Without reading further than the title, my answer is:
too fucking often to be forgiven. The interest rate when I was born was 18%. Enough said.

Hey man, at least you're not under the impression that any of this is more than the impulse of men with a bit less intellect than those reading this forum... I'm not operating under assumptions, no matter what you say. :P

Interested. Link?

When you look at it, my position makes the most sense out of what is being said around this issue. There is a minority (the cable providers) effecting decisoins for the majority (everyone else, from Google to Netflix). The majority should simply protest this and the government won't be left with a choice.

Yeah for real. I have Netflix and I use it now and then with netflix-desktop, which is pretty nice if you ask me, but all things being equal, you can always just install QtWeb, block everything, and hit up TPB on a daily basis. It's a waste of time trying to have morals in a situation where even when you pay what you're supposed a third party thinks it has the right to stop you.

Okay then, Google and the rest should be saying: we'll find a way to directly hook into the home as if this were the early days and we owned everything except the dirt we buried the cables in though sometimes we own that too. Silicon Valley needs to grow up and swing its weight. A tax protest from just a few major corporations would be costly, and if they encouraged their employees to join, the impact would be ten fold. It's time we got together and, as a people, told the government it is not taking another step without our damn permission.

I say more power to them, but it certainly brings a little heaviness to my heart. It makes me feel like we really are returning to a Cold War status globally but with a lot of new players with a lot more weight than before. I don't think I want to stick around to see the madness. I want to get to a winning side before much longer, and I don't see staying American as a way of doing that.

Thank you for this. I'd burn 2 mod points upping it if I could. HINT.

I agree with most of what you say here. My only addition is that it would be nice if Gates and others would address the contribution gap.

What I mean is, there are many millions of minds who never get the chance to contribute to technology due to circumstantial or financial realities. There is no telling how much progress we could be missing out on. I think that Open Source has been a decent if not stellar vehicle for addressing this, and I wish that Bill Gates would just take a few minutes to think about it from that perspective. I believe the last time he spoke about Open Source in an interview, he had the same childlike opinion he had in the 90s, despite Firefox, OpenOffice, et al.

I can't afford to buy the code of Rise of Nations or to buy any sort of licensing for so doing, but I can think of many ways the game could live on. For me, it was the only piece of Microsoftware I ever truly, truly enjoyed.

For awhile we had an Xbox, and then we sold it when we realized we were only using it for Netflix anymore. When he did his AMA, I asked him to open the code and received no response. Surely people were asking him more important questions, but still... It was actually why I made a reddit account, LOL.

But if you ask me, Steve Jobs was by far more evil than Bill has ever thought of being. That's only my opinion. Remember, as Jerry Garcia said, choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.

Well, when I was 12 years old, I would have said fuck him, he can never make up for the all pain he's put the users of computers worldwide through. But now that I'm grown, I have to say, fuck him, could he please lend me $1M for my startup?

Why are they singling out the Chinese? Don't throw statistics at me. There are French, Israeli, Egyptian, South Korean, Japanese, and on down the line who've hacked facets of the US Government and US Companies. If you're going to go down this road, you have to disallow everyone. I'm not saying you should go down this road. Then again, I aspire to be a Chinese Citizen.