"reasonably intelligent animal kill for entertainment."

Human intelligent? Not sure.

It's called "society", asshole.

Bluetooth is a perfectly usable universal standard. I have a car with generic bluetooth, and everything (except for stupid Apple phones) works fine with it.

That's a great red herring you made there, but it's irrelevant. Taxes are on profits, not sales.

Stock valuations are based not only on actual assets, but future growth and earnings potential.

No, stock valuations are based on what people will pay for the shares.

A company-specific tech platform? Are you fucking kidding me? Why would I want something that's going to be dead many years before my car is dead? I drive a VW with generic Bluetooth, and it works perfectly with any gadget (except Apple... they're fucked). I would never buy a car with a brand-specific entertainment system.

Men's rights and white power groups and other groups that "fight" for the rights of an already empowered majority exist only because they choose to ignore history.

Oh, and here are the "terms" for getting information from a web server: HTTP. I can do whatever I want with the data. Thank god, the web is not structured in a way that requires "terms" to request a document from a web server. What you're describing was attempted by a few companies called "Compuserve" and "AOL".

Dude, web hosting is like $5.month. Setting up a web site and typing some shit isn't all that complicated or expensive. You can just run a web site on any old PC, too. If you need a fortune to run a web site, then maybe you should get into another line of work...

Many sites would not exist if its creators couldn't monetize it from google ads or some other ad network.

So what? Fuck 'em. Those aren't sites that I, at least, am interested in seeing. If you have to get *paid* to write something interesting or informative, then fuck you. I'll pay for people to do actual work (journalists).

The web existed before advertising, and it will exist after advertising, too. People can still create content for the web. Fewer will get paid for it, but so what? Hell, if anything, the web was much more interesting and undoubtedly more human before the commercial bullshit started in the mid 90's.

iTunes is a horrible, bug-ridden, overly complicated piece-of-shit that isn't allowed into our company. Are you sure you want to be comparing your product to iTunes...?

There's a thing in economics called "unequal knowledge" which explains why used cars have little value. The seller knows whether the vehicle is robust, but the buyer has no realistic way to tell

Used cars have little value? What the fuck are you talking about? Of course they do. And, if you want to buy a used car and you're worried, you just bring it to a mechanic to check out first.

With that being said, thank you, paranoid worriers for buying new things so the rest of us can get your used stuff at better prices.

Yes, now those five poor bastards who bought Windows 8 phones might, at some still unspecified date, get some decent apps.

Sssshh! Don't tell anybody, but those of us using Windows Phones don't need all of the silly "apps" that Android and Apple users need because Windows Phone 8.1 is actually useful, in and of itself!

Yup, nothing's perfect. But I certainly think that the telephone system in the US has served it's citizens very, very well over the years. Anybody can still get a phone in their house for about $25/month, no matter where you live. That, to me, is much more important than any kind of "telephone innovation" that the US system may or may not be missing.

That's supposed to be the point of our government: To provide equal access to basic services to *all* citizens, not to be a competitive, money-making machine that sells products or services to it's citizens. When something is decided to be a public good, such as basic telephone service, that means that every citizen, no matter how poor or remote, has access to the same service that everybody else does. The US telephone service has done that well, and it's time that Internet access is handled the same way, as well.

If you want "innovation", nothing is stopping you from purchasing that "innovation", but your ability to purchase it shouldn't come at the expense of the poorest members of our society having nothing at all.

I've yet to have anyone explain clearly why having the internet under the same regulatory regime as the telephone system would be a, net, positive thing.

Because telephone service is guaranteed to every American, no matter how poor, or how remote, for a fixed price.