There was an FAQ on the Steam site I can't find anymore that addressed this issue. The prices for non-Valve games are not set by Valve/Steam but by the publishers. They almost always set them to be the same or more expensive than in stores because retail stores said they won't carry physical items if there is digital distribution that undercuts them on price.

why is my damn phone a different device when I plug it into a different USB port?

That is not the fault of Windows but of the device. USB devices are supposed to include a serial number. If they do then Windows can tell it is the same device plugged in elsewhere. If not then it has to assume there could be multiple devices. A second reason is a consequence of Windows backwards compatibility. Because there is a device name space (eg COM9 for serial like devices such as phones) each one has to be plumbed appropriately. If your phone was COM7 last time then you want it to be the same this time. Sure Windows could drop backwards compatibility, but that is one of the major reasons people use it - because their programs work and keep working. (Did you know that the Visicalc binary from 1982 works just fine on XP? It dates from before DOS even supported subdirectories!) There is a lot of interesting reading at Raymond Chen's blog including an article on this very topic as well as how important backwards compatibility is to Microsoft. Glad I only use Windows for gaming and to update my Blackberry's software. Twins :-)

I was paying them $240 a year for two subscriptions and am now paying them $11 for one subscription which won't be renewed when it runs out.

A car antenna cracked and they only sell replacements for exorbitant prices, so they fixed the issue by issuing a new radio (which includes antenna) and paying $80 towards installation. Their systems cancelled an account instead of noticing that a credit card expiry date had been updated to be current. They removed the station I listened to the most and explained that "customers like me" wanted that. They kept charging the wrong amount (too little) in this mess and on cancellation refunded the wrong amount (too much). This is despite pointing that out to them.

But it was most noticeable to me that they hate their customers so much they pay (presumably the lowest bidder) in another country to talk to them. (Of course that country doesn't have Sirius or XM service so the customer service reps have no experience of using the product in any way.)

Read Inside the AS/400 by Frank Soltis (or a more recent edition) and you can see exactly how they did all these things starting with the System/38 in the 1970s.

You don't have to have multiple address spaces. Heck even the first Linux kernels just used one huge address space with each process getting a 64MB chunk of that.

The System/38, AS/400 and whatever they call it this week has always had persistent "objects". They are named but they aren't files although if you squint hard enough you could claim they similar enough. Phantom is only 30 years late in claiming to be the first.

The advantage to using a VM is that code above the VM is insulated from changes below the VM. For example the very first System/38 program will still run today and in all that time they have gone through several generations of processors including changing from CISC to RISC and changing address sizes. You can still have C and assembler but they target a virtual environment rather than a concrete one with the OS doing the right thing at run time.

What about reports of forum threads and postings being repeatedly deleted? To me that was the worst aspect of this whole issue. And due to Seagate's slowness in responding many will assume the worst - eg deliberate hiding of the issue, hating of the customers, ignorance etc - when the actual cause appears to be overloading of the support process.

And how much effort do you think it takes to make a great text editor, compiler, kernel, windowing system etc?

The problem the PC industry has is "sharing". So called piracy is seen everywhere as well as considering the used market hostile to its interests. Open source/free software is the other way round. It is all about sharing. The more sharing that goes on, the easier it is to recruit more developers (people to improve the software via code, testing, documentation, art assets etc). That incredible army can bring about rapid improvement especially compared to a traditional development team (see cathedral and the bazaar).

The open source world also leads to better tools. Since volunteer time is precious, there is a big incentive to give them productive tools. You can see how several other commenters have been pointing at the tools and hoping for improvement and standardisation.

Things would have been better for the consumer if we'd adopted GSM at the outset like Europe ...

You are conflating several things. As a radio technology, GSM isn't too bad but CDMA is a lot better especially in such a sparsely populated county. The whole SIM card thing is nice but could be done with any underlying radio technology. The FCC should have mandated interoperability of SIM cards, not of how radio stuff is done. As an analogy, it is better to legislate car emission outcomes (eg quantities of pollutants per 1000 miles driven) than how emissions are reduced (catalytic converters, injection systems etc).