Yawn, the mail, calendar and contacts apps on my iPhone already work pretty well with the change server at work. Every now and then they stop syncing but I simply turn off the syncing of those 3 items and then turn it back on (I don't even have to delete the account info just flip 3 switches). Wait a few minutes till the phone sucks down the data again and I'm off. It's not outlook that's indispensable, it's Word, PowerPoint and Excel. Why would I pay for Outlook, the only thing I really miss is the ability to set my out of office messages from the phone. Filters are another things missing, but that's something that's complicated enough that the once every year I set one up I would just do it from my laptop. Am I gonna switch apps for that? Nope.

I call BS on this. No one is abridging anyone's freedom of speech when they advocate regulating corporate communications. The share holders can still band together and say anything they could as a company and they could spend just as much money if not more. What they can't do is spend the money of all the shareholders on a viewpoint that they don't all necessarily support based on a majority control and call it a business expense which they get to write off. People have free speech rights not corporations and not unions and not churches.

Bull. Levy a fine larger than the market cap of the company (or even greater than the assets.) When they can't pay the company as a whole can go into bankruptcy and the government can be awarded the company as a whole functioning intact corporation (if they don't get it all they can get enough to control it). There is no reason the company needs to be broken up, it's a working functioning corporation. As the now largest owner the government can fire several high level employee including the CEO, dissolve the board and sell all shares to the public. Low level employees with no connection to the crime can continue to work. A functioning profit making concern continues to exist and the shareholders and bond holders get zero'd out, thus providing them with incentive not to be so passive and allow a corporation to do shit like this again next time. The government gets money in the end. It's a win-win-win!

"The information involved is typical ad-related analytic data?" Are there ads on the government run healthcare signup site? Why are there ads?

Guess what, men get discouraged from engineering too! If I quit every time, I failed an exam or a class or or was told I wasn't right for the honors program or was touched inapproriately by a professor I wouldn't be an engineer.

Women of all ages should know that they can and should pursue their interests in ANY field. The fact that you've been discouraged doesn't mean it was a gender thing, plenty of us males in engineering did to. Lots of my male colleagues were told they weren't good enough; for some it was true and for others it wasn't but they didn't really want it enough. Having seen how many men it happened to and seeing it wasn't a gender thing for them leads me to believe that in many instances it isn't for women either.

I'm kinda curious why you think video games, socializing with coworkers after work and bowling are qualities that women will hate and day care, family culture, lack of crunch time and brining your kids to work don't appeal to men?

Perhaps it's just me but that seems rather sexist to me.

They all seem like positives to me.

Further, going to "meet ups" related to your core field or technology seems like a very efficient way to find people with the skills you need.

Good grief I wish for the return of the sanity of those days!

That's just not true. While he may own $20Billion worth of assets, they surely don't pay that much in income (dividends) something in the neighbor hood of 1% to 5% would be close which puts him earning somewhere between $200M and $1B. A $70 million a year tax write off is very valuable. I don't understand why he should get any write off. He bought something that he believes will make him money knowing full well that the physical assets and cash of that entity are far less than the purchase price. He is not a naive investor. If he sells it and loses money let him take a loss and write it off otherwise why should the rest of us subsidize him.

I'm not sure this is true. If you could hack my fridge to control the temperature then it would be fairly easy to turn it off right after I leave for work and turn it back on before I return at the end of a long day. Many foods in my fridge like liquids (excluding milk) and condiments wouldn't go back in a noticeable way, but it could leave me at increased risk for salmonella from the chicken or eggs.

If you claim (in large print) to be selling me unlimited internet access and are then charging me more when I go over some limit, then yes it's a cap, and the FTC dam well ought to be going in and bitch slapping any company doing this type of thing even if they put an asterix with words in tiny print to the effect of "when we say unlimited what we really mean is as long as you don't exceed the limits we actually put on it"

And when they conspired with others to commit a crime did it also become a RICO crime? (I must admit I don't know what the hurdle is to make something RICO)

Yes, but remember broadband isn't regulated like telecom. That's part of the whole fight over reclassifying broadband as common carriers so that they would have to comply with net neutrality. True the telecom services (phones but not voip phones) are regulated the way you say, and anything that cherry picks the profitable areas impacts the ability to subsidize the unprofitable ones. But broadband isn't classified in the same way and so I don't think you can say that they are required to offer the services everywhere. Certainly where I live, I'd like to get ATT UVerse which they offer in other part of my Silicon Valley town but not where I live (close to Stanford). I've been asking for it for years and I'd really love to hear that they are obligated to provided it but, clearly, they don't think they are.

Suppose I bought chips specifically for this feature and now you've disabled that feature in firmware. Can you say class action law suit?

First I'm not fat and I don't drink 44oz of soda at a time, thanks for the ad hominem attack. I have not chosen for you to subsidize me or anyone else. You've decided that you want to pay for people who have no health insurance (I assume that's because you think that's what a fair, just or civilized society does) and that as a result of your choice you now get the right to tell those who do and don't have health insurance what to do so that your choice to pay for people who don't have health insurance isn't so costly for you. I understand your choice I'm just not willing to let you take away my rights to fix the problem you created (and with a law that does't really fix the problem but simply inconveniences people, see your buy two fatty comment.)

That's your opinion of what constitutes a civilized society. I don't agree. In my equally valid opinion, a civilized society ought to protect us from each other. If a civilized society would like to educate me as to why it believes what I'm doing is bad for me that's great. If it wants to tell me what to do, I don't consider that civilized.