Actually, it's not so much an "unwillingness to share" even though I understand how it comes across that way. If it were a simple question, such as one might find on stackoverflow, certainly, happy to help. But the breadth of the question means a huge amount of time is required to answer it in any sort of adequate fashion. Time is money, they say, and frankly I have more money than time. So it's more like "there's a limit to my generosity, after that you have to pay for my time."

and I like to get paid for my work. I expect most of my peers feel similar. So as unhelpful as you may find this, hire someone who's done it before, and ask them nicely to let you tag along and learn. Then you can become one of the professionals.

The above statement may sound condescending, but it's not meant that way. It takes years to learn the stuff you're asking, and differentiates the juniors from the seniors. Asking the seniors to train you for free isn't likely to be that well received by most of us.

Because it was only completely contained in those two countries... It's not remotely contained in DRC or Liberia.

This is actually false in many cities in the Seattle area now. Many of them actually do force you to sign up for garbage service. If you refuse to pay, they send you to collections and do their best to make your life hell. I believe Kent is now one of those cities (about a half hour south of Seattle). Thankfully I'm in a city that doesn't do that (yet), but I've heard talk that they'd like to.

So really, the choice in some cities is:
1) Pay for garbage service and use the garbage service
2) Pay for garbage service and take your own trash to the dump, and pay to dispose of it there.

I'm not certain how they get away with it from a legal standpoint, but they do (so far, at least).

Ever hear of saying no? "Sir, if you want my cash, you will have to arrest me and charge me with a crime."
or
"Sir, I will be happy to comply when you have a search and seizure warrant signed by the court. You may contact me at [phone number] once you have it. Until then, if I'm not under arrest, I'll be leaving."

Seriously, stop orzing. Yes, he'll be pissed... but what's he going to do, pull you out of your car? Shoot you? Maybe, but unlikely. Keep your door locked, and be firm but polite. Oh, and if you end up in court get an attorney to fight it, there's no justice for those without legal representation. None whatsoever.

You're aware that all the services of Office365 started out as box products, and are still available that way, right? Microsoft doesn't provide the server, but they readily provide the software. It's just expensive and a PITA to maintain, which is why people outsource to Microsoft where several hundred people work full-time to keep those services running as reliably as possible.

There's no reasonable way you could provide all the services of Office365 on a single local server for any company of reasonably large size, and even if you had a few servers you'd completely lose the local and geo redundancy features. The ability to have an entire datacenter go offline and only suffer a brief blip in services is something that very few companies have the money or the knowledge to implement themselves.

Civil disobedience is different still.

You're aware that bicycles fit easily through places where cars cannot follow, right? You stopped why? Do you honestly think that doughnut-muncher had the ambition to pull his lazy arse out of his car and actually pursue you on foot? And even if he did, you're on a bicycle, if he gets out you can EASILY ride faster than he can run.

I mean, good job citizen, way to orz on command.

Honestly, I think most of the First World countries have completely lost their spines, and will sit idly by while Putin takes over all the former Soviet countries, and then starts to expand outward. People will raise sanctions while he grabs all the land he needs to rebuild an independent economy where sanctions are little more than a slight nuisance. Then he'll start to expand outward, bringing some of the Latin American socialist countries into his NuSSR, following with the weaker European and Asian countries. And the US will sit by and scold him on being a terrible human being, while not doing anything to stop him. Why? Because we've lost our stomach for a real war. A real war is nasty business, far worse than what most people alive in the US today have ever experienced. Unfortunately, Russia is one of the few countries with both the desire and the capability to bring that type of war to our shores, and God help us if we've let all our allies fall before we awaken and actually do something about it.

Well? Did he find it?

It's a great idea... until technology progresses just a bit further, and these cameras are equipped with facial recognition, GPS and data capabilities, and all tied into a giant back-end database tracking exactly who was where at what time...

You think the surveillance state is creepy now, wait until every cop is a roving track-your-location bot. The reasons for it now are reasonable, and I have no problem with cops having video of their encounters with people. But give it a decade or two (maybe less) and it could be come a very creepy bad thing.

I wouldn't really call them a new spin on taxis. They're more like the remises in Argentina, and unlicensed (and technically illegal) taxis in many other countries. Basically, you have the licensed and regulated taxis, where you have a relatively strong assurance that you'll get where you want to go for a controlled/metered rate, in a reasonably safe and well maintained vehicle, and if you have a problem you can write down the cab number and make a complaint to a regulator. You also pay a fairly hefty fee for all this.

If you're willing to take a bit more risk, you can flag down a remis, pay a couple pesos per person, and they'll take you from where you are to downtown, or from downtown back out to the residential area you live in. The drivers make these trips all day, fill the car as full of people as it can possibly be filled (they pick up additional people along the way until the car is completely full and then some). They run on the cheapest fuel possible (in Argentina, typically LPG), and are not necessarily well-maintained. So there's risk. And, while you typically get where you want to be OK, there's plenty of opportunity for an unscrupulous person to take advantage of individual riders (or even groups if they're organized well and coordinating with someone else). So again... it's a risk.

There's a reason taxi cabs are regulated as heavily as they are, and in general it's probably a good thing for public safety even though they're freakishly expensive.

I'll second/third/fourth this... I had an HTC Arrive (Sprint's WinMo7 phone), and bought a couple Anker batteries and a charger. I switched from the HTC battery to one of the Ankers as my primary battery, because it lasted substantially longer. I still carry the universal charger when I travel, as it can charge my camera batteries, anything that charges over USB, etc. It's a little finicky to get it to contact the battery correctly sometimes, but overall it works quite well and is far more flexible than any other charger I've seen.

many open-source apps can be found at the store from unofficial sources that have a cost

So, serious question... is this a bad thing? With a few caveats, I don't really see a problem with someone making a bit of money from packaging an open-source program for a different OS, if they're going to the work of compiling, testing and packaging it. Obviously they should somehow make the source available if the license requires it, but beyond that they may be doing that software a favor, assuming an official package doesn't exist (which for the Windows app store, may very well be the case).

So their brainless store got filled with brainless garbage to take advantage of the brainless users who'd use it.

So, they succeeded in being like Apple?