Somebody broke joystick support in Yosemite. Of course, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense given how little Apple cares about joysticks in general.

And for further amusement, get a load of this. On this month's electric bill, there's yet another new fee entitled Four-Corners adjustment. What's that, you say? Well, because environmentalists in Washington have decided that coal is evil and the Four-corners electric generating plant is coal-fired, it is therefore evil and must be shunned. Is APS going to eat that cost? Hell no. This is on top of the so-called Environmental benefits surcharge. Oh, so I have to bend over because a lot of people believe that electricity generation is bad for the planet. Got it. So, what's going to happen if global warming *cough* I mean climate change turns out to be total b.s.? Am I going to get all that money back plus interest? Yeah, right.

What's even more ludicrous is that in the case of my warehouse, because it's metered for three-phase power, the cost of the meter is ten times the cost of a two-phase residential meter at over $30 a month even though I don't use three-phase power. What this means is that even though I don't use Netflix, I'm still going to have to pay for the infrastructure improvements to get Netflix.

Funny that you should mention shampoo. Many years ago, my father was renting space in a warehouse to store his RV. The majority of the warehouse was used as a shampoo bottling operation. The owner was showing all of this to my dad. As it turns out, there was this giant tank of shampoo and many boxes of different brand bottles. So the same stuff was being branded and priced differently.

But to the issue of classifying ISPs as a utility, once you do that, the whole thing becomes a political football. States have entities like the Corporation Commission whose function is to exert public control on the utilities. In theory anyway. These are elected officials. The utility comes along as whines and complains that they can't continue to operate unless they get a rate increase. Publicly, anyway. Behind closed doors, these rate increases have already been negotiated. The officials have been bought and paid for because, after all, they need to campaign to keep their jobs. Somebody has to pay for that.

Ultimately, the consumer might think that they're data rates aren't being impeded because a piece of paper says so but there is no way they can prove it to themselves. The ISPs aren't going to invest money in "infrastructure" unless they can recoup the investment and make more money than they did before. If a mandate comes down from some government bureaucrats to increase your download speed from 10MB/s to 20MB/s, they're going to get a rate increase. If a mandate comes down that they have to invest in rural internet access, they're going to get a rate increase in exchange. Personally, I'd rather Netflix users pay for their excess bandwidth.

A few years ago, Intuit released an "update" to Quickbooks for Macs. Upon installation, poof, there goes your entire partition table. Completely unrecoverable. In my case, I happened to be on a business trip and had to get my backup drive FedExed to me. Did Intuit offer to pay for that? Nope. Rat bastards.

Now, I'll grant you that Intuit doesn't seem to give a crap about the Mac but having switched over to the Windoze version of Quickbooks so I could get the Manufacturing edition features, I've come to the conclusion that they don't give a crap about their Windoze customers either given their track record of ignoring enhancements or additions to core functionality and instead trying to push people onto the web.

So, if a company doesn't disclose a breach in 30 days, what happens? They get fined? By the government? Who gets the money? What does a punitive regulation solve? What if the company doesn't themselves find out about the breach for 30 days?

AKA Alpha Males.

People who are able to bullsh*t others into believing their bullsh*t will always trump those with real intelligence and experience who try desperately to pull back the curtain on the "wizard."

Everyone knows (or should know) that the web was built on WTF-8 which explains a lot.

Man, the B.S. is getting deep in here.

Good for them but I highly doubt the phrase "Yahoo it" will catch on.

Look at your bill again. Here's what my APS electric bill looks like for this month for my warehouse space:

Customer account charge $4.16
Delivery service charge $3.33
Demand charge - delivery $0.00
Environmental benefits surcharge $0.97
System benefits charge $0.24
Power supply adjustment* $0.12
Metering* $34.82
Meter reading* $2.24
Billing* $2.48
Generation of electricity* $5.50
Federal transmission and ancillary services* $0.34
Federal transmission cost adjustment* $0.21
LFCR adjustor $0.52
Taxes and fees
Regulatory assessment $0.11
State sales tax $3.14
County sales tax $0.42
City sales tax $1.12
Franchise fee $1.10

Cost of electricity with taxes and fees $60.82. Note that the actual cost of generating the electricity is less than 10% of the total bill.

Wrong. That's because the phone company was DE-regulated thus allowing competitors to break the stranglehold AT&T had. Even so, every time the Feds decide to add a new regulation in the hopes of sticking it to the phone company, they end up tacking on yet another fee to your bill.

We're seeing the effects of regulation now in the healthcare world. Private practices are going the way of the dodo and/or are requiring patients pay an annual fee only so they can afford to pay the paper pushers.

Big deal. Would you dredge up and dispose of the USS Arizona? Would you sell off Gettysburg to real estate developers? The point is that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. The Manhattan Project has tremendous historical significance and peaceniks need to pull their heads out of the sand and remember why we went to such lengths.

You, dear consumer, will be the one taking it in the shorts. Don't believe me? Take a very close look at ANY of your utility bills and tell me how many fees you are paying that have nothing to do with the thing you are using (the actual electricity, the actual water, etc). ISPs are going to pass the cost on to the customers. Period. Oh, and they're going to have to hire bunchteen thousand paper pushers to deal with the regulations so you'll be paying their salaries and benefits. And you can kiss the small, local ISPs goodbye because they don't have the resources to deal with this.

Imagine being able to print reproductions of exotic or extinct wood e.g. tiger or fiddleback maple.