"prolific" is still less than you think. Pesticide is expensive, and so is spraying entire crops with it. Farmers target their sprays for the fewest most effective times, they don't just hose it on day after day.

As opposed to what? Private power companies that stage brownouts to drive up their own prices?

At least state owned power utilities have to face a public board of inquiry before they can raise their rates, and the state regulates how much of their income has to go to keeping their own services repaired. Unlike telecoms letting wired phone service wither because they can make more money on cellular.

Yeah, the private market has always been such an example of fairness and customer service. *eye roll*

Wrong. Netflix offered Comcast and other ISP's who were complaining about Netflix traffic into their networks the option of installing servers directly onto their networks. They all categorically refused. Because this is not really about network congestion. It's about Netflix directly competing with their cable businesses.

Point of fact, it's trickle UP, not down.

Try The Door into Summer. 30 year old engineer arranges for an 11/12 year old girl scout to fall in love with him, skirts the issue with some time travel shenanigans.

In Time Enough For Love, Lazarus Long adopts a young girl so he can raise and marry her later. Not, in fact, the only time his Lazarus Long character was involved with an underage female.

I suspect that 98% of the rest of the world will far more likely go to the movie based on who's starring in it than the title or story.

Heinlein's stories also featured pedophilia and incest in an approving light.

Oh, ONLY 15 years.. and they STILL don't have even a quarter of Apple's desktop marketshare. And really, you can make Linux as easy to install as you want, average people will never install it! They won't even download it. If it doesn't come on their new PC they picked up at Cost-Mart, they'll never bother, because people just want to turn it on and use it, not spend all day configuring this and that obscure option. Because most users are not computer enthusiasts. Most users are not programmers or graphics designers, and I know for sure that most graphics designers don't want to mess with their computers which is why they all typically use Apple. I take that back, the graphics designers do love to tweak their themes.

The future of computing is back to the old server/thin client models. Streaming services out to users on tablets and phones because if the phone's hardware can't handle your "serious work" then they can stream from a custom VM over the network. The future of computing is the millions of low wage workers in Africa, China and the like who don't have the money or the infrastructure to support a PC but everyone has a damn smart phone.

Also the idea of a "mature market" for PC's is exactly why Linux on the desktop has no hope! The market is mature! It's settled in with Windows and OS X and there is no room to disrupt that with a Linux desktop no matter how damn amazing it is. The only, ONLY 3rd option that has made any kinds of inroads has been the Chromebook, which completely throws out the desktop concept.

No, I didn't post it from my phone. I didn't post it from Linux either, jerk. I did post it from my Asus Transformer tablet running Windows 8.1 though.

And why exactly, if in your own words desktop software is being funneled more and more through the web browser, do we need big honking desktop machines then? An iPad with HDMI to a bigger monitor and a bluetooth mouse/keyboard can run all those web applications just as well, and with a lot less electricity being wasted, as your desktop machine.

You shoot yourself in the foot with your own arguments.

First you say people only need a browser and an office suite to do business work, then you claim people need PC hardware because phones aren't powerful enough. Powerful enough for what, running a web browser? Working on a spreadsheet and some word documents? Please. Forget that the average consumer phone outclasses any computer I had access to 10 years ago, which were perfectly fine for doing "real business tasks" on until the OS & Application bloat caused us to move on.

As for people not wanting to use Android or iOS as a desktop environment, you mean Administrator/Power Users maybe, most general people are fine with the simplistic App button and not worrying about file directories or control panels.

People already do plenty of real work on tablets & phones. Like recording albums, shooting movies, and more.

The war was fought decades ago, a winner was declared and for some reason the Unix/Linux neckbeards still sit around railing about how they'll take that hill someday..

The desktop is increasingly unimportant, or mostly an adjunct to where people do their primary computing which is portables. Give up on the desktop and accept that you have a niche, hold onto that niche and nurture it instead of constantly beating your heads against the desktop, it's not going to happen. Even Apple kind of half-asses their desktops now and focuses on their phones, and they have a development budget bigger than some countries.

Where, exactly, is Amazon's Unlimited plan effectively much different from a Library? Oh other than the fact authors will be getting continuous revenue, rather than only being paid for a few copies to fill the library's shelves.

Yet somehow writers managed to profit and thrive, even as libraries allowed anyone who wished to walk in and read all their works for free.

Rather than turn publishing into a zero-sum game and Scalzi believes, it appears to me that Amazon has turned the idea of a library into a new revenue stream for authors. You'd think authors would be happy for that opportunity to earn a little more income.

Sure, some authors will learn how to write books that game the system over time, but so what? This is not the only revenue stream available to authors, just one of many. Some people will pay for Unlimited, some will still buy individual books, some will wait for the movie, some will pirate the book AND the movie, some will pick it up at the library.

You just pointed out the fallacy of your argument. Libraries.

Libraries have allowed multiple people to read a variety of authors works while only paying the authors once, and yet the publishing industry has continued to survive. I see nothing that different from a Library and Amazon's setup, except well read authors will continuously receive payments, so in fact they are getting a net gain.

There's this thing called taxes, you might have heard of it.

Socialism is a social and economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and co-operative management of the economy, as well as a political theory and movement that aims at the establishment of such a system.

Communism is a socioeconomic system structured upon common ownership of the means of production and characterized by the absence of social classes, money, and the state; as well as a social, political and economic ideology and movement that aims to establish this social order.

No, he meant socialism.

Steve also said that American businesses should operate like Chinese ones, shortly prior to the overworked, underpaid and essentially imprisoned in company bunkhouses Foxconn workers started jumping off the building's roof to finally escape their hell.

Steve Jobs was an entitled a-hole that looked down on everyone else on the planet.