This. When they first introduced ads, you could go into settings and opt out. I did so, then turned off auto-updating. I'm happy with the version of the client I have (2.something)

Why does the FTC even bother? How is that supposed to deter anybody?

My guess is that the abilities of the FTC to punish are severely hampered so that they can't be used on otherwise-legit businesses when they do a bad thing.

That reminds me of waiting in a very long line (maybe it was Christmas?) to send packages through the USPS, and someone at one of the counters spent their entire time ranting to the postal worker about how USPS service was horrible and they hoped the service would become a private one, and that private industry was better.

If I'd had my wits about me then, I would have said "Hey, if you like private industry so much, why are you here instead of FedEx or UPS?"

Their ranting probably delayed the rest of us getting to the counter by a minute.

I often wonder why we've not heard a peep about Half Life (2: Episode) 3. I understand the concept of Valve Time, but even taking that into consideration we're closing in a decade since Episode 2 (and the whole episodic started with the claim that they could put out an Episode every six months). To have nothing, not even a single screenshot or even an official "yeah, we're making Pikm- er, Episode 3", in 8 years, seems really bizarre. At best we had a blurb about "Ricochet 2" as a thinly-veiled explanation of the HL3 lack of information in 2012. I understand that they want to get it right, but at this point they risk "Duke Nukem Forever" syndrome, where the vacuum created by the lack of information is filled by user hype and it will become impossible to meet gamer's expectations. (I don't expect the eventual HLF3 to be as poor as DNF was, though.)

My assumption as this point is that a small group is quietly tooling away at HL3 using the Source 2 engine (perhaps co-developing). Once both HL3 is more-or-less done, they'll sit on it and just keep the graphics updated. Right now Valve has so many things its trying (like SteamOS) and is still getting a ton of attention/money from Steam trading cards and marketplace, TF2 hats, and DOTA 2 that the company itself doesn't need HL3. Thus it will maintain and use HL3 as its "Final Fantasy" if it feels the company could be in financial trouble within two years. They could release it on the N-Gage and it will still sell millions of copies, so it's like one funds where you put something in and can't touch it for 20 years.

ow does a single company make bad decision after bad decision so persistently?

In the case of SEGA, I think another interview with Tom Kalinski spoke volumes about the problem: Sega of Japan. The interview touches on the fact that SEGA partnered with Sony to create a CD peripheral but cut their ties before it was complete. Nintendo also did this, to make a peripheral for the SNES, and cut ties with Sony to partner with Philips (Sony found out about the change when Nintendo announced their partnership with Phillips.) Sony then took the work they had done with the two video game giants of the time and created the Playstation. In particular, I think the following part of the interview highlights the whole problem with SEGA (emphasis mine):

I remember Joe Miller and I were talking about this, and we had been contacted by Jim Clark, the founder of SGI (Silicon Graphics Inc.), who called us up one day and said that he had just bought a company called MIPS Inc. which had been working on some things with some great R&D people, and it just so happened that they came up with a chip that they thought would be great for a video game console. We told them that in the U.S., we don't really design consoles; we do the software, but it sounded interesting and we would come over and take a look at it. We were quite impressed, and we called up Japan and told them to send over the hardware team because these guys really had something cool. So the team arrived, and the senior VP of hardware design arrived, and when they reviewed what SGI had developed, they gave no reaction whatsoever. At the end of the meeting, they basically said that it was kind of interesting, but the chip was too big (in manufacturing terms), the throw-off rate would be too high, and they had lots of little technical things that they didn't like: the audio wasn't good enough; the frame rate wasn't quite good enough, as well as some other issues.

So, the SGI guys went away and worked on these issues and then called us back up and asked that the same team be sent back over, because they had it all resolved. This time, Nakayama went with them. They reviewed the work, and there was sort of the same reaction: still not good enough.

Now, I'm not an engineer, and you kind of have to believe the people you have at the company, so we went back to our headquarters, and Nakayama said that it just wasn't good enough. We were to continue on our own way. Well, Jim Clark called me up and asked what was he supposed to do now? They had spent all that time and effort on what they thought was the perfect video game chipset, so what were they supposed to do with it? I told them that there were other companies that they should be calling, because we clearly weren't the ones for them. Needless to say, he did, and that chipset became part of the next generation of Nintendo products (N64).

Sure, they repaid with interest "that money" which was their bailout

And the interest they paid back was paid for by:
A) Increasing fees and penalties on customers
B) Stagnating wages and bonuses of regular employees
C) Laying off employees
D) Decreasing the compensation and withholding bonuses of the CxOs and upper management that led the company to needing the loans, by a large amount
E) Decreasing their profits
F) All of the above (except D and E)

So when the cop believes that the wallet a man is removing from his coat slowly, after being shouted at to show ID, is a gun then shooting the man five times is justifiable?

I like T-mobile as well, but have a completely opposite plan. I rarely use my phone (no social life), don't want to do anything on the web, and never travel outside a 60 mile radius from home. (Once in the last three years.) I dropped Verizon and switched to T-mobile, going with their prepaid option and a cheap flip phone. I top off the account and pay 10c min/text. This might seem like a lot for those who use their phones quite often, but for me this is great. With Verizon I was paying $70/mo, even after military and a secondary discount, and they said I couldn't get a no-data plan if I had a smartphone (I had a Droid 2 with them). With T-Mobile I've averaged about $15/mo.

Their signal can be weak and spotty in my area (Boulder, CO and abouts), and I can't get any picture/long texts (a rare occasion for me) because I don't have a data plan, but outside those I am extremely happy that I switched to them.

It is just a bunch of whiny asshats who care about specs on paper rather than real world performance.

If "real world performance" cannot at least meet "specs on paper", then it is false advertising.

Yes, in this case it's an extremely little thing compared to the overall card, but corporations are trying their damnedest to slip in/out whatever they can at the expense of the consumer. So long as they can get away with it (which includes paying a fine/lawsuit that costs less than the profit from their misleading statements) they will continue to do it. If we can use lawsuits or laws to stop such practices now, while the claims are relatively small, it's for the best.

If we instead say "eh, that's no big deal", then it will continue and latter suits will be harder to win. At some point it might become easy to win, say when the box reads "Will not set your house on fire!", no less than five house fires are caused directly by normal operation of the card, AND the card spontaneously bursts into flames just sitting on the defendant's desk, but it's in our best interest to fight these practices now rather than waiting for that time.

Here's an article about how your listed height can affect your chances. There's a "ceiling" for women and a "floor" for men, according to this study (though that link is Daily Mail, so don't bet your life on this info.)

The reason that they don't offer auto-update is that, if they did, Adobe/Oracle wouldn't be able to offer you crapware along with your update, pre-checked for your convenience (Norton something and Ask.com Toolbar, respectively.)

it's valves site after all so why not?

Because that goes from private censorship to impersonation, which can run afoul of a lot of laws in a lot of countries even for something as relatively "innocent" as game recommendation.

In this case, Valve is simply refusing to pass on the message to the other party in one circumstance (one specific domain). Not a good thing, but not illegal or even necessarily amoral (though that is up for debate) when done through their own service. In the other circumstance (related domains) they pass the message on but change the client behavior to not automatically open the browser. This is also their prerogative, again neither illegal nor amoral (except, perhaps, mischaracterizing the site as malicious), though if they tried doing this for links to, say, EA's Origin website they could be sued by EA for anti-competitive practices.

Because children never lose objects, even medium-sized ones. If Mommy is sick, the last thing the child will be thinking is "where did I put my green fun phone?"

The option of a panic button that is firmly attached somewhere (or, better yet, a panic button in every room, firmly attached) won't get lost, and the kid can be taught easily enough to hunt down the nearest one and smack it repeatedly.

I suppose you could strap the phone to the kid somehow, but it has to come off at some point so it's still not as reliable. You could combine the two ideas, and have the phone attached to a fixed object and easy to get to.

There's building off of others' work, and then there's just adding a veneer.

Using your scenario, what Elementary OS seems to do is to take a bread product created by someone else, already wrapped, and take the bread out to put in their own nicer-looking wrapper. They don't claim to make the bread, true, but what they add is a miniscule part of the overall product. They then say that people can pay the same price as the originally-wrapped bread, but it would be good to pay more. This is the veneer. (Incidentally, this is how a lot of store brands work, but the store brand is instead cheaper than the name brand.)

If they were building off of someone else's work they would use the bread to make a sandwich they sold or to make other derivatives with it (croutons, offer bags of crumbs to people at parks for duck feeding, some food-art project).

Not that the veneer is necessarily bad; if someone feels that it offers more value over the original product and would like to pay more, fine and dandy.

Yes, but you have to have substantial capital to use as influence in the commodities market and perhaps a connection to some mercenaries in an oil-rich country, primarily in the middle east.