Why should it be free? The infrastructure costs money and they have a right to make a profit on it. TV is not a necessity - if anything, its a vice - , so you can't even make an argument that it should be subsidized for the poor.

Nothing is free, ever! Even things that may look free... like say roads, schools and clean water, cost money. People like me pay for them. I pay a mountain of taxes; much more than I eve get back. I'd rather do that than live like a king in a third world shithole.

And I never tried to steal cable TV either.

It is probably more insidious, given the nature of the allegations in Germany against the BND. Suppose you are a spy agency and want to spy on your own population, but are thwarted by laws about that pesky due process? No problem! Simply cut a deal with other spy agencies. "You spy on our people, because spying on foreigners is your job. We spy on your people, because spying on foreigners is our job. It all goes into the same database and no laws were technically broken".

When I saw this headline, my snarky alter ego asked if the Chinese had lost a sub in that area. The Glomar Explorer was my first thought.

Seriously, if I have a project where I can reduce development and maintenance costs OR use efficient design methods, then those efficient methods are not so efficient.

I am totally registering goats.uk if they do this.

What about those of us who live in Germany and like it just the way it is or was.

I lose if Facebook ceases to operate here. I have friends and family spread all over the world; Germany, Sweden, the US, India, etc. and it was always a lot of work to keep in touch with everyone. Facebook makes this easy.

I also lose if people started to use pseudonyms. Have you ever tracked down an old friend, or been tracked down by an old friend via Facebook?

I think you are partially right. I’ll presume that when the insurance company manages to rid itself of the bottom half of its driver pool, its payouts decrease more than its collected premiums. In effect, the insurance company is defecting against its competitors by sticking them with the higher cost customers.

People who refuse to do anything about a greater evil, lest they accept a smaller evil, piss me off. Suppose that the greater evil would win by one vote if you stayed home. Your choice in this case is to vote for the lesser evil, which is still evil, or not vote; which in this case is the same as voting for the greater evil. If Gore had been president in 2001, we’d not have had Dick Fucking Cheney using 9/11 to push the US into the Iraq war. Would we have had rendition? Torture? Since Cheney actively supported these things and was their biggest cheerleader, it made a BIG difference between having a smaller or bigger evil and in this case, we got the bigger evil.

Those people who voted for Nader in 2000, because “voting for the smaller evil is still evil” have the blood of the Iraq war on their hands!

i can write just fine in my utilkilt with no undies

So I guess valuing the (usually) smaller size of the archived xml marks me as clueless then.

Actually, from my perspective, there have been significant improvements in every version of Office. Then again, I'm also someone who writes a lot of VBA macros and the occasional c# .net plugin.

There is also a Green Party in the US. Interestingly, the Greens are classified as a "left libertarian" party and its platforms do overlap with the larger, but still insignificant, American Libertarian party.

There should be a moratorium on gesture patents. Right now, we're in a state where we can't say that any new developments would be non-obvious to an expert. You could make a list of a million gesture controls over a couple of beers.

Goodness gracious! I'll grant the hardware similarities, but that link is comparing an old feature phone's OS UI with a not-heavily skinned Android phone. Those icons and that layout are stock Gingerbread. Aside from that and the use of gestures, the usage paradigms for iOS and Android (at least as of 4.0) are quite different and "how things flow" is also quite different.

Samsung's best defense here is probably a quick rollout of a 4.0 update.

Wait! iOS 5 has usable notifications? You could have fooled me!

If I had mod points today, you'd get'em. This is the same thing that goes through my mind whenever I read someone lamenting that too many people are ignorant of some aspect of computing; e.g. security.

Oh and its not just Americans, but "people" in general.