In other words, within a year or two we will be rolling out ads that you will be forced to watch before you can view the programming you pay a subscription fee for.

Except that it isn't an instant. Insulin takes effect pretty darned quickly. Thyroid changes can take days or weeks, and the synthetic hormones themselves actually have to be taken under specific circumstances, as absorption into the blood stream orally requires no significant intake of food. My wife takes her medication early in the morning and then cannot eat for something like three hours.

Having an artificial thyroid that would more closely monitor TSH (thyroid-stimulating hormone, the way your body monitors and adjusts thyroid hormone levels is complex) and adjust actual thyroid hormone levels directly would be far better in the long run.

Pretty amazing advance. Now I wish they'd do the same for the thyroid. My wife had hers removed due to cancer nine years ago, and has to manage her thyroid levels via synthetic thyroid hormone pills, which, while effective, are crude and require regular testing to make sure she's not hyperthyroidic or hyothyroidic.

"The Supreme Court doesn't accept my legal genius, therefore the Supreme Court is wrong, and I remain the greatest constitutional expert EVERRR!!!!"

Internet trolls and other hyperbolic posters have been around as long as the Internet was around. I remember when I first started posting one Usenet in the very early 1990s (1990-91 or so), that there were many flamewars that ended with everything from legal threats to, at least in one case, a poster threatening to show up at another poster's house and beat him senseless, and in those days many of us actually had our home addresses in our bloody sigs! I don't think anyone ever really took it seriously, even when the poster making the threats was a net kook (and ye olden days there were some legendary kooks, particularly in places like talk.origins). People, particularly when shrouded in anonymity, behave in ways that they would never dream of behaving in person, which to my mind is a key to the notion that most of even the vilest trolls are really just assholes letting off steam in public forums.

I'm not saying that all conduct on the Internet should be protected, but I think we have to accept that anonymity and instant communications from any corner of the globe creates a somewhat different situation. I've personally been threatened with bodily harm a couple of times in the over a quarter of a century I've been on the Internet, and while I can't say it didn't effect me, I suppressed any desire to panic and realized that the assholes in question were, well, just assholes, and the odds were pretty damned low that I was ever in danger.

It is if you have the right lawyers.

Sure they could have screwed it up more. They could have mentioned that Alpha Centaurians have invaded Duluth, and are transforming Minnesotans into angry Communist half-snake half-jelly fish chimeras who chant "Serve the giant penis god!"

Now THAT would be a screwed up writeup!

The end result of Libertarianism is economic slavery for the underclasses. Libertarianism is "the freedom to starve."

You're a true Renaissance man.

You don't expect the modern slave mas... er Libertarians to let the government take away their indentured underclass once again without a fight, do you?

640k ought to be enough for anyone.

These two posts are like reading a technical treatise written by Lewis Caroll.

At $45 a foot per cable.

If you're running Windows 8/8.1, why would even be running Netflix in a browser? The only time I run Netflix in a browser is when I'm on a Windows 7 machine, and even then, isn't Netflix running in a Silverlight plugin?

I'm not sure that logic plays through. Frankly, for Microsoft, the real problem is that damned few people really even consider Microsoft mobile products at all. They're a niche player, competing with BlackBerry for who will end up pushed right out of the market.

Imagine you're Microsoft, you're faced with the possibility that you will never, even if you heavily subsidized a mobile Windows product line, be able to make any significant headway into the iOS-Android hegemony. What would you do? If it was me, I'd quietly admit that I'm never going to be able to dominate mobile platforms the way I do desktops and portable computers, and I'd leverage what I had by opening up my software to more platforms.

This isn't even a revolutionary idea for Microsoft. They once owned their own *nix platform; Xenix. Windows NT itself was designed a hardware abstraction layer so it could be ported to multiple hardware platforms. But somewhere along the line Microsoft and the x86 computer manufacturers welded themselves together. I can't say it was a bad decision, as it made Microsoft and Intel absolute shitloads of money for a quarter century, but at the same time it seems to have frozen Microsoft in place. It became a one-trick pony, only able to envision itself in a world of Backoffice apps and OEM licensing. Now it's got to be nimble again, and as it has already effectively ceded a large portion of the computing products out there to Apple and Google, it's got to make the best it can with what it has.