For those of us old enough to have witnessed the last 40 years of computer evolution, I can tell you with 100% certainty that it's all about the user experience and not about low cost or availability. Apple's successful products are a pleasure to use. Apple's failures weren't. IMHO, nothing that Microsoft makes is a pleasure to use. There was a time when the computer nerd in me enjoyed dinking around in the OS or the hardware but no longer. I have work that I need to get done and anything that impedes my progress or is tedious to use gets tossed out. Sadly, I can't do that for everything I need a computer for (are you listening, Intuit?). I have the same view of the entirety of the web. The whole thing is built like the city of Cairo or the postal system of Costa Rica (pre 2007).

Because their pants are on fire. "Most people support" Wrong. Most people they polled support, perhaps. I, for one, have never been polled by the NYT.
Now, there's an article on Gizmodo that attempts to explain where body fat goes when you lose weight. Apparently, the majority of it is expelled as CO2. If that's true, then all gyms and diet companies and the people who patronize them are contributing to greenhouse gasses and should be taxed accordingly.

There are some markets where XDSL is being tested. It works by ganging multiple lower-speed DSL lines together like a RAID array.

There will never ever be income equality so there's no point in even discussing it. But "regulation" is a problem and actually, it isn't so much the regulations as it is the millions of people whose only functions are to a) make more regulations, b) enforce the regulations, and c) hire more people to do both a and b. There are fewer and fewer people who actually make some tangible product let alone a quality one. Meanwhile, there is an ever increasing number of leaches...I mean people who feed off the people making things. Have you noticed how many fees you pay for services every month whether or not you use the service? Have you noticed how often they try to sneak something into that laundry list of fees that's totally bullsh*t? Have you noticed that you're less likely to own something and more likely to be renting it? Have you noticed how many things you have to pay for every month that you didn't have to 20 years ago? I'd be willing to bet that people like Edison or the Wright Brothers would never have been able to accomplish what they did if they had a regulatory system like we do now. And don't get me started on the trial bar who is the epitome of society's leeches. The world is rapidly becoming a place where the people making the most money do so by force of law and not by persuasion.

You want to start a rumble?

Soooo....sh*t for brains?

And in the darkness, spit up the blue screen of death.

Building a cross-compiler for embedded development is a major pain on OS X when it does work.

Way back in the 80s, the Saudis knew that Iraq was going to invade Kuwait long before it ever happened. As a result, they spent a lot of money on arms. Over the past couple of years, they have been spending a lot of money on military training. So has the UAE and Jordan. Now the Saudis are building a 600-mile long border "fence" on the Iraqi border and buying even more arms. These guys know FAR more about what's going on with their neighbors than we in the West do or more likely care to admit. By tanking the price of oil, they put a lot more economic pressure on belligerent nations such as Iran who are heavily dependent on high oil prices. It's entirely possible that they're using this strategy as a preemptive strike and feel comfortable with it knowing that the U.S. has enough domestic production to prevent a 1970's-type of crisis. That crisis was started by the Iranians and piled on by the Saudis both of whom are key OPEC nations until the U.S came along and said, "You know, our naval fleet runs on oil-based fuel so we won't be able to afford to defend you unless you open the spigots again." They still need our military support.

A few years ago, Inuit released an online update to Quickbooks for Mac that effed your entire partition. I happened to be away on a business trip when this happened and I had to have my backup drive FedExed to me. Did Intuit offer to pay for that? Hell no. Did anyone file a class action suit? Who knows, but even if they did, I'd have gotten discounts for coupons for cellphone cases or something equally useless.

Somebody broke joystick support in Yosemite. Of course, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense given how little Apple cares about joysticks in general.

And for further amusement, get a load of this. On this month's electric bill, there's yet another new fee entitled Four-Corners adjustment. What's that, you say? Well, because environmentalists in Washington have decided that coal is evil and the Four-corners electric generating plant is coal-fired, it is therefore evil and must be shunned. Is APS going to eat that cost? Hell no. This is on top of the so-called Environmental benefits surcharge. Oh, so I have to bend over because a lot of people believe that electricity generation is bad for the planet. Got it. So, what's going to happen if global warming *cough* I mean climate change turns out to be total b.s.? Am I going to get all that money back plus interest? Yeah, right.

What's even more ludicrous is that in the case of my warehouse, because it's metered for three-phase power, the cost of the meter is ten times the cost of a two-phase residential meter at over $30 a month even though I don't use three-phase power. What this means is that even though I don't use Netflix, I'm still going to have to pay for the infrastructure improvements to get Netflix.

Funny that you should mention shampoo. Many years ago, my father was renting space in a warehouse to store his RV. The majority of the warehouse was used as a shampoo bottling operation. The owner was showing all of this to my dad. As it turns out, there was this giant tank of shampoo and many boxes of different brand bottles. So the same stuff was being branded and priced differently.

But to the issue of classifying ISPs as a utility, once you do that, the whole thing becomes a political football. States have entities like the Corporation Commission whose function is to exert public control on the utilities. In theory anyway. These are elected officials. The utility comes along as whines and complains that they can't continue to operate unless they get a rate increase. Publicly, anyway. Behind closed doors, these rate increases have already been negotiated. The officials have been bought and paid for because, after all, they need to campaign to keep their jobs. Somebody has to pay for that.

Ultimately, the consumer might think that they're data rates aren't being impeded because a piece of paper says so but there is no way they can prove it to themselves. The ISPs aren't going to invest money in "infrastructure" unless they can recoup the investment and make more money than they did before. If a mandate comes down from some government bureaucrats to increase your download speed from 10MB/s to 20MB/s, they're going to get a rate increase. If a mandate comes down that they have to invest in rural internet access, they're going to get a rate increase in exchange. Personally, I'd rather Netflix users pay for their excess bandwidth.

A few years ago, Intuit released an "update" to Quickbooks for Macs. Upon installation, poof, there goes your entire partition table. Completely unrecoverable. In my case, I happened to be on a business trip and had to get my backup drive FedExed to me. Did Intuit offer to pay for that? Nope. Rat bastards.

Now, I'll grant you that Intuit doesn't seem to give a crap about the Mac but having switched over to the Windoze version of Quickbooks so I could get the Manufacturing edition features, I've come to the conclusion that they don't give a crap about their Windoze customers either given their track record of ignoring enhancements or additions to core functionality and instead trying to push people onto the web.

So, if a company doesn't disclose a breach in 30 days, what happens? They get fined? By the government? Who gets the money? What does a punitive regulation solve? What if the company doesn't themselves find out about the breach for 30 days?