In the days before iTunes that's what we had. You could browse for different stores in Windows Media Player, and pick from a variety of distributors. You could always go to different websites to find songs and books. But only the really dedicated did this. Then iTunes and the iPod came out with one place to purchase content. The existing market didn't like it because it limited choices, but it spread like wildfire to the majority of the population; finally they didn't need to make decisions on where to get content from, there was only one place to get it from. The same is happening with websites, if an app doesn't exist in Apples app store, then the company doesn't exist to most people. Browsers are feeling too nerdy, and technical for most people, and they prefer their appliance like apps.
So the reasons why authors don't create their own distribution channels is that the majority of the population doesn't think outside of the box.

Yes. When I'm on the bus, mouse is awful. So when I'm doing computations in Excel on the bus it's all keyboard with the occasional touch of the screen.

If you built a system that didn't keep track of metadata, it might be hard to reengineer your system, to comply within three weeks.

Competence, Organization, and privacy policy. Even if Microsoft wanted to break their privacy policy and spy on an end user as much as Google does, they couldn't pull it off because it would require too much coordination among too many different organizations for them to be able to pull it off.

I'm not suggesting so much to have ';' be used to access members, so much as I am advocating the idea that the end of a statement should be the same as what it is when writing spoken language.

Switch the functionality of the '.' and ';' characters in C style languages. For me, it's perfectly fine with what '.' and ';' do and mean, but apparently it's a real struggle for those learning programming. While in University I'd be talking with somebody struggling in their Introduction to Computer Programming class, or somebody who was a CS major, and then dropped out and the number 1 complaint was how they were upset with how the program wouldn't compile because they were missing a ';' at the end of a statement. But if the character which represented the end of a statement was a '.', that would make sense to them because it's same character that represents the end of a statement in written communication. That way if they complained about a program not compiling because they forgot a '.', you could respond with "Well you wouldn't end a sentence with out a '.', would you?"

Actually my Dad said nearly exactly that last week. He was having trouble connecting to his network, and after sending me a couple of screen shots from his phone of the issue, he ran the Windows Network Troublshooter and it fixed his issue.

Given that not all browsers are able to implement the same set of features, nearly every feature is browser-specific.

That's just not scalable though. How many people can the mafia personally witness voting and have it affect an election, and keep it under wraps? Measures to prevent those scenarios are non-technical measures.

I still think that how deeply they were linked prevented smaller skirmishes from breaking out. Unfortunately the different issues climaxed in WWI, but it's quite possible that it got that bad because so many leaders were willing to work at preventing out and out conflict for so long. I never claimed that being trading partners would completely prevent war, I just think that it prevents it most of the time.

I disagree. It's quite possible that this decision wasn't made lightly. I'm sure there are some Russian businesses which are being hurt by this. When countries trade with each other, and become dependent upon each other, there's a higher motivation not to go to war with each other or let political poo hit fans. While trade dependency is a strategy that kind of hurts when war breaks out, it decreases the likelihood of that war actually breaking out.

I think that policies should be optimized for day to day living during peacetime, not war.

Sometimes it takes more than a month to replace an in place product. Also, just because you're running machines that have OpenSSL on them doesn't mean that anyone in the company has any idea about how to compile code. Right now my father's company is dealing with heartbleed. They take equipment from vendors, and rents the equipment out to customers with servicing contracts. Apparently part of the contracts they have with the vendors is that they're not allowed to do software patches at all. Apparently it was industry standard. About four days into emergency heartbleed meetings my father said that that policy has been changed for all future orders.

Having a 20 year piece of equipment that depends on a part that had an end of life of 2011 seems like really bad planning.

It's possible that the activists made building one too expensive. I'm all for doing things safely, but committee meeting, after committee meeting starts to costs real dollars (which is why the activists insist on their being so many).