Because Republicans on the Supreme Court are consistently voting to make the situation worse. Prior to Citizens United, it was possible to at least attempt to address the corruption of the system via the elected legislature (or at least throw the bums out if they won't address it). Now, we apparently have to ammend the Constitution to remove a ridiculous manufactured equivalency between corporate bribery and free speech. It's silly to pretend that that's not the result of a significant difference between Republicans and Democrats. And the reason Republicans did it is that they think political money favors them - nothing more, nothing less. So, there's that difference too.

What sort of work are you in? Any sort of tech job should pay more than that. I made $15-$20 / hour delivering pizza in college. And than was in South Carolina in the '90s, when gas was 45 per gallon and a decent two bedroom apartment was under $400 / month.

I guess the world doesn't need a Russian Shuttleworth, eh?

And what's worse is that the offshore consulting firms stipulate in their contracts that they own any documentation that they 'create' - i.e. mostly transcripts of recorded 'knowledge transfer' sessions with the original U.S. workers that were asked to train the first round of replacements. Pretty quickly, the company ends up without any in-house knowledge of the guts of their own products, and without even ownership of what documentation exists. Of course, if the companies were doing things right, they would've had decent documentation to begin with, but that doesn't change the fact that the the only in-house product-specific expertise is in the heads of the 1 or 2 original developers retained as 'business analysts' - and no mechanism exists to produce a new generation of BA's when the originals eventually leave.

You can't inject an Elop without short-sighted capitalists running the company. Anybody with any tech background knows getting into bed with Microsoft (and hiring an ex-MS exec as your CEO counts) means getting absorbed or screwed. But your average short-sighted capitalist just sees Microsoft's money and thinks "this guy knows how to get me some".

The problem is that the Enterprise market is moving to the web. Most enterprise applications are database-centric, so a network connection is a must. At that point, the obvious advantages of server-based logic overcome any limitations of the browser-based frontend. If your application logic is going to be on the server - and be massive (as is the case in many enterprise apps), it makes no sense to build that logic on any specific desktop - or device - platform. A web browser provides you with a smart terminal interface that is implemented on every possible platform.

Historically, people built enterprise apps on the Windows desktop, because the web browser UI was simply not robust enough for serious data entry. Those apps were hellish to support in the field - and slow in accessing a remote databse, but they kind of worked. Well, those apps exist, and many will continue to be supported - and even developed. But what will not happen is rewrites of those apps as Windows universal apps - or any frontend-specific paradigm. It's too late for that. It might have had a chance if existing Win32 code could be easily leveraged, but full-out rewrites, not likely.

But I suspect that's not what Microsoft's after here. They want an in to mobile, and those relatively simple mobile apps, and games, etc that don't work well as web apps and are small enough to rewrite for various platforms (hell, most of em are already supporting iOS and Android ports). That could work, though it sure doesn't have to. Most of those apps are mobile only anyway, and they already work on 95% of devices (i.e. iOS and Android). The chicken and egg problem isn't going to go away just because Microsoft makes it easy to leverage your mobile app to the desktop. The only leverage Microsoft has is the reverse of that - desktop to mobile. And, like I said, desktop apps either already exist as Win32 code or will be written as web apps. So that leverage is minimal.

So enable the plugin for your KVM console's URL only. If that's not possible, there should be a browser extension that makes it possible.

I don't think so. Anti-microsoft bias focuses on their piss-poor products, or their business practices that make it harder for us to acquire good products.

You mean somebody with at least a basic understanding of economics?

Slavery was not a big issue for the seceding states. They were primarily concerned about tariffs. Their ships exporting cotton to Europe would come back full of manufactured goods, and Lincoln's proposed protective tariff would have hurt them significantly. The Corwin Amendment (the first attempt at a 13th amendment), which would have enshrined the legality of slavery in the Constitution, was well on its way to passage. Lincoln (who was far from an abolitionist) even entreated the states to pass it during his inaugural address. The Simpsons addressed this dumbed down look at the war quite well.

Virginia, the largest slave holding state, didn't secede until the Union attacked the Confederacy, and cited that as the reason.

The republican congress didn't even bother trying to pass the 13th amendment outlawing slavery until the it looked like the courts would overturn the emancipation proclamation as an illegal executive order (all those newly freed southern blacks were voting republican, and a return to bondage would cost the republicans their majority).

Could you put a little more socialist bias in your description of the events?

Why no complaints about the 50,000+ six-figure jobs Microsoft created in King County? Or about how Seattle and the Eastside have some of the best public schools on the planet, funded by property taxes, paid by homeowners who work for MS, Amazon, and Google among others? Or about how the technological innovation these companies, and others, provide, funded by the money they don't have to pay as taxes, has improved the abilities of humans around the world to access information and training?

I'm guessing that as a typical socialist, you're unable to understand the concept of opportunity cost (i.e. when taxes remove money from the private sector, the private sector has to cut R&D, expansion, or other expenditures). You probably think that a broken window is good for the economy, despite what Bastiat proved.