Holy hell, that sounds unpleasant. You had me at "non syncro", and the rest was just icing on the cake.

No, but if you only have $90 to live on for a week, that extra $10 can make a huge difference in meeting your basic necessities. Maybe you'd have to skip a couple (home-cooked) meals in order to pay all your bills, or perhaps you'll only have half of the money for your electricity bill at the end of the month. Now imagine that you have $9000 to live on for the week. That extra $1000 isn't going to determine whether or not you'll be able to eat at every meal this week, or whether you'll be able to keep the lights on. Perhaps you'll be able to buy an extra computer this week, or a cruise next month, but you're not going to have to skip meals or otherwise go without the basics.

This is why most modern governments have a system of progressive taxation, which, just so we know we're talking about the same thing, means that the more you make, the higher your income tax rate becomes. In the US, you're taxed only 10% on your first $8,000 or so if you're filing as single (although deductions and credits often reduce this amount further), and then your next $25,000 or so is taxed at 15%, and the rate continues to increase on increasing amounts of income. (See also this.)

Such a system of taxation has been endorsed by that notorious commie Adam Smith: "It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expence, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion."

To restate the first paragraph in a different way, an additional 1/9 of your income goes much farther when you're making very little than when you're making very much. I hope this explains why there is no crack and no cognitive dissonance required to say that the difference between an income of $90 and $100 is much more significant than the difference between incomes of $9,000 and $10,000.

Actually, no: The courts did it. Or, if you want to be more specific, the court reporter, a former railroad president, did it.

If you want to equate the rights of free persons with those of legal constructs, start by removing the "limited liability" provisions of the laws which enable those constructs.

Corporations are possible only because of laws enabling their creation. Why, then, is it wrong that they be regulated by the same mechanism that allows for their existence?

People are different because they exist independently of laws.

You may point out that corporations are comprised, principally, of groups of people, and you'd be right, but they have more power than do individuals, primarily because they have more money than any person could hope to amass. When you combine this greater power with limited liability and other special rights that are allowed them, it becomes quite obvious that it is entirely appropriate to restrict their behavior.

I would propose that he consider the difference in price between buying a phone outright and buying it on a contract, and compare that to the cancellation fee, and see if the cancellation fee is pro-rated. It could very well be cheaper to have them subsidize your phone and pay the cancellation fee in a year than to buy it outright.

There is also speculation (I'll be honest; I'm too lazy to Google it right now) that the increase in allergies is due to our collective increase in cleanliness and hygiene. Studies have shown[citation needed] that allergy rates in first-world nations are much higher than in third-world nations. Further, they speculate that this is because the human immune system is pretty powerful and badass, and with all the anti-bacterial everything all about, and not allowing kids to get dirty, the immune system finds something to fight, which turns out to be food, in many cases.

Pets have been allowed in the cabin on US carriers for quite a while now. It was far from a new thing when I worked for an airline a decade ago.

It didn't seem to me like he was questioning that the kid was allergic, just about the correlation/causation due to proximity.

There's no need to put words like feet and inches in scare/irony quotes. They are actual units of measure, not just something he made up. You know, one US inch is exactly 2.54 of your "centimeters". A bit annoying, isn't it?

I'm not arguing that they are sensible units of measure, just that they are actual units of measure.

Could you provide a link to where he is quoted in context? I am genuinely curious about this, as it looks very bad for Schmidt.

I don't personally use an ad-specific blocker, but I do use NoScript and FlashBlock. This has the side effect of blocking the most obnoxious ads. Otherwise, I can think of exactly one time that I've blocked images from a host due to epilepsy-inducing GIF animation.

Now, it's extremely rare that I actually click on an ad, and I can't recall ever having purchased something after clicking an ad.

Nah, they could just slap on an "IPv6 fee" line-item that will never go away. If you have a land line, just take a look at it sometime and notice that you're getting charged for touch-tone service, and wonder if there's actually anybody *without* it anymore.

See also: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

You can... buy music?