community apps), it's easily hackable, the UI is great, though the battery life is mediocre at best (though my understanding is that this is hardly unique to the pre wrt smartphones in general). The only issue that I've had is that the little cheapy USB cover fell off, not great, but hardly a huge issue (I've certainly not smashed/shattered it, so perhaps our use cases are a bit different). So, given that, how is this a POS?

Wow, that was quick. Blame "environmentalists" for foiling plans to "release the pressure"? The fact that we don't have anywhere near the technology to impact something of this scale and depth shouldn't matter apparently. Perhaps you need to stop listening to fox"news" so much.

<quote><i>you can't use money you don't have to make more money.</i> <p>
Unless you're the Feds.</p></quote>

Actually, most business investment is done with borrowed money. That, and our financial industry is mostly based on gambling with borrowed/other people's money.

Last I checked, Gore wasn't advocating forced austerity or any such, he's pushing for us to move toward limiting/eliminating the use of carbon based fuels. He does have an older and large house, but spends the extra to be sure that the electricity that he's using is from non-carbon sources. Apparently, his utility gives that option. Heck, he could use solar/wind/geothermal, nuclear, fusion based energy to heat his backyard during winter and that'd not be in conflict with what he's advocating.

Since he's not proposing that we live like monks in hovels, I don't see how him not doing so has any bearing on this. Also, there's quite a bit of money to be made by smart capitalists in renewable energy; it's entirely compatible with capitalism. The problem that we have presently is that the energy market is broken in that it doesn't take the external costs that carbon based fuels add; that's what cap and trade attempts to do. It's intended to harness the ingenuity of the capitalist market to help solve these problems.

So, the "scandal" here is that his wife works for Golman Sachs and that pharma stocks are overpriced? Somehow mandating that healthcare workers get vaccinated against a new flu is somehow a huge conspiracy to profit for them how? I recognize that the tin-foil-hat brigade has kicked onto high alert over H1N1 vaccination, but this is stupid. This is front page material how?

<sarcasm>
Wow, industry boosterism from the wall st journal, what a shocker.
</sarcasm>

I suspect that we have a fairly large body of data on the creativity and success of those who aren't schooled given that it was the default mode of 'learning' for most of history, and heck probably still is in many poorer places. I'd suspect that we'd have come out of the middle ages much quicker if our supercharged, hypercurious unschooled masses, untainted by school, were 'unschooling' so awesome at harnessing our innate potential. Also, I suspect that life in general is pretty good at crushing one's innate curiosity given a bit of time, and with school they'll have to tools at least to acquire, understand, and work with knowledge that doesn't have immediate payoff.

s/Ob/Os/g

Actually, Microsoft reported last year that they pay more like 25% and that's probably inflated since it's usually noted in the context of Ballmer threatening to move offshore, so this is their "high" number to use as a club. That they don't actually pay anywhere near the statutory rate isn't a surprise as essentially no companies actually do. In fact the effective tax rate of our corporations is a good bit lower than most industrialized nations when exemptions and manipulations to hide profit are factored in.

A good outline of effective corporate versus statutory tax rates if one is interested

A mentioned and noted earlier, our corporations aren't suffering higher effective taxation rates here than other industrialized nations and in many cases they're lower. Ultimately, if our infrastructure and the quality of our workforce suffer, it doesn't matter what the tax rate is, they won't locate or stay here with the skill jobs that we want. That's what taxes are for. I understand that corporations are amoral by nature and will try to externalize every cost that they're able to since their guiding force is maximizing profit. As such, they're motivated to make sure that paying for the police force, roads, education and the like is "someone else's problem".