...and desperately attempting to avoid irrelevance.

That being said, there's some sense to the strategy. If it's true that they lost money on the original Xbox, then it's worked for them in the past. Selling products below cost is a good way to get customers, provided your product is good enough that they'll buy your next one at a price where you'll actually profit.

I don't personally see Microsoft tablets being taken seriously (the number of people I see on the internet who apparently like Windows 8 doesn't fit with the number of people I've met who like it in real life, which leads me to believe that they learned a lesson from Vista -- albeit not the right one -- and have seen the value in paying astroturfers to pad their failures a bit). But then again, I didn't expect the XBox to be a runaway success either, and it did just fine, so time will tell.

Fortunately there's enough competition in the tablet market among Apple and all the different Android manufacturers that Microsoft isn't likely to be able to achieve the level of lock-in that they have on the desktop market, which means that another viable tablet maker could actually be a good thing. So even though it's Microsoft, I don't wish them ill here.

You sound like someone who has access to hard data that shows a causative relationship between higher taxes and reduced economic performance. Please post your data; I'd love to see it.

Sure. The NSA scandal was proof of that they've lied and violated the Constitution. On the other hand, I don't see where this is the "worst administration for lies in our lifetime" considering they followed the Bush administration (spoiler: the NSA was doing its spying shit then too).

That being said, about the ACA, promoting the general welfare is specifically constitutional, and there are 7.1 million more people with health care now than there were six months ago (and I'm sorry but "LALALA THE'RE LIARS I CAN'T HEAR YOU" isn't evidence that they're lying about the enrollment figures, no matter how much the irresponsible right wing press may be disingenuously speculating).

Your line of reasoning seems to be "we know they're liars, so that means they're telling a lie. Since they're lying, we know they're liars." Come back with real evidence.

Seriously.

From the article:

an eye-popping 90% increase in just the last month of the six-month open enrollment period.

That's not eye-popping at all. The enrollment numbers didn't even double in the last month. Those number are completely ho-hum, and if anything, I'd expect it to be even more skewed to the last minute.

Sure, this is the worst administration for lies in our lifetime

You're very well-spoken for a five year old.

True, but it's not the center of the solar system or the galaxy.

Spaceballs.

There goes the planet.

I like Win 8.1. It's fast and reliable. I don't think it has ever crashed.

I can do everything I want pretty easily: edit videos, produce music, play games, run Steam, run overclocked hardware.

Yes, I'm sure you can do all that stuff that the cool kids are doing. I don't see anyone here questioning Windows 8's capabilities; people are complaining about the fact that it's a tablet interface that's been shoehorned into a desktop, and everything about it is designed to push you back to the tablet interface (which, conveniently for Microsoft, is a walled garden that they control).

At any rate, Windows 7 does all that cool kid stuff too, and the interface is sensible for desktop users.

I agree that everyone has a right to express their views. The ex-CEO of Mozilla has a right to express his, and the people who decided to boycott the product over his views have a right to express theirs. No one's rights were violated, so I'm not sure where the Thought Police come into this.

Notch doesn't owe you any more work. He's already hired a bunch of people to continue development on Minecraft, so any obligations he might have for the Minecraft community are fulfilled. If he wants to spend the rest of his life sipping mixed drinks on an island somewhere, that's his prerogative.

There was a study a while back (I wish I had the link) that found that more money can make you happy, but only if you're not already born into money. And Notch himself has said in an interview that he basically accepts that his biggest achievement is now behind him.

The happiest people in the world aren't the ones who are driven by ambition; they're the ones who can realize that they've achieved something and then stop and enjoy life. Notch is doing what he loves to do, because he can afford to do that. He can afford to not sell out, because frankly, once you're a multi-millionaire, you can pretty much invest your money and live comfortably off of the returns for the rest of your life. I hope, on the off chance that I ever strike it rich, that I'm able to do the same thing Notch is rather than get caught up in that cycle of always wanting more.

it's not their 'tollbooth', it's their road

It can be "their road" when they pay land owners for the lines through their property, and pay back the tax money that was given to them to subsidize its construction.

An eighteen wheeler can cause more damage to the road that requires more maintenance than a motorcycle, this is the same thing: a movie that needs to be streamed a million times takes up much more capacity and energy and basically uses the system much more than millions of small individual requests do.

Netflix is already paying a provider for bandwidth. You may or may not know this, Slashdot Libertarian, but as your bandwidth usage goes up, your bandwidth prices go up too. As such, Netflix is already paying extra money to run that 18 wheeler due to the wear and tear on that road. AT&T is trying to bill them extra because the truck is carrying a product that competes with them.

Is that their prerogative? No. They built their network on public dollars and on peoples' private property under the conditions that they would act as a utility. If they want to not act like a public utility, then they can come to me and pay me a fair price to run lines through my property (or better yet, since I don't use AT&T at all, how about I just cut their line? It's my property after all.)

It would be a delicious irony if people were able to recover some of their lost value due to government regulations.

...vanishes into thin air again.

No, I don't trust Bitcoin. Never really did.