well, that one's easy: Liberal Guilt (as I have labelled it here, in capitals) is derived from other people's collective actions or inactions and not on the actions or inactions of the person feeling guilty... Conservative Guilt, then, would be derived from what the individual feeling guilty does or doesn't do. It's a pretty consistent pattern on both fronts. One can have both, although not usually on the same topic.

Anon, Anon C., you should have posted non-anon.

/+5 cometh for thee (or something like that)

who's "we", in your statement exactly? The company building the datacenter and infrastructure is owned by the Navajo Nation.

Go swallow your Liberal Guilt for a while and join the rest of us in reality. We have cake.

read the parent without the word "additionally" in the third sentence; it's the same idea, and probably shouldn't have been characterized quite the way it ended up being.

It triggers the learning center of the brain BECAUSE it forces you to utilize short-term memory and summarize ideas in your own way.

I disagree - I've been using a Surface Pro since launch, and I love it. It has replaced my desktop computer and my Apple laptop that I had kept for reasons I've completely forgotten now. It may not be for you, but for my needs (mobile IT consultant for medium-sized businesses), it's perfect. Windows on a tablet DOES work, most assuredly. (Note, I don't mean RT, since that's mostly a reply to iOS anyway and not a target for desktop replacement)

There are workarounds to this already in use. Bitinstant is one that promises trusted "instant" transactions for bitcoin with specific vendors, although they're reworking their website right now. Others will follow. It'll be a matter of dealing with trusted big-name transaction clearinghouses that settle bitcoin transactions in real-time between their own customers while also transmitting to the network for inclusion in the chain later.

I was tolerant of your posts until you started changing other people's words in your quotes so as to attack them. I gave you the benefit of the doubt on the trolling accusations, but you slipped up pretty big once you went down that road. The sad thing is that once you're outed as a troll, you lose your troll powers (at least, for the current thread.) Looks like you lost this one. Better luck next time, I guess.

You speak as if all companies are equally bad. Somehow, I think you're either young or more sheltered than you believe you are.

prior to widescreen, I was forced to buy non-widescreen monitors. Because the manufacturers gave me no alternative other than standard aspect ratios. It was sad that those decisions were forcing developers to design their software for such a limited space (desktops and the programs on them) to work around the limitations of that particular screen ratio, even for people who would have preferred to buy widescreen instead. And then, because the software was designed to fit, it was used as an argument on why the aspect ratio should never change.

pfft, you think I read the article?

Ha!

Data is not a utility. Data is unique and can't easily be found other places in short order like:

Backup generator
HAM radio/cellular
Using cash (or bitcoin)
Your in-house accountant (not really sure how Accounting is related to "cloud" services)
Using cash again
Your own well
(Ok, I grant it's difficult to refine your own gas, but I hope you get the point I'm making)...

There's a marked difference between having a utility for generic products and having access to the unique data you generate in real-time. You can't just go to the supermarket and grab a couple 5-gallon bottles of your email from last week, but you sure can get water off the shelf in a pinch.

"offsite" is no more protected than the facility it's ultimately located in. I was shopping for local colo facilities once and went to a (very small) MCI facility that was in the basement of a steam plant. A steam plant. As in superhot water running through overhead pipes.

I asked the guy giving me a tour, "what happens when the steam plant has a leak and all this water condenses and suddenly fills the basement?"

He stopped in his tracks, looked up at the pipes, and went sheet white. Apparently, nobody ever thought of that before. The tour ended right then.

My point is: if your local building is built to your specifications, and you specify sufficient protection against loss of data, your servers are just as safe at home as they might be at some "offsite" location, especially if you roll the dice to go with some unknown setup in some unknown location where you're trusting some unknown admin to take care of some unknown hardware configuration. I guess some people like the bliss that comes from not knowing, and thus being unable to worry about those things.

I have a Surface Pro, and am using it right now to type this, in fact. It works great. Battery is fantastic, speed is surprisingly good, OS is very stable, and once I calibrated the touch screen for my preferred input angles, all was happy in radiumsoupland. As a long-time IT pro and current freelance IT consultant, I love it. I do not need a second, but if they went on sale for half price, I'd buy at least one more for my wife, and possibly another for the kids. The Windows 8 touch interface is just an interface (and is optional), and the underlying Windows architecture is largely the same, so in my observation, all the bellyaching about it being a horrible OS is coming either from those with a preconceived hatred for MS experiencing full-on confirmation bias, or folks trying to make a name for themselves in the blog space by "daring" to go against Microsoft.

All this negative press has people wary about it. The device itself is fantastic in my experience. The "failure" of the Surface is a marketing problem, not a technical one. If they can fix the marketing aspect, the Surface (and subsequent devices) do indeed have a future, and a very bright one indeed.

to be fair, I don't think the Libertarian position is that money is backed by debt (indeed, precious metal coins with USD face values are valuable in their own right), it's that the Federal government's issuance of debt is backed only by debt (its promise to pay), which is absolutely true. Not all spenders of US Dollars are the Federal government, and not all USD transactions are debt transactions, so not all debt issued in US Dollars is unbacked by assets. Big difference from what you insinuated, there.