Your first statement immediately made all other statements pointless. You immediately showed that you are unable to have an intelligent conversation and thus your view following the slurs are meaningless.

I remember reading somewhere that the purpose for the Surface was originally to force developers to stop dumping out crap devices. Sort of a "Hey, we're going to release a nice piece of hardware with our next OS, and if you can't drop something better than a netbook to compete with it then I guess we don't need you." MS depends on their hardware providers to step up and compete with the iPad and iPhone, and up until the Surface none of them tried to do that effectively (not that they had a great OS for it with win7, but it was fairly good for touch). Now we see a ton of hybrids, slates, and touchbooks that all run Win8 with pretty nice features.

I don't believe they are selling poorly. They've sold around 1 million units, and they've only been out for around 1 month. It sounds great to say "less than 1 million units in a quarter!" but the truth is they haven't even been out for a quarter, not even half a quarter. But lucky for slashdot plenty of people are around to make accusations based on incomplete information and an extreme bias against a company that actually produces something (unlike most of the posters).

Keeping hatred under control, perhaps. But even then you don't see anyone else patching pirated copies of their software 'for the good of everyone', even if it is for damage control.

So you had multiple copies flagged as unlicensed or as invalidly licensed, and they gave multiple warnings that the issue existed so you could fix the problem but your employees failed to notify you, and somehow that is MS being a dick? After that they help you fix the problem by giving you new CD keys and appologizing to you, and they still aren't nice to pirates? That makes no sense at all. Also, considering you started by saying it was half a dozen machines and followed it up by saying "most of our computers" I'll bet you're a small business which means they didn't exactly apologize because they had to, they did it because it was the right thing to do.

It seems to me that they were pretty damn fair the whole time.

Microsoft provides free updates to their OS even if you're using a copy they know is pirated. I'd say that has a bit of good will to it, especially since most people just get a "you may be a victim of piracy" warning and a black desktop background. When it comes to being polite to people who pirate or infringe on your work, MS isn't exactly slashing throats.

He isn't saying at once, he's saying on multiple consoles in the same house at different times. For example, you're watching a movie in the living room so your child/sibling/mate takes the game into their room to play it. This is a common and legitimate use of the game, but would require a household to buy multiple 'licenses' to be able to use the same disc just on different consoles.

The UK is a horrible example to use as a measurement of how long it takes for an area to change from 2Mbps to 100Mbps. The parts of the UK that have shifted are relatively dense and have a high HPM (homes per mile) to warrant the massive spending required to get equipment capable of supporting this kind of change. The physical topology of the UK when compared to other areas is miniscule (USA? India? China? Australia?) and relatively trivial. On the other hand, in the USA there are not only higher upgrade costs, but incentives to NOT upgrade (i.e. local monopolies for every city) since there is little or no competition for internet. Sure, AT&T 'competes' with cable and satellite, but you don't see cable companies overbuilding eachother (and you won't thanks to franchise contracts and gentlemen's agreements) to get your money. No, your options are normally between one of two evils and the pricing is usually about the same (especially since many small-medium size MSOs actually lease their connections from AT&T to save money).

Bandwidth won't be shooting up over night, or even in the next decade for most people. The price will double long before the bandwidth does.

Really, because the people I see clustering together based on race (by choice) weren't even alive 40 years ago, and the city I live in isn't segregated that way.

The tone you're setting is wrong, because it implies that all white people are racist and somehow dedicate every waking moment to ruining and isolating non-white people. In reality most of the wide array of cultures and ethnic groups in America tend to bulk together out of comfort and stability by choice, not because they are rounded up and placed in isolation camps. People want to spend time typically with other people that are like them which includes taste in art, skill set, and (tada) ethnic origin. You see this all over the world and it establishes unique and interesting subcultures.

On the note of racism though which is always applied to white people oddly, I'd like to point out that non-whites are equally racist and (unlike white people) are often more willing to admit it because there is no focus on shaming them for it. One example is the shooting in Florida where the man is half hispanic and half white. The man claims himself to be hispanic as his primary race, but the minute people started saying he was racist they started calling him white or "half white". They completely stripped him of his willfully claimed ethnicity, mostly because saying a white man hates black people will sell better than a hispanic hates black people.

You can't control if peanuts are or are not in a school at this level of allergy. I eat peanuts every morning at breakfast. If I had a child go to school with peanut residue on his hands and face (even a small amount) then the ban becomes effectively useless. In cases like these (and we're talking what, 1 in 100,000 schools at a generous estimate?) the kid shouldn't be in a public school. I'll put it this way: 150 people (adult and child alike) die in America annually from food related allergies, meaning you're more likely to die from a bee sting or a lightning strike. To put it in further perspective, 2,000 children drown every year: but we still have public pools.

I guess the kid can't go to a gas station, grocery store, or any other store for that matter as well since most places these days have bagged peanuts in the checkout isle. In which case, the kid probably shouldn't be in a public school and instead be homeschooled since they have an allergy that will mean they die just about everywhere they go. Since, as you said, they don't have to be removed from the bag for the peanut to kill the person.

The CDC uses a flawed method of measuring "obese" honestly.

This method of calculating BMI puts many people into the obese category that aren't actually at an unhealthy weight. Not only are normal people you see regularly at a 30BMI based on this type of scale, but this includes all people who do any form of highly competitive sport, body building, or other activity that would increase muscle mass or require you to store extra weight (including long distance swimmers). Based on BMI height/weight measurements, just about every single navy seal is fat.

I'd be fine with that actually, since I don't agree with mandatory health care. Affordable yes, but that is a hard thing to define and not something that can be guaranteed since the current system has a profit motive which also goes against the idea of affordable (since everyone MUST have it, why make it affordable?)

Actually when you go to rob someone taking a gun (since they can't legally own one) is the best move to both passify the home owner and / or murder them if needed. In these instances there won't be anyone to see you do it. The only person who did see you is now dead on the floor (or people if you murder a whole family). Criminals don't think "what is the minimal amount of defense I can take into this robbery", no they think "What can I do to make sure I get away without being caught". A gun pretty much ensures that when you tell the home owner to bury his face in the pillow while you tie him up, he does it.

This is why Americans don't want to give up weapons. We know the "kind criminal" is a myth, and we don't intend to be a victim while we hope that someone shows up to save us.