It's not necessarily the FUD that worked. Read the presentation - the proposals were killed by a State senator that was bribed to make a law that said "no office in this state can sell high speed Internet"
Look at the T-Mobile fine print for the BYOD plans:
"If you switch plans you may be bound by existing term (including early termination provisions) and/or charged an up to $200 fee."
AT&T (same "no-contract plan" page:
Early termination fee up to $325 may apply.
The pricing for a no-contract is actually similar or more expensive than my current 2 year contracts AND you have to pay for the phone.
They're not ditching the two year contracts. They're just locking you into a contract for 1 or 2 years without giving you a free phone. Big difference.
Any sysadmin worth their salt is going to cost a pretty penny. If you cheap out on the workers, you'll get what you pay for including multi-million dollar license fees. The license fees for MS products in EDU is currently at ~$1000/year/FTE or full-time student. You only need to have ~50-150 people total (depending on your area) to pay for a good sysadmin.
If you make such claims, please back them up with statements. The latest iOS upgrade has been a great improvement to both speed and usability for my iPhone 4 and my iPad 1 is no slower today through all the upgrades than when I started using it 3 years ago, it still runs all the games and whatnots.
The problem is that the whole computer eco-system is built on the premise that whoever is buying doesn't have a clue what the fuck they are doing. Most of the niche and custom software (think PeopleSoft which comes as a set of basic HTML blocks and a database) is something that can be built much better for a company in less than 6 months by a team of dedicated and decent programmers.
Yet, the person buying doesn't have a clue what they are doing so they throw a few million at it and 2-3 years of H1B's and overpaid (for their qualifications) contractors to come up with a system that is more broken in the end than when it started. The same happens everywhere and at every level. Desktop software: Throw a few millions at Microsoft and Dell so everyone can browse the web and receive the occasional e-mail on a system that could run Crysis 5 when it comes out in 2020 even though a Raspberry Pi would be good enough for most of the fleet. Web software: throw a few millions in the directions of Oracle and IBM in order to serve out 99% static pages.
Check your house's breaker box. Most likely you DO have 240V/60Hz coming in. And with any digital inverter worth it's salt, 50Hz is just a matter of a jumper or switch.
10-15%? Think more along the lines of 50%. You have to add ~15% in taxes but you don't just have to deal with SSI and taxes. You now also have to deal with accountants and lawyers to make sure everything is on the up-and-up, make sure your workplace conforms to OSHA and state standards, disability claims and benefits, vacation benefits and other employees to get coverage, FMLA, a variety of insurances to protect you from litigating employees, medical benefits...
Not saying that workers should go without all those benefits but for some that is a burden too heavy to carry if the competition doesn't follow the same rules.
They don't hijack it, the whois providers are themselves the hijackers. In case of your command line utility, it is possible your ISP simply provides their own whois (there is no requirement for whois to query the 'official' databases and it is trivial to put your own 'cache' in).
And the best thing is that most of these 'hijacked' domains are never paid for, ICANN allows for ~$0.25 (refundable) to 'reserve' a domain name. Eg. an ISP or web service may do this as a 'service' so you're sure to have it when you pay for it (with them). Then if you don't pay for it, the domain is set up for expire and goes on a feed where decisions are made (most likely an algorithm based on keywords and name lists) and then registrars are bombarded for seconds leading up to the expiration time by requests to register the domain in a similar 'reservation' fashion.
You know you can already do all of that and plenty of people do it. The problem is that the cost to do so is prohibitive unless you make more than a few million a year and can pay your own set of accountant and lawyers.
So Russia?
There is a difference in the kind of crookedness. In China/India, you pay (local) government to stop meddling with your business; in the US you pay (local) government to meddle with your competitors' business.
They already are for tax and other purposes. This ruling basically says that if your company has any ties overseas, the oversees assets now fall under US jurisdiction.
How about cosmonauts? US-centric much!
Why bash Apple or big banks? Whatever these companies are doing is within a legal framework. If you don't like it change the legal framework. Every brand will attempt to protect their product lines and profits and will do whatever they can to do so.
Waste not, get your budget cut next year.
