Didn't Apple go through this exact same issue with the iPhone app store a few years ago, and they fixed it?

Not nearly as weird as what you said. Since when is sales tax generally applied as a dollar amount? Why would we be paying a flat $10 per item? That makes no sense at all. That would mean a 10 cent piece of gum would cost 100x more, while a car might cost 0.05% more.

Practically all general sales tax is a percentage. A tax like this would be applied as a percentage, say 300% (and I remind you, this is completely unreasonable). That means that a $3 ice cream would cost $12 with tax, and a $6 ice cream would cost $24 with tax. So no, the better item wouldn't suddenly do better in the market. (Quite the contrary, the market would be racing for the bottom trying to sell crappy $0.25 ice cream so it would be $1 with tax, hoping to increase demand to the point that sales would again be profitable.)

Ice cream, being nondurable, is not a good candidate as a Veblen good. The same applies for most foods.

Did someone forget to take their meds for schizophenia this morning?

It wasn't a load problem. The setup was just wrong (recursive resolvers used as authoritative servers didn't answer non-recursive queries correctly). It wouldn't have worked if Microsoft had given it all the CPU power and network capacity in the world. Garbage in, garbage out.

The takeaway is either:

1. No business should use Azure because Azure doesn't scale. OR:
2. No business should rely on Microsoft services, because Microsoft does not have the necessary competence.

This is only the latest in a line of screwups by Microsoft in their service offerings.

Now admittedly, I'm a bit bitter about a problem that's not really Creative's fault. I bought an Audigy 2 ZS for my laptop using PC Card...and then the next wave of laptops only came with an Expresscard slot. So, I ponied up again for an X-Fi card that fit the Expresscard slot...and then laptops stopped coming with those. Now I fully admit that Creative isn't to blame for that, but it is sad just the same. However, I digress.

I use my onboard audio for nearly all of my listening needs. My internal speakers are utter crap (I think one is blown, actually), and thus, even if Creative added all the super-duper offboard processing in the world, it wouldn't sound any better than what those speakers can pump. Adding a nice set of Sennheiser or Denon headphones, I can start to hear some of the MP3 sizzle in the 128kbps MP3s, and a handful of 192's, depending on the song and the encoder and settings used. Even playing video games, the difference between 'Good Enough' and 'X-Fi Good' never comes into play, because it's the nuts-and-bolts of the big picture that will make or break it in either direction - if the sound effects and musical score is good, the miniscule difference an audio chipset will make has nothing to do with it. If they're crap, a ZxR processor isn't going to change anything.

That being said, I still use offboard audio hardware on a regular basis. I use my Rane SL3 to DJ with Serato. Even if it wasn't a de facto hardware dongle to unlock the Serato software, there's no motherboard chipset that supports 2ms latency from end-to-end of the audio path. In other words, my SL3 can reliably take an audio signal from my turntable, translate it into speed and directional data, and send MP3 audio back out, in 2ms. Creative doesn't make hardware like that. The story is pretty similar for my Audio6 (which I use for Traktor) and my Connectiv (which I used to use for Torq and Deckadance, though it required closer to 5ms latency to be stable). I have a MobilePre USB that I use occasionally for XLR and 1/4" recording. These are niche products for niche purposes, but the fact that your local Guitar Center sells a range of these kinds of interfaces demonstrates that there's indeed a market for discrete audio hardware. Creative just doesn't make it.

I was just noting the irony. That said, I would personally put forward that people doing programming in the real world need a software engineering degree, not a computer science degree as you don't do computer science when writing real-world applications - you apply the principles of Computer Science in an disciplined/engineering methodology.

But then, software engineering as a discipline is in such poor shape that it is not really helpful to anyone but NASA and DOD as currently defined, and that needs to change.

Germany is not an occupied state, since the end of the 4+2 talks which was 25 years ago. Continuing to claim so doesn't make it true.

Actually, it's the German population which has a problem with being spied on. And they were pressuring the government again and again no longer to tolerate it. Being spied on is an issue that has grown in importance within one year that now the German government has to fear to lose the next elections if they don't do anything about it. And that's exactly how it is supposed to work.

First of all: Germany is no longer an occupied state, independently of what you think. Second: Of course Germany can do it. What will the U.S. do to retaitiate? Occupy Germany again? To what result? And is it worth it? Losing all the business in Germany? Losing all the taxes the U.S. earns from doing business with german companies?

Actually, Germany has a problem with spying on their own citizens, as this was declared illegal by the European Court of Justice.

So I do development and I want to cut my costs down. I presently have a desktop at home with a 600W supply and a server with a 250W supply, as well as laptops with 60-90W supplies. As I use the desktop for other things (e.g playing DVDs, Netflix, etc.) I'm satisfied to leave it for now; laptops might get replaced by tablets or chromebooks.

But the server? I keep it on a UPS, and would love to be able to keep it up for a very long time. On the UPS it would only get between 10-30 minutes if power fails (APC 1500). I am very interested in switching it out for a few lower power devices. In fact, I'm targetting replacing it with 3 devices (a Rasberry Pi for authentication, a Udoo for disk storage, and a Routerboard for firewall support) with a total power envelope of 50W.

Do I still intend to do software development on the server? Yes.
Do I still intend to do DNS, DHCP, Samba, WebServers, etc on the server? Yes.

But you know what - unless I'm building something targetting a mainframe, some heavy video driven application (e.g games, autocad, etc) then I really don't need a very powerful system. Point being - a beagleboard, Udoo, or Rasberry Pi really is sufficient for most people doing software development....well, unless you're trying to use Eclipse or Visual Studios, but then you're just asking for trouble.

So I actually RTFA, and I see that it is 5 million subdomain names. That is a few hundred subdomains implicated as used by botnets against 5 million. It doesn't support a conclusion that No-IP was somehow in league with the botnet operators or that support for botnets was a significant part of No-IP's business.

Microsoft portrayed No-IP as primarily a business making money from botnet operators, but Microsoft only listed a few hundred subdomain names that were implicated. Compared to what I imagine is hundreds of thousands, or millions (or tens of millions) of subdomain names that No-IP must support to have a viable business, it's a tiny fraction.

Likely much less than half the cost on a per aircraft basis and already proven to work.