Tax Rates != quality of civilization. People engaging in work, contributing to the economy and paying fair taxes along the way for the government to provide essential services to allow people the freedom to continue working and making money builds civilization.

Why should it go to social programs? Why cant I just keep my hard earned money for my favorite social program: buying ME beer...

I have had ATT for a while and found it particularly frustrating. The "4G" is unreliable and even if you have several bars you can have zero data throughput. I travel frequently to LA and Florida and had poor service both places. Last LA trip we had a biz dinner at a place near the beach and I had no service, my buddy had full Verizon LTE.

Switched the iPhone 5 about a week ago and went to Verizon and its insanely better. LTE feels about as fast as WiFi at home, and actually faster than some hotel WiFis. I was back in LA the last few days and had great service in areas I had zero on ATT. Would deff recommend Verizon, eps with an LTE phone.

Other cool note: VZ lets you tether free, ATT makes you pay additional.

So you are saying the Comcast cable line into my condo is owned by ATT? And the Fiber line into my office that is owned by CenturyLink is actually owned by ATT? Not arguing for the sake of it, but seems a giant over statement to say ATT owns the last mile everywhere.

Qwest bought USWest, which was a baby bell. Qwest was purchased by CenturyLink, which is not connected to ATT at all.... ya, it WAS all ATT back when the phone system was first rolled out, but it is completely inaccurate to say that now.

I'd point to Level3 or (what used to be) Qwest or Global Grossing or other companies that own their own nation wide fiber network. Qwest bought a bunch of railroad right of ways and laid fiber all over the place. So no, all the back haul from towers isnt ATT.

Really? Idiot Republicans? Both parties voted for bailouts of TooBigToFail XYZ. Reps tend to want lower gov spending except on military. Dems tend to want lower spending except on social entitlements of their liking.

I for one would rather see us spend money on another moon mission than trying to convince Afghans about the glories of representative government, or for DHS to research why kids get fat when they eat too much bacon.

Lets not forget about the dramatic shift in social standing of tech/engineers since the 60s. Nowdays people are more about what some dumbass girl from Jersey is doing on sat night in bar than what NASA is doing with JWST or Kepler. People with nothing to their credit other than being famous for being famous for a sex tape or stupid antics are way more popular in mainstream culture than astronauts or engineers. Its quite sad.

Metro may be exactly what most users want instead of a start menu. Look at the success of iOS for many not-so-smart users. You just move the screen around until you find the shiny icon with the name of the thing you want to use. Oh look.. a glossy button called "Words with Friends". I'll push that. And magically its full screen. No need to have to figure out confusing things like resizing the window or moving it around. Plus with one app only open at a time (except if you dock on the side bar) it removes all those distractions of multitasking. My mom will love this.

Power users can drop back into "real" desktop mode to do nerdy things like write code or something.

I'm not an Apple fanboy (or Android). But I do like the AppleTV, its small and cheap ($99), and streams everything that I care about... my music library, Netflix, and I can rent moves from iTunes. While its missing some items like Hulu, or expandable apps... for $99 I don't care. And the new screen mirroring features are pretty nice.

Q could be interesting, but for 3x the price, what exactly am I getting? Android only, can't stream Pandora, etc, no screen casting option. Even AppleTV supports streaming from Android (via a 3-rd party app).

If Q were $100 or maybe even $150, I would seriously consider it just to get away from Apple, and for the potential hacks that will come, but they screwed up the procing big time.

Like the outrage about unions doing the same thing for the past decades? I dont think its right in either case. But if a union can form a PAC and donate to and lobby candidates/elected officials, its not any different for a company to do it too. Personally I'd rather see neither allowed...

As long as a Republican isn't in the White House? I suppose you have read all the new NSA directives since Obama has been in office that have upped the standard? Or are you referring to that time Obama signed the extension of the Patriot Act. Definitely higher standards there.

Its the same from both sides, don't obscure the truth that the gov in general is running around destroying privacy and other rights while people fight about what side of some random carpeted aisle the idea came from...