Because even though I hate the ribbon, no actual power user really USES Windows Explorer as a file manager.

ALL of them? So the people running the lottery don't even draw salaries? What do they do, use volunteer labor?

I don't think it can be a "tax" if it's voluntary.

It's not really a "tax" because it's completely voluntary. Private casinos are also allowed to rig the game in their favor, and that's fine, that isn't the problem. All a state lottery really is, is a casino operation, but with a measure of state protectionism against the free market. Think of it the same way you would think of, say, government operating a dairy farm and selling milk. Or government offering broadband. It competes with free market operations that provide the same service, but with protection from free market forces. It's government offering services. It's basically the same also as if a casino operator (or dairy farmer) bribed state officials to enact laws to protect his/her business specifically.

If a decent security programmer/expert earns say $50/hr, then this covers only 10 hours of work, and that ignores actual cost-to-company equivalent costs of hiring an expert (e.g. desk, HR, equipment, admin, accounting overheads, so it's actually closer to 5 or 6 hours worth of programmer time). Do you mean to tell me that if they hired an expert internally, they expert the cost of that expert equivalent finding a bug every 5 hours? This is highly patronizing, they are basically treating the security experts out there as children who are supposed to get excited wasting their time doing virtually-free work for the great Facebook just for the so-called "prestige". In fact, most will spend many hours and are likely to earn nothing. Facebook, hire some programmers out of your own damn pocket. Security experts, retain some dignity.

It is human to do it, but I think it is counterproductive to confuse "nostalgic value" with "value".

I really enjoy reading very good books that stimulate my mind, but I am puzzled when people say 'the joy is in the experience' and refer nostalgically to 'turning pages'. When I'm reading a really good book, I couldn't care for the 'experience', it's about what I'm reading. I do find reading text on a screen somehow less "engaging", but I won't go so far as to say 'the joy is in the experience', and frankly if I was a young kid today and my grandpa was trying to encourage me to read because I get to 'turn pages' and 'the joy is in the experience', I expect I would probably find that a rather lame argument and would go back to my e-everything. I think if you want a kid to read a physical book give him an interesting physical book.

For books, true "value" though is in the text, not the medium. Our children will grow up not missing turning pages, but will develop arbitrarily associated deeply nostalgic feelings for the particular look and user interface of the (relatively primitive) e-ink and e-reader standards of today. Then they will grow up and try to explain to their (eyes rolling) children how the joy of reading on these primitive screens is "in the experience", and that their kids are missing something because they only read books through, I don't know, the direct-brain-reader-interface of 2040.

I love pixel-y old low-res video games and side-scrollers because it takes me back to my childhood, but I'm not going to push my children to play them somehow hoping they will get the same "feeling" out of them - they won't. The good news is your children will develop equally deep nostalgic feelings for whatever is the norm their day, so they're not missing anything --- provided you figure out what's actually valuable --- e.g. great books.

do not need the abstract tool of money. No other animal uses such a high level of abstraction to represent value exchange

Um, sure, but other animals still sleep in the dirt, get wet when it rains, die of basic diseases, and no other animals have advanced medicine and technology and such sophisticated division of labor. I'm not sure how 'no other animal' uses it, is an argument against it. Without money, meaningful division of labor would be impossible; without meaningful complex division of labor, we would not have been able to progress much. How would someone be able to specialize in, say, treatment of neurological disorders, or how would newton have been able to specialize in researching newtonian mechanics and lenses, for example, if there was no such thing as money? He would have had to either grow his own food, or would have had to trade his services directly with a farmer, which makes no sense.

Now if you want to define consciousness a just being awake and aware then you can do that, but you limit your ability to go beyond this definition you have,
Abstraction only works as well as the agreed upon meaning by the parties using such abstraction. Double speak, triple speak and out right lying are all misuses of the abstract communication tool.

Yes, and this is how "they" use grammar to control our minds!

Through the timecube of course.

I think you've just described large parts of the UN.

By 18 years from now, that 1 billion increase over 10 years will constitute an extra half a billion sweet 18-year olds to potentially tap.

OK, seriously, why not just have kids anyway? So they might live through an overpopulation kill-off, so what? These things happen, and it won't kill overyone; I'd rather my offspring be around and survive a great die-off, than some other random chump's offspring be around and survive a great die-off. Plus, it's nice to have kids around. Shit happens, at some point you just have to let go and stop taking things seriously and let the chips fall where they may.

I like G+ mainly because it feels new-frontier-ish. That'll change when the masses join.

The worst part of that is how people automatically that they are not the stupid ones, but that Facebook "did something". They clearly don't know the first thing about computers but instead of their default assumption being "maybe I am just confused here", their default assumption is that they know what they are doing and that the company is at fault. Having worked tech support I've seen the same thing. I think it's a symptom of our politically correct education system teaching morons that everyone's random brainfarts are "valuable".

That's a pure straw-man argument; the argument isn't about whether or not the free market is "more efficient", it's about whether it's morally OK to steal from person A on the basis that person B has a medical need for person A's money. That's it. Transgender has a condition and, let's face it, wants other people to give up some of their hard-earned savings to pay for it. The question is, is that OK, is stealing OK in some circumstances? That's the question. I'm not offering an answer, but let's not pretend that anything other than that is what it's about by offering strawman arguments.

Actually they're raising the retirement age for one main reason: They basically blew some of the SS fund. The government spent it. They'd like you to think it's about demographics but the reality is today's demographic state was fairly predictable 20 or 30 years ago.

It's not the beginning of some corporate pattern, it's just Zuckerberg's personality shining through, and it has already started to hurt Facebook so I wouldn't worry, this kind of thing tends to be self-correcting --- if you've been following Facebook for a while, you would've realized long ago that their attitude has always been "let's keep pushing and find the precise line of how much we can get away with", from their ongoing privacy violations, to bullshit like the fact that others can sign you up to groups and FB declared they intend to do nothing about that. The massive sudden leap of early-adopter users to Google+ at their very moment of launch is testament to how much Zuckerberg has been irritating his own userbase, with many just waiting for some alternative to come along. The market has and will continue to define the limits of how far Zuckerberg's controlling personality. When FB does stuff like this article is about, it really does hurt their reputation, and while the effects may feel very abstract sometimes, they are real.