If they can't make a profit without bombarding people with ads, maybe they fail at being entrepreneurs. It's not my job as a consumer to prop up bad business plans.

There's Amazon Prime for Business?

The website should be a way for the business to reach new potential customers. Not an ends to producing profit in itself.
I buy plenty on Amazon despite blocking those affiliate third-party retailer ads at the bottom of the pages.
There are porn websites that operate on giving away short video samples, and subscribers paying for full videos.

I block ads on ALL websites.

Using this technique, can they tell us if the NSA did write the Regin Malware now?

You might also note this is going entirely off Apple's numbers. We haven't added the money from the markets of Android and other platforms.

It is for Microsoft. If they don't make a new Windows release visually different in some significant way most people will see no reason to upgrade, which will make the product a commercial failure (or at least, not enough of a success to make Wall Street happy). Now, it's true, if Microsoft were do make a new version of Windows significantly faster performing and more secure then they might get a bunch of people on board even if it had the same interface as before, adding shiny to software is much less work than actually improving the product itself.

Why would you willingly watch ads?

I think you mean "pot calling kettle and all that".

[YouTube] now uses its HTML5 video player by default in Google's Chrome, Microsoft's IE11, Apple's Safari 8, and in beta versions of Mozilla's Firefox browser. At the same time, YouTube is now also defaulting to its HTML5 player on the web.

You mean the web you browse with Google's Chrome, Microsoft's IE11, Apple's Safari 8, and in beta versions of Mozilla's Firefox?
Am I missing something here, or are these sentences completely redundant?

You are familiar with the story of the Boy Who Cried Wolf, right?

Not a Nation of Wimps, a nation of media outlets run by large corporations that would like to cause a buying spree of disaster-readiness supplies.
Last time there was an ice storm in my area roads got shut down hard, we were just fine for food and only left the house, to walk to nearby store, because we were so damn bored staying indoors and wanted something to drink besides what we had. Water and food were not an issue with what we normally kept on hand.

I'm surprised no ones suggested building a dome over the White House yet.

Doesn't that only supports my opinion there is some obvious favoritism going on here? If the primary goal of the media is to get views then why wouldn't they be leaping all over a story about high-profile lobbyist being caught in a child sex ring? They normally like to report alleged pedophiles regardless of how strong the evidence. Why are they letting something so juicy stay under the radar?

Apple had it written into their carrier agreements they retained full control of the OS and updating it. Carriers simply are not allowed to block stuff like that. Plus, you can always update your phone through USB with iTunes.

Google gave the carriers more power to change Android and control things like software updates. Some of this was necessary (more hardware to support from different manufactures, requiring drivers and testing my those OEMs), but a lot of it was because it's what OEMs/carriers wanted (so they could differentiate their handsets from competitors and for business reasons).

Carriers wielded this power as a club to force people into upgrading their phones more. Lots of earlier versions of Android were, you have to admit, kinda half-baked. Google released new versions that filled in many of these gaps in the phone features, but carriers didn't make those updates available to current Android users as often as they should, preferring to make the new Android version a bullet point on the features list for new handsets (which defeats the whole purpose of a smartphone OS).

Why did Google make their agreements like this? It was easier to get agreements with carriers to support the platform at all. Remember that Apple had to work very hard to get in the door at all with the iPhone, eventually signing an exclusivity agreement with AT&T to get them to come on board. Verizon would plain not agree to Apple in a setup where they did not have the ability to customize the OS and disable features they didn't like (as they were famous for at the time), add carrier branding to the hardware, etc. Once the iPhone became the must-have device of the time and AT&T's exclusivity agreement ended it was only then the other carriers agreed to Apple's terms.