No need for all this, they already accomplished the goal without ever declaring an emergency. It took about 20 years to accomplish simply by deregulation and allowing 3 people to monopolize all of the companies with FCC licenses.

Did I ever once suggest that I would Liberal? The conservatives might tend to be the lesser evil of the two, but we have more than two parties.

I vote with the party that most closely aligns to my own views... that doesn't necessarily mean I'll vote for the winning party (I can't remember the last election where I voted for the winning party actually), but I know in the end that it's the most I can do to give my own personal values a voice in Parliament, and an alternative view for them to consider when enough people in my voting district vote the same.

Exactly. Microsoft tried to secure the software against the users, and tried to tell everyone it was more plain security.

I'm glad users didn't swallow it. MS's lame attempt at confusing everyone got the ridicule and hate it so richly deserved.

I'm guessing the desktop isn't the enviable real estate it once was. They're probably going to fumble around in the mobile space some more. The last time they were caught this flat-footed by a new technology, IBM was trying to start up competition with them on the desktop and Microsoft's position was quite strong. They just had to... borrow... the TCP/IP stack from BSD and they were good to go. They just had to poke IBM in the eye a couple of times to convince them to go elsewhere. I suspect they'll find Google to be a somewhat more difficult competitor to deal with. Especially given the state of Microsoft's search engine and... mobile platform.

Learning programming is relatively easy. Learning to write maintainable code, on the other hand, takes skill and experience.

Clerks and accountants used to do amazing things with Lotus-1-2-3 macros because Lotus cleverly leveraged what users already knew about spreadsheets into a Turing Complete set of commands. But often these users eventually got themselves into a jam, or made something that nobody else could decipher.

The funnest job in the world would be to create fake front sites for dictatorial countries. For example, I'd make "CNN.com" grab content from onion.com, and stupid.com content would be used to fill up "Amazon.com".

In "1984", the main character's job was to re-write history with fake BS. He seemed fairly content at that job until he took the proverbial red pill.

I agree, but I think that the article is talking about something different than that.

"Get off my red lawn!"

DoublcClick has such negative value that their servers should be blocked at firewalls, or at least "host.txt". Even if you have AdBlock, blocking them earlier saves bandwidth.

Defend your ideas.

That often doesn't fly. You have to choose your battles carefully, and not be seen as "complaining" about everything. Before being "forceful" over an idea that was originally rejected, make sure it's something that really matters and makes a difference.

It is certainly true that to the best of our sensibilities, we seem to have something like a free will. We can, for example, take any kind of data that we are exposed to in the present, and make what we believe to be free willed decision. I can concede that this appearance might very well be just an illusion, but if it were ever the case that we could somehow become aware that we were not making a free willed decision, then that illusion would disappear as well. Simply providing data to a person and allowing them to independently make what they think is a free-willed decision is not something that would dissolve such an illusion. Further, if free will does not really exist, then it should be possible to contrive a hypothetical situation where all of the decisions that someone will make can be anticipated before they occur.

If, however, it were ever allegedly possible to predict with perfect certainty what answer a person would give to a specific question, but the person had already decided to say that their answer would be the opposite of whatever their alleged predicted answer would be, then the prediction will always be wrong, so no mechanism for prediction such a decision exist, showing in turn that free will exists. If, however, they were not capable of deciding to do that, then they would not have any illusion of free will either. The illusion persists, however, so free will must also exist.

What's wrong with complacency? You get really used to it after a while even.

Amazon discovered it was for sale when they visited "buy.buy".

I don't buy your argument.

Yeah, I've moved past the point where people like you can shame me into flip flopping. I don't want you around me, and I don't value your approval.

It doesn't really matter why I hold this position, or how you want to label it. What matters is, I refuse to support companies that woo women away from traditional family life, and I refuse to be sneaky about it in the name of political correctness.