Everyone understands that, in the current system in the USA, politicians have to give and take. The problem that people have with this is twofold:
1. Because the whips have much less power than in other countries (such as the UK), politicians in the USA can blame others when they don't do what their votors want them to do.
2. People get upset when politicians abandon core issues in the name of "horsetrading".

People understand that they won't get everything their representative promised, but when they get only token, minor changes, that's when things are wrong.

I could see someone wanting to own a car that they never drove because they had a driver. The thought is silly but I can picture it and know it is certainly true in some cases. I love to drive.

Your personal anecdote is interesting, but it has little relevence to my point that a tiny number of people want more objects just so that they can possess them. Look at the prices of art by famous old masters and how the value depends mostly on who painted the picture, not on the merits of the artwork.

They know that a ban on Whatsapp would be immensely unpopular and would make millions of people realize how stupid their drive against encryption is.

Instead, their intent is to force Whatsapp and others to voluntarily hand over the communications of their users, much like Blackberry (reportedly) agreed to do for countries with regressive regimes.

The one thing I don't get is that flights are constantly over weight, or at least that's their excuse for jacking up baggage fees, so how do they expect to handle the extra weight from 80 more people?

Where did you get that idea from? They jack up baggage fes because they can, no other reason.

Planes can also take more or less freight -- but freight doesn't pay a much as passengers, so they would prefer to make up the weight with passengers rather than freight.

You are using outliers to claim all of humanity is bound by those rules. There are plenty or rich people that just live and dont worry about increasing their wealth. Trump is a greedy fuck, nothing more. Dont use greedy fucks as an example for all of us

The problem is that those outliers will fuck up utopia for the rest of us. Their greed is the downfall of society. We already see that today, with increasing wealth disparity and historical data that shows that overall reduced wealth is associated with increased disparity.

Says the guy who wants 99,999 ferraris so he can drive a different one every day. You don't? Huh, weird, I guess there is a limit on want, need, and desire.

Go ask Floyd Mayweather what he does with the cars he buys: he is known for buying them, then never driving them. Why? I have no idea, but he clearly feels some need to own them.

It's an interesting concept, but I think that it is flawed.

The problem is that the people who want Reputation don't really have the skills to get it. Look at society today -- sociopaths are over-represented amongst the wealthy. Many of these sociopaths don't have any advantages other than their lack of concern for others. Thus in a true meritocracy, they would not be wealthy or have a good reputation.

Society has to deal with these socipaths before any kind of meritocracy is possible.

I took a look at the postmaster tools, and as soon as the DNS update goes through (which proves to Google that I'm allowed to manage our postmaster tools) I'll have a better idea what options it gives us.

I registered and validated a couple of domains. However, the tools show no options for me. Probably we don't send enough emails to gmail, but I also wonder if what it needs is a number of emails AFTER registering.

Why the hell would I want to try to manage Windows - with its configuration management based on APIs (WMI, CIM etc.) - with a shell and tools designed to manage Unix, where configuration management is based around text files?

This needs to appeal to Unix users -- Why would experienced Windows users want SSH when Powershell can be used to manage remote computers?

Firstly, I would imagine that a combination of Powershell utilities and coreutils would be very effective. Secondly, not everything is about configuration management. I use cygwin extensively in my job, running a BASH shell and using many of the coreutils to start, run and analyze processes.

Some low-level customer support person didn't do what they were supposed to do in order to stop the calls

Initially, yes, but what about the calls that happened after she initiated her lawsuit? None of the lawyers asked if the calls were continuing? None of the bosses asked if the calls were continuing? This wasn't just a low-level f*ck-up.

"they'll just pass the cost on to consumers". I'm at a loss to determine what you think the alternative would be.

Reduced dividends to stockholders. Or reduced retained earnings (which should result in reduced stock price).

They've already announced they want to add SSH/SCP to Windows Server 10/2016.

Without a BASH shell, GNU utilities, etc., not likely to have much impact.

Microsoft wants to see BSD succeed,

Indeed, Microsoft wants BSD to succeed over Linux. BSD can be controlled, Linux can't due to the licenses used.

I'll probably be modded down to troll for this but: Microsoft indirectly sounded the death knell for a product today that was killed by Linux -- Windows Phone.