Then you have the gall to say

Fucking liar.

Bing, Yahoo, AOL and Ask.com, are all alternatives. And that's not even counting engines like Baidu and whatever they have in Russia that is kicking everybody else's ass. Just because Google makes a better product and people prefer it doesn't make it anti-competitive. Sounds like a case of sour grapes more than anything else.

There is no lack of competition as I mentioned above

Running with the best of the best in search will never be cheap. I'll bet building aircraft carriers isn't cheap too. What would you suggest we do to "fix" that? Oh, nothing? Hypocrite much?

cross-funding of services to extend dominant position,

This is not even close to against the law. Google has a dominant position not a monopoly. You are confusing the two. Apple dominates the iDevice ecosystem but it isn't illegal because they have competition just like Google does.

You have made no legitimate argument that suggests this makes sense in Google's case.

It is not Google's job to make web search any cheaper to get into. Should GM help out every tom dick and harry trying to build a car in their garage? How about Intel? Should they start leasing out their fabs to all various and sundry to appear "competitive"? Get real.

The original PC was terrible too and a joke that never should have monopolized the market. The Mac and Amiga had graphics, mice, icons, multimedia, while the greenscreen IBM's had beeps, 640k ram limit, with an OS with a simple braindead command.com interpretter. This was not just in 1982, but stayed taht way until 1992 10 years later. I never used these platforms and I am not a zealot. I just hated my PC and felt ripped off. I guess people who used typewritters thought greenscreens and errors were awesome and did not know any better back in the 1980s. If they did the PC never would have become popular.

Your screed is only relevant if they are actually doing this whole "tying" thing.

Otherwise, it's all just a lot of hot air.

Web Search is the ultimate commodity free from vendor lock. It doesn't get much better than that in computing.

I'd actually really want to know when that happens.

Google Search is a much, much less dangerous monopoly than Windows is or ever was, because they don't really have a way of locking you in. The cost of switching search engines is close to zero, while the same can't be said for OSs, especially since they have exclusive and widely used applications like MS Office.

Google's dominance in the online advertisement market seems way more dangerous to me.

Apple OS X Lion shipped with new NVidia video drivers that are causing anyone with a mid 2010 Macbook Pro to get a kernel panic every 5-10 minutes.

Oh, yeah? I'm posting this on a mid-2010 17-inch MacBook Pro with an Nvidia card. I've been running Lion developer previews for months, and the only time I've ever have graphics problems is when I'm playing a game and the system gets too hot because my room isn't well-ventilated. In fact, Lion could be the most stable first release of any OS X operating system. I regularly play World of Warcraft, Starcraft II, Borderlands, Left 4 Dead 2, and Team Fortress 2 without issue.

Nvidia isn't saying that nothing will get fixed. Apple works with Nvidia on their drivers. What Nvidia is saying is simply that they can't provide technical support. Removing posts about goofy boycotts and petitions is just clearing out nonsense posts in what is supposed to be a support forum. Apple's support forums are some of the silliest, whiniest forums on the web, and you'll rarely find useful information from the users there.

I also question the claim that "Apple knew about the issue before shipping Lion," as if there's some big conspiracy that Apple knew it was going to cause your machine to black-screen but didn't care. Give me a break.

How a major hardware manufacturer can ship such a faulty product without getting much press about it is completely beyond me.

Because the issue only affects a tiny segment of customers. If, as you claim, every single person with a mid-2010 MBP was getting kernel panics every 5-10 minutes, that would be major news. Like most customers with technical problems, you're acting like it's a bigger deal than it is and that it's affecting more people than it is. Installing a new operating system is a major procedure that can uncover previously invisible problems lurking on a person's computer. That's why, every time there's a console firmware update, you'll see a bunch of posts from people claiming the updates ruined their machines.

The problem isn't so much the existence of the photo, more that it has become trivial to link a person's name to it.

Trying to find someone specific using the mentioned services is like searching for the needle in the haystack. It becomes a completely different matter if it's done for you by some search engine.

Who cares what some manager at the next Geocities has to say about it? Facebook is a fad, it too will pass.

-jcr

We had "32 bit machines with GUI, preemptive multitasking and hardware-accelerated 3D graphics" prior to August 1981? Any links/info?

Yes, stupid. Take a look at Sun, Apollo, and SGI.

All had bitmapped graphics (no window system, programs took over the screen), mice, and the SGI machines at least had hardware-accelerated 3D graphics (the hardware did matrix mulitplications and polygon fills).

This comment is not to be understated. I was very young, but my first-hand experience comparison of what Apple and Amiga had at the time to what a Windows+DOS system could do makes it clear that half-assed triumphed over quality. People didn't know how to evaluate a computer when making a purchase, so they just bought something cheap that looked like a computer, even if it was inferior in regards to hardware and or software.

We already had all of those things prior to the release of the PC. Expensive as all hell at the time, though.