Unless you're buying music and you can't find a particular track on Google or Amazon.

You forgot watching Hollywood movies (lawful DVD player, lawful BD player, clients for each country's DRM'd streaming services) and preparing tax returns.

Unless a service provided only by said "robber barons" is required to get and keep a source of income to keep a roof over your head.

So /r/carporn isn't enough transmission porn for car geeks?

Many (but not all) can choose another locality.

So why over the past decade and a half hasn't Microsoft added additional support in Windows Notepad for LF, on which every other major platform has since standardized?

Last time I checked (which was today), creating a Gmail account required a mobile phone number. So for someone buying a mobile phone in order to have a mobile phone number in order to create a Google account, where is one supposed to search for reviews of mobile phones? If a different web search engine, then why not just stick with that instead of using Google Search?

I was building up to that. An oligopoly can have the same negative effect on buyers as a monopoly.

Let's just say that curation helps keep a flood of amateurish games from cluttering the list of new releases presented to prospective game buyers.

The relevant market here is not Windows but operating systems compatible with widely used applications. And at the time, enough of those were exclusive to for Windows that Microsoft was using its monopoly in one area (copyright in Windows) to secure or strengthen market power in other areas.

I agree. Access to rights of way is a natural monopoly that has been allocated inefficiently in the past, and I presented an alternative to this inefficiency in another post.

I grew up as the only conservative in a family of upper middle class liberals. It always infuriated me that poor people were constantly getting free stuff, and I bought in to the whole poor people are lazy mentality.

Similar conservative here. I never really bought into the "poor people are lazy" meme. The hardest worker I've ever met was a poor Mexican who turned out to be an illegal alien. This guy was so dedicated to doing a good job I would've endorsed him for citizenship in an instant. (Likewise I haven't found the lazy, rich fat cat meme to be true either. The vast majority of rich people I know are some of the hardest working people I've met, frequently sleeping only 4-6 hours a night because they're working the other 18-20 hours. It's like they're always firing on all cylinders and don't know how to let up. Even when on vacation, they'll try to sneak off to get some work done.)

What I have noticed though is that poor people tend to make much worse financial decisions, moreso than not-poor people. e.g. A poor friend asked me for help buying a laptop. I knew he didn't have much money, he knew I knew, so I worked my butt off finding him a great deal. I eventually found him a refurb i3 laptop for $235 (when he sold it 2 years later, it was selling on eBay for $265). I felt satisfied that I'd done a good deed to help a poor person. Then the next week I learned that he'd bought a 64GB iPad for $800 (the extra $100 was to have his name engraved on it). ...

They don't need money. What they need is a systematic, comprehensive, plan for how to get them off the bottom. The single biggest factor keeping poor people poor, is the responsibility for children. As noted, often times, a parent finds themselves as the sole caregiver for children, and they are consequently trapped, as the responsibilities of childrearing often conflict with the responsibilities that employers would place upon employees (such as reliable attendance, and schedule flexibility). The simplest solution to the problem would be to do away with welfare and unemployment benefits entirely and replace them with guaranteed services for their dependents such as 50 hours of weekly daycare

That was exactly my conclusion too after managing a hotel with a lot of low-income employees. So many of them were single parents or were in families where both parents worked, that a good chunk of their income went to babysitting or daycare. Since the hotel usually had empty rooms that could be used for babysitting, I looked into what it would take to start up daycare services for our employees.

OMG. The legal liability and insurance requirements were crippling. Apparently parents are a sue-happy bunch when it comes to the tiniest scratch on their little darlings. Later I talked about it with a friend who ran a daycare center and he pretty much confirmed what I'd found. Liability insurance was his biggest expense, and he was always one lawsuit away from being put out of business. Eventually we just made it a policy where we would comp workers an empty room for a day for emergencies. What they did with the room was their business. If they couldn't find a babysitter and wanted to dump their kids in said room in front of a TV while they worked, and they and co-workers would check in on them every 10-15 minutes, we (management) would look the other way.

It's pretty sad to hear people suggest that sole purpose of a persons time on earth is to work hard and be productive.

Economic activity = sum of (productivity)

Productivity is the fundamental measure of economic output. The more productive the average individual is, the higher the standard of living is (everything produced is also everything consumed). If you're suggesting a person not be as productive as they can, you're advocating that the standard of living be lowered. That's really what all the economic development since the industrial revolution has been about. Leveraging machines and alternate energy sources (i.e. other than human and animal muscle power) to radically increase per-person productivity, which has proportionately increased the standard of living.

If you want to take a break and relax, that's fine. But you'd better be damned sure that your productivity while working is enough to "pay" for that relaxation time. The Germans are great at this (I've worked with them). They work super-hard when they are working and so are very productive. But once they're off work or if they're on vacation, they relax more than most people I've seen. It's ok though because their high productivity while working is more than enough to pay for it.

Money is actually just a (poor) representation of productivity, one whose value in terms of productivity isn't even constant. So thinking about economics in terms of money can result in very misleading conclusions. e.g. If you double everyone's pay, everyone becomes 2x as wealthy, right? Nope. If you double everyone's pay, then prices also double (prices of goods and services are what bring in revenue used to pay people). So in terms of income, it's a wash. Productivity hasn't changed, so fudging with the value of money doesn't change income or expenses. What does change is savings. The doubling of income and prices means the value of anything saved as money is halved. So anyone holding their savings as money (like poor and middle-class people do, instead of in non-monetary assets like real estate or stocks like rich people do) will find their wealth has been halved. Precisely the opposite of what you thought would happen when you doubled wages.

I wonder how much of "invented here" syndrome is related with frustration with curation on the popular curated platforms (iOS, Windows Phone, Windows RT, and game consoles). Cryptographic lockdown applied by the operating system publisher blocks end users from writing their own applications or writing a mod for an existing application. Because people are unwilling to go through the organizational overhead of becoming a licensed developer, they stick with the vanilla version of whatever they can get from the platform's official app store.

In a broader sense, Windows monopolizes the users of the large set of applications that are exclusive to Win32. The findings of fact in United States v. Microsoft spelled out the "applications barrier to entry" responsible for Windows market share.

Phrasing my point in a manner that you will most readily understand depends on your answer to the following question: If cellular weren't a cartel, then how could all four cellular carriers get away with raising pay-as-you-go texting rates at the same time?

Just to be sure: You mean keep the gaming PC and run the non-gaming stuff on the $199 PC, right? Then the question for households that currently have a $199 PC becomes whether to buy the expensive gaming PC or to buy one of the consoles.

Don't worry; I agree that PC users are masters of their own respective experiences.

Some other Slashdot users would argue that this curation serves a purpose, namely saving people's time from having to wade through the crappiest of the crap, which is 90% according to Theodore Sturgeon, and that the profitable majority of people have been Stockholmed into not "feel[ing] hampered by that. Have you looked into what caused the North American video game recession of 1983-1984?

With Jerry, Fievel Mousekewitz, Elizabeth Brisby, and others, who needs Mickey Mouse?