Right, and their weapons are 12-guage shotguns(handheld) and flamethrowers(wing mounted)

Right. It really is interesting to see what the US has devolved into.

What we are seeing is the US and China becoming more like each other:
China turning into a consumerist, polluting, financial behemoth, while the CCP keeps control
The US turning into a self-censoring, pseudo-police state.

Are you now or have you ever been completely ill informed and ignorant of history?

Put down the glass pipe.

I've seen some ridiculous comments on /. before, but this really takes the cake. Congratulations!

Your post sounds like some trite consumerist mantra.

What utter rubbish.

So you're equating freedom with consumerism?

I would recommend you wake the f#$k up and see what a consumerist "growth for growths sake" worldview is doing to the ecosystem of the planet we live on, but nah, I'll let you stew in your own FauxNews juices, while Hannity has you on a slow boil.

So they're Druids? Actually, if we could confine Schmidt to Scimitars and Wooden shields that might be a good thing. But, they also get some nasty spells that I'm sure would work wonders on K Street...

Agreed, Google as The Scarlet Brotherhood.

Over the years I've had four registered domains. My current one live on one of the big corporate hosters, and it runs on WordPress, which is actually quite fun to manage. I put new content about once a month, sometimes more. It really is a lot of fun and I have complete control. That is one of the things about FB that I could never accept, combined with the fact that FB is 99% fluff/krap, and, the interface is absolutely abhorrent. At least Google+ has a half decent ui.

But yes, things like FB make it easy for most people to do what we who run our own sites do, without the cost and management.

"Cayenne8, prepare yourself for transfer to re-education camp ZuckerPage-9 by creating your required Facebook and Google+ accounts. Failure to do so will result in your being relocated to a trailer down by the river."

Yawn...

I'm sorry, did you say something?

The real point his comment makes is about the backsliding of American infrastructure , and to that you can't argue against.

Sure, if your standard is to compare the roads. bridges and broadband of the US against, oh say, Bolivia, then sure, we are in a much better place. But to compare the US against other "First World" countries it is a much different story.

Also, your comment about the economic output makes no difference to the average American whose wages and benefits have been stagnant or backsliding since the 1980's. For someone who lives off of capital gains in the stock market or other investments, sure, things like economic output have some meaning. Yes, the "US economy" is very strong, and the capital it generates is incredible.

How much of the benefits of that economy are actually being "trickled down" onto the American middle class?

I find it interesting that your comment is being modded down, though I'm not surprised.
You are correct in your condemnation of the US regarding infrastructure, and yes, that is what the whole broadband issue is. We have let ourselves(via greedy politicians, lobbyists and corporate managers) become the slaves of a no competition broadband scenario, where we have two choices, the phone company or the cable company for broadband.

causal or casual?

It's not just in house VB jockeys doing this. All sorts of "enterprise" grade software will only run as admin.
If you can find the registry keys to tweak and files and folders to manually change perms on than sometimes that problem can be mitigated.
Really, the problem is that software development gives little priority to security.

Actually, they should invade Iraq.
That will fix things!