The issue is that all banks were shitty and risky and credit unions were extremely strict. You throw some Reagan era trickle down policy into the mix, deregulate banks, and artificially raise the price of property over the course of 20 years to the point where people have to go through banks because the credit unions realize the risk of giving out loans in a shaky market and bam! That's basically what happened. And the banks went bankrupt and we had the option of a) letting the banks collapse and forcing the American population into such a strict loan situation that people would have killed the real estate market or b) bailing them out to relieve the stress on the American public that would otherwise no longer be able to sell their property or buy new property. We picked b. The issue is, we picked b without imposing regulations that restricted how they used their free tax money.

That's why we need to impose rules upon the banking system. Capitalism is broken and encourages wealth to sharply rise to the top instead of having a more balanced distribution. When the people with the wealth are also the people making the rules, it's time to reboot the system. Unfortunately a reboot isn't an option, so imposing rules until the situation naturally takes care of itself is the only reasonable fix.

I'm all about small government and giving rights back to states, but we've got to clean house before redistributing power.

Or how about giving the states back power as initially intended and keeping the central government around for social programs, diplomacy, the post office, upholding constitutional rights, and settling disputes among states. The only reason we have such a centrally focused government now is due to wars, domestic and foreign.

The way we're set up now, no progress can be made due to our centralized government and corruption. I'm sure we'd be seeing a major redistribution of the population right now if the government was primarily state run, as it's a lot easier to vote for what you want by moving to areas with other like minded individuals.

This one is simple, guys. Google will sell an Android license to anyone. Apple and RIM make their own hardware. They have a stake in the reputation of their company. Consumers are smart enough to realize that a Google phone failing is not Google's fault, it's the fault of the manufacturer of the hardware. It's giving the manufacturer's a bad name, not Google.

There's plenty of junky Android phones with junky hardware on the market. That being said, there's some bleeding edge Android phones out there with incredible hardware. It goes back to the old saying, "You get what you pay for."

I imagine they're being mined because someone wants to have the biggest nerd wang. Like in videogames where people have to have the best gear to prove a point.

Bitcoin had a heyday about a year ago but it's a total joke anymore.

You can complain about WebOS not having the SPECIFIC app you want, and you can complain about a few niggly things it doesn't support, but honestly...the OS just about does it all, and really well to boot. I miss the days of my WebOS phone where I had a device that didn't crash (Android crashes a lot more often), didn't have weird audio issues (Android seems to), and I could easily kill off tasks (still have to use Advanced Task Killer in Android). No one beats WebOS's multitasking/memory management and ability to have a stupid amount of web pages and apps open at once.

I had a WebOS phone for 2 years, does that count?

Why would you want to cripple your beautiful TouchPad with a version of Android not designed for a tablet? Unfortunately I wasn't able to snag one myself, but WebOS, despite it's faults, is a beautiful OS. Sure, you don't get some of the apps that you do with Android, but for most practical uses WebOS is going to blow Android 2.3 out of the water.

You're missing the point. Seasme Street is a PBS show that's supposed to be public for everyone. It's great that it's on Netflix, but it's horribly sad that Sesame Street isn't available free for all these days. With unemployment and poverty rates at an all time high, I'm sure there's thousands of children who would benefit from the show who's parents are unable to provide their household with cable, netflix, or high speed internet.

With PBS stations around the nation closing left and right, it's a shame that the ever growing population of people who are ditching their cable for OTA broadcasting won't have Sesame Street for their children.

Of course they're editors. They edit articles to have completely different meanings...

Yeah, /. editors have a real knack for reading headlines, ignoring the article, and making up their own headline based on assumptions.

Microsoft really isn't that evil, guys. Their issue was (and they're getting better at it) that they take a grapeshot approach to growing the business. Throw out 100 products, see which ones people use, then push those hard. It's not like the old days when MS was trying to lock you into everything and was playing dirty pool. If you want to give anyone that title, hand it over to Apple. The only difference between Apple and MS of old is that Apple doesn't use the grapeshot approach, they just pick one thing and force it down the industries throat.

If there was, I never heard about it. And if there was, those were probably unscrupulous sites you shouldn't have been doing business with anyway.

I do know that I saved 25% on multiple purchases, though. I got some really killer deals.

I wonder if Bing Cashback payouts are included in the losses? If you frequent any deal sites, they gave away a metric crapton of cash trying to push Bing as a shopping search engine. I'm sure they just considered this marketing. In all fairness, it worked to some degree. While Google is still my most used search engine, if I'm on a computer that's set up to default to Bing...I'll actually use Bing. It's a good search engine and I wouldn't have known that had I not participated in so many Bing Cashback deals. I still prefer Google, but if I'm just looking for quick results, why even bother to switch over if Bing's already loaded?

I agree, I think the real future of MMOs is going to be the Guild Wars model. Its sustainable for the developer and keeps players playing by not beating up their wallet. It also encourages the developer to pump out expansions and not put out a game until it's properly balanced. Borderlands was a great example of this as well. It was B2P, yet came out with 4 quality expansions in a years time. While the expansions were smaller compared to most MMO expansions, they also only cost $10 each. I have a feeling that a lot of people bought the expansions without even playing them, just because they liked the game and the expansions were cheap.

I don't think the $15/m model is sustainable anymore. A greatly reduced rate ($5/m) or B2P is definitely where things are going to have to head or else the MMO market will deteriorate. People only have the budget for one $15/m game...but I'm sure they'd buy and play multiple MMOs if they were based on the B2P model.