You also want to encourage businesses to build and maintain permanent housing for your residence so at least a few people can live without 4 hour daily commutes.

The most common one is the company still has a lot of good employees, and the buyer wants those.

Another common reason is that if the company has good credit you can buy them, borrow a bunch of money, pay yourself consultancy fees from the borrowed money and then let the company go bankrupt. It's called "Vulture Capitalism".

It also works if a company owns a lot of property. The sci-fi pulp magazines went out of business in the 80s because their distributor got bought out when somebody noticed they were sitting on a bunch of property that was undervalued. They bought 'em, sold the property and shut down the business, leaving the pulp mags without a distributor.

Sometimes too the companies have a bunch of money from investors and it's use it or lose it time. I think Facebook is here, and that's why they bought out Occulus Rift.

And occasionally it's just because the company is over valued. HP is currently in a lot of hot water with their stock holders for spending several billion on a company that was massively over valued.

...and economic coercion is harmless? Given the results, I'd disagree.

Not harmless but the exercise of community censure we have just witnessed is to be distinguished from state power. Speech is not harmless, and free speech cuts both ways.

you need to upgrade. Sooner or later one of the poorly policed ad networks will serve you up a virus. I run some ads off my home page to pay for hosting/etc and I stick to google's ads because so far every site I browse has been shut down at least once when their ad networks served up a virus. Angry Nintendo Nerd, Spoony Experiment, Something Positive. All of them. Heck, I think even Penny Arcade's been nailed.

It's not a matter if if, it's when. Which is why I'm posting from Win 7 today :(...

Can you at least explain how one "seriously tr[ies] against a slot machine?" Pull the handle instead of pressing the button? Exert great force while pulling the handle (or pressing the button)? "Be the ball?"

I'm all out of aggregate; are cement terms okay?

"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1."

Since a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler has occurred, this online discussion apparently has a length. Nice catch.

I've never heard of "crapware" before, but charging money for something that has no monetary value (as it's offered for free by another entity) sounds to me like fraud.

I think it's certainly malicious when MS informs NSA about various security holes in their products prior to patching them — it's difficult for me to conceive a better way to undermine customers' trust.

That's just it, Russia didn't even try. The went straight into fascism. China was the same thing. That said, I don't think you can go from violent revolution coupled with extreme poverty right into Socialist Utopia. Again, Russia was pretty bad off after WWII, and it didn't get rebuilt like Japan did...

It's possible, but most don't make it. Everyone remembers Abe Lincoln, but can you name any of those kids from his Log Cabin School?

Also, learning to develop is now very, very expensive. A college degree that was $50k in my day is $200k now. That degree gets you the same $50k to $60k year job today, but with 4 times more debt...

You got lucky enough to pick an industry that didn't get devastated in your area and you didn't have anything really, really awful happen to you. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy for you, but you're very much the exception, not the rule...

their moms/dads are rich. They can blow off school and go back whenever you feel like it. If you look at just about every successfully "Entrepreneur" they come from upper (way upper) middle class to very rich.

We here in America like to pretend we've got a lot of upward mobility that isn't really there. So when somebody starts making millions we pretend they pulled themselves up by bootstraps. Heck, Bill Gates started out with nothing except a 1 million dollar trust fund, his father's years of experience as a business lawyer and his mother's seat on IBM. If he can make it anyone can.

My only fear with regard to "terrorism" — excluding the conversion of my country into a totalitarian police/surveillance state (as I consider this to be a realization rather than a fear) — manifests itself along the lines of: "I hope that steroid-fueled, combat-ready, bored cop over there doesn't think up an excuse to harass/question/search/detain/arrest/chem-spray/electrocute/beat/pop me, as he's all jacked-up to 'fight terror,' and there aren't any terrorists around to be fought (but I am), and I'm nine times more likely to be killed by a cop than killed by one of the elusive boogeymen the government seems to want me to fear."