Thats whats been wrong all along - its been bugging me. We in the West have been working on "Survival of the Fattest", having missed the typo. Sheesh.
Fittest, who woulda thunk it :P

We had to switch to self-service everything because those shitty jobs you describe started getting paid a reasonable amount of money, and many good jobs were unionized and the unions spoke up for their workers to get them decent working conditions, a pension to retire on etc. Because paying for the labour of things cost more (as it should have) the slave-labour jobs disappeared and we did more ourselves to ensure that the cost of the things we paid for were kept down. If you want to be treated like Royalty you still can almost anywhere - it just costs a lot.
The problem is that all a long the rich kept getting richer and have gradually been paying less and less taxes. Now they have engineered the destruction of many of the unions, so they can pay shit wages again and continue to get rich on the backs (and bodies) of the workers who make it possible for them.
Corporations now rule the world in effect. Oh sure, they allow us the illusion of government and democratic elections but they control the strings behind the puppets we elect, and the government works to their benefit before ours mostly. Its not all cut and dried, not all back and white of course, its many subtle shades of grey too, but the welfare of the average person is not the prime motivation for the elected governments of the age. If it ever was it certainly isnt now.
Increased reliance on automation is going to put even more people out of work. If they can automate the industrial side, whats to say they can't automate the service side too? Then where do the ex-members of the middle class go to find work?

Well there is the little fact that the Apple products are easier to use, generally more reliable, very user friendly, have a great UI design, and are of course extremely stylish. If you are willing to settle for things which okay to use, mostly reliable, somewhat user friendly, have an ok UI design with very little thought put into it by comparison, and can be considered stylish as long as you haven't seen the comparable apple product, then yeah there seems to be only the 1 leading company.
I have an iMac desktop, it dualboots into OS/X and Win7. There is no comparison between the two operating systems in my opinion. OS/X wins pretty much hands down on every category except "Runs the games I play" which Win7 wins hands down, and is thus installed on my box. If OS/X ever becomes the popular OS to develop for that MS Windows is at the moment, I will never look at Windows again.
I have owned an iPod Touch, again very nice kit. Not at all comparable to anything else.
I have a Blackberry Playbook, my wife has an iPad. She has apps available to do all sorts of fascinating things, many of them free. There's probably half a million of the suckers available. The Playbook has apps, none of which do anything remotely interesting to me, and they number at least a hundred or so. As a piece of kit, the Playbook is great, but the support and the apps available are just plain sad.
I have a Samsung Galaxy S smart phone. Its not bad unless you have played with an iPhone of course. The Samsung works but the UI is poorly thought out IMHO. I am constantly frustrated by strange choices in the way it works. I seldom feel that way about Apple products.

I am not a fanboy, but I am not blind either. Apple's products work very well, and when compared to their competition, the price really isn't all that out to lunch despite the naysayers. My iMac desktop is 5+ years old, and the only thing I have needed to fix on it so far is the hard drive which I had replaced. I can't think of a single one of the many PCs I owned in the past that lasted 5 years without having had to have multiple things replaced and/or repaired.

I would modify that to read:

WW2 - Finished by the USSR, with US/UK/Commonwealth assistance.

And you are ignoring the horde of instances where the US meddled in other countries affairs to suit various corporate interests and/or invaded those countries (most of Central America for instance).

Or lose the horde of Batshit-Crazy (tm) Born-Again Christians who think that only by supporting Israel at all costs and ensuring that the Middle East is a continuous battlefield can they ensure the 2nd Coming of Jesus and the Apocalypse they are all dying to have happen - and get some sane, intelligent, and non-religious politicians who will try to do things for the electorate, rather than do things for themselves. I know thats asking the moon of course. I can only think of a handful of politicians I believe implicitly when they open their mouths. The rest I believe have agendas, and I am probably wrong about those I trust :(

And you can just bet that those contractors are giving the military the "best" deal they could too, not padding it any way. Trim those costs down a tad then :P
As for Blackwater, I am just fine if all of their employees get shipped to the moon - one way :) (I don't believe in private armies)

out of the defense budget, and go do both. The US is already the dominate military power on the planet, bar none, so I am sure they could trim the military budget by a tiny percentage without anyone who doesn't wear a brass hat noticing. Whats the saying? "A billion here, a billion there and pretty soon your talking real money?"
Its nice to think that private enterprise will provide the means to get there (for whatever values of "there") but although its happening, its not happening overnight. NASA needs to continue doing it all themselves until business is established in orbit - otherwise we waste a few decades waiting for it. As well, think of all the scientific discoveries we might make during this moon mission series. The last one turned out pretty well didn't it?

Good luck trying to push reform of the way Corporations are defined in the modern world. Since they (collectively) have about as much power or more as the governments they dominate, that is never going to happen. You are however correct: Its corporations and their power, along with their better-than-citizen rights that are the root of the problem in the modern world.
All we have at the moment in the Western world is the illusion of democracy for the most part, in reality we are becoming an almost feudal system with corporations taking on the role of the nobility. Not quite yet, but getting there - when private corporations have their own police forces and collect the taxes directly then we are there.

Go find your old SWG install disks. Visit the SWG EMU at swgemu.com and play SWG as of patch 14.1 :)

Well, its in beta, so there is only the 1 server (Basilisk) plus a test server, there is no Space content, the themeparks are only in development at the moment (Rebel and Jabba's are running I believe), Creature Handler isn't working, neither is Shipwright, Bio Engineer and there are no Jedi at all yet (some will see this as a bonus).
The game is playable though. Its legal, and its free. You do need the old install disks and some patience. If you are a C++ developer they are looking for volunteers to work on the code :)

www.swgemu.com

As bad as Sony was and is, Verant was even worse when I played EQ. Patches would arrive with zero warning and completely change a class or some other aspect of the game. No notes, no warning, and often no logic behind changes that was apparent. Sony was actually an improvement on things. Admittedly it was early in the world of MMOs so things were less polished but it was very frustrating.

As for shutting down COH when it was a viable game, its beyond me what their thinking must have been. The game was playable, had good crowds playing it all the time, and was turning a predictable profit every month. All they had to do was have the willpower to maintain or expand it. I played it from beta right through to its 5th year steadily, then periodically after that. It had the best group combat dynamic of any of the dozen or so MMOs I have played. Brilliant design in all regards IMHO.

Also, if there is little or no market, there is little or no incentive to try to smuggle an item into a country. It is demand driven really. Why take tremendous risks just to increase your stockpile of items you can't sell ?

Which lets me post one of my favorite quotes (although I can't remember who to attribute it to):

"Computers have enabled more people to make more mistakes, faster than any other human invention - with the possible exception of Tequila and Handguns"

or something to that effect :P

Except that Netflix (just like the BBC service offering their shows) hasn't studied the usage patterns of its customers.
They often offer only 1 season, or sometimes a few seasons of a popular show but they never offer the whole thing unless the series is long dead it seems.
When my wife and I want to watch a series, we will go through it from beginning to end. If its on Netflix (or the far superior but very limited apple BBC app), then its a no brainer. I am quite happy with Netflix generally but I get very irritated when they offer say 6 out of 10 seasons, but fail to offer the other 4 seasons at all. If they want to offer something they had better be prepared to offer the whole thing.
Because the moment we run out of seasons on netflix its time to find the rest of the series. Usually we can get it at the library, but if not, then it might just be bittorrent time. In effect the 6 seasons offered with 4 missing provide an incentive to go download whats missing. If they provided it, no one would worry about downloading it when they would just watch the Netflix version.
The BBC tends to be worse about this than Netflix even. I watched the pilot of an excellent show called Red Cap. They offered the pilot only. The rest of the series was not to be found, nor the second season. Off to the torrent sites - only to find its not available there either.

This is /.
Many of the people here would have to *start* taking showers first before they could possibly *stop* :P