A free market is a market where you take what you want for free, literally and literal definition. So the freest market is living as a nomad in the wild as stone age man, watch out for the real predators because running around completely free means not being able to rely on anyone else when it comes to tackling that pride of lions or that pack of wolves or tiny, tiny critters that infect you body and that you would not be able to survive with out any outside cooperative assistance. Freedom can not be shared, as sharing logically places limits on freedom of actions.

Larry Niven as well. Was it the third or fourth Ringworld book that went on at great length about various humanoid species fucking?

The problem is M$ is not offering the options customers want, either OSX or preferably Android. Offering options is pretty pointless if the options you offer and not the ones the customers want regardless of how many options you offer.

When M$ were being dicks with ribbons and windows 8, they completely ignored the idea, that hey, pissing off customers in one market segment will likely negatively impact those customer choices in other market segments. So how many people pissed off by ribbons and touch feely desktops choose to punish M$ by choosing any phone, absolutely phone other than an M$ one and for how many years will those customers hold a grudge. Seriously arrogantly pissing of customers can get them to hold a grudge not just a several years but the rest of their lives, you play you pay and the Ballmer legacy will hang around for a long time to come.

Because buying at Walmart, buying cheap is rarely ever buying smart. Crappy products, shit wages and conditions for fellow members of your community, closing down of better local businesses often with better products. So yeah buying at Walmart is like 'investing' in lottery tickets and hoping for something better no matter how often it fails.

The real question is, do the Australian and New Zealand governments have a choice. The US is positioning US marines in Australia, fully armed and munitioned (so called firing range practice), as a measure against China, around 7500 km away. Now seriously so far away from China and like only a couple of thousand against the whole Chinese army. Hmm, to me it sounds like more the number you would need to take over and occupy the Australian government parliament should they disobey. For how long did the US government punish New Zealand when the New Zealand government banned US military ships from entering if they would not declare whether or not they had nuclear weapons on board, for how many decades did this go on.

You seriously think Australia politicians want to sign the Trans Pacific Partnership and abandon their constitution to US corporate dictates and as a consequence lose any chance of ever being elected again but if they are corrupt enough they will and the consequences for US Australia relations will be awful.

Point the finger at Australia and New Zealand is like blaming the hostage for being kidnapped. The problem here is lazy, ignorant, stupid Americans who let their government run riot across the rest of the globe. You seriously, I mean seriously, think that those are the real choices of the Australian and New Zealand governments or just the same choices any other hostage would make.

That's what is going to give this story legs. If it's proven that the information was used to affect domestic policy or international relations, or if there's strong evidence that it was used to exert economic leverage over Pacific island nations, then New Zealand's credibility in the neighbourhood drops drastically.

In years past, a lot of the voice and data traffic in the South Pacific was handled by a company named Pacific Teleports. They resold bandwidth on an Intelsat bird. The ham-fisted monitoring there was almost a joke. You could actually see an additional 80-100 ms lag introduced at the exact point where the traffic left their earth station in Australia and entered the terrestrial networks there. SSL sessions would break continually.

But people more or less expected this kind of behaviour from Australia. They've never really thought of the Pacific islands region as anything more than an undeclared territory, and ever since George W. Bush appointed Australia the 'sheriff' (his word) in the region, they've been even more ham-fisted in their approach.

New Zealand, on the other hand, has always portrayed itself as a Pacific island country, perhaps the first among equals, but a peer to its neighbours. Its aid programme was more engaged, and it welcomed Polynesians and Melanesians much more warmly than Australia. The difference is similar to the difference between the USA and Canada. Now, imagine Canada being revealed as the primary source of intelligence gathering in the Caribbean.

Australia has always been somewhat brazen in its attempts to influence events in the Pacific islands. New Zealand, in contrast, has (until now) appeared to be the more reasonable of the two. If that changes, then it has the potential to drive these strategically important nations closer to China. I'm not suggesting it would be 1941 all over again, but if it ever came to that, you'd think Australia and NZ would want friends on the islands here, rather than strangers.

What choice does Microsoft have at this point? If they simple cede the mobile market, they risk Google marching right up the middle with a series of devices that come to resemble a full computing platform. And that most certainly is Google's intent. That's why they're putting considerable resources into Google Docs; they want it to be good enough, and once it is good enough, then suddenly that Chromebook looks like a pretty decent competitor to a more expensive Windows laptop.

At the end of the day, Microsoft has to at least gain some market share or it will begin to see its most valuable market; Exchange-Office, begin to leak away.

Neither does saying "it is the greatest next thing", apparently.

As much as I need to access such documents on my phone, I can. I can't conceive of actually wanting to work on such documents on a smartphone, but to view them, Google Docs seems to a reasonably good job, and when I had an iPhone, Apple's ability to view Office files was good enough in most cases.

That's always been MS's problem, they bring nothing to the table that isn't delivered by Google or Apple, and the things that they could bring to the table, like AD integration, they don't. Coupled with an absolutely miserable app store that is a laughably stunted entity compared to the major Android and Apple markets, it's little wonder they've had such a problem.

So we need the Dr. Pepper of cell phones?

Heinlein wasn't the only one. Some of Philip Jose Farmer's later work had a pretty sexually bizarre bent

They can join BlackBerry in the "any day now, we'll be on top!" movement.

His later books got more than a little bizarre and disturbing. Strange things seem to happen to aging SF writers.

I'm sure it's true to a point, but considering the fauna that has lived there long before humans came along, I'd say the jungle predates human activity by a very long period of time.

Because mass surveillance doesn't exist in other economic and political systems.