like they walked away from Atari going 'huh, video games are dumb'.

Are you referring to the early 1980s video game crash? After Atari made TONS AND TONS AND TONS of money? .. and there were tons of really junky cartridges being put out.

but I still have to recharge my phone every night, and a decent range in an electric car will still set you back to the tune of nearly $100K.

Your phone nowadays does way more than the one you used 10 years ago... and if you want to get a flip phone with a long battery time, you still can.

You are apparently one of the VERY few people who needs to drive a LONG distance every single day. Even removing the subsidy, you can get electric cars that easily do double the average commuter distance for 1/4 of your stated price. (Subtract $10K if you count subsidies for some states, e.g. CA + federal.)

Don't know why they don't want to keep the poor and middle class from getting health insurance...

Don't you mean: "Don't know why they want to keep the poor and middle class..."?

If so, I'll answer: I don't want to keep them from anything THAT THEY PAY FOR (or get as a side effect of their job, etc.).

You probably mean PS4, but I filled up my stock PS3 drive with various games bought on the PSN sales... and I would say I'm a "prefers disk" person.. but when a game gets down to $5, I'll get it on PSN.

So eventually I'll probably replace my PS3 drive with a bigger one.

Also, backward compatibility only supports a handful of games.

Is that part referring to the newly announced Xbox One backwards compatibility?

If so, didn't they announce a *hundred* to start with, with hundreds more to come? Even if you totally discount the "hundreds more" part (don't count on vaporware), that's likely to be 100 of the most popular games.

Seems like a win to me.. (and even though I already have far too many games I've already bought (cheaply) that I haven't finished, the backwards compatibility DOES make me curious about getting an Xbox One at some point -- to play the various Xbox exclusive games I've never been able to play.. even if they're "last" generation.) So their spin has piqued my interest, and I'll be paying attention to the backwards compatibility list!

No. In fact, to play a game (or actually get a "game"'s worth of content), it requires hundreds of dollars of DLC.

Ridiculous, it doesn't require that. Just wait 6 months to a year (there's plenty of games to play in the meantime), and the game'll fall to $20 with all of the DLC included.

Heck, I got the Mass Effect Trilogy for $5 in one of the PSN sales.. (No, I'm not one of the people who pays for the continuous account.)

At least MS isn't as bad as Apple where the literally force you to buy new hardware along with the new O/S (Ipad 1 anyone?)

Huh? Your "all that embedded technology" comment likely refers to *old hardware* too. It's (likely) not that they're trying to continue to run XP on completely new hardware... They're trying to run it on whatever ancient hardware (including weird custom peripherals)...

Which is JUST like keeping an original iPad running to run some old iOS app that doesn't run on the current OS on current hardware.

So your slam was completely inaccurate.

The only DHCP server I've "operated" is the one in my WiFi router... What failure modes are you talking about?

One could argue HFCS is worse than transfat and it is used everywhere.

[citation needed]

HFCS is sugar. Sugar is sugar.

The subsidies are bad. People eat too much of it. But (until some proof is provided), it apparently isn't any more unhealthful than any other sugars.. unlike trans fats, which truly were worse than what they replaced.

Most people don't lock their inside garage door and the bad guys know this.

Citation needed.. Really?? I basically always lock all of my doors when I walk in the door, and I only put the "basically" in there for the literally one or two times I've forgotten and freaked out in the morning when I realized I didn't lock it.

Because, as many other people have described, transferring $10K or more often can be indirect evidence of crimes going on (cash based businesses making tons of money, possibly illegally, and not reporting it).

Trillions of dollars have left the USA, some of it legally (Apple Computer) and some of it not.

Apple's earnings didn't "leave" the USA. They were earned outside the USA, and just haven't been brought into the USA.

Why are you bringing completely unrelated issues ("drug war") into it?

Plus, how can you have "a tax system that does not require tracking one's every financial transaction"? Rely on people's honesty? HAHAHAHA.. It sure hasn't worked so far. (Yes, even though there are audits and such, I'd say a lot of the tax system is the honor system.. if it weren't, there'd be far more automatic checking of the finances that ARE already tracked.)

IIRC, the original 1980's-era laws were only interested in transactions $10k or greater. The Patriot Act addiction/enhancements were to use semi-regular transactions of under $10k as 'structuring' (that is, to try and close the workaround of, say, withdrawing or depositing substantial amounts under $10k on a semi-regular or regular basis.)

Which seems like a perfectly logical law, since otherwise it's WAY too easy to evade (transfer $9999.99 each time).

some VC guys like Khosla...

("Like" above is used as "for example".)

I like Khosla, but some people, including a judge, didn't agree with him doing what he wanted with his property:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinod_Khosla#Martin.27s_Beach_dispute