No, you're thinking of some government that you just made up. Go read the Constitution, especially the 10th Amendment. The states wanted to make it very clear that they were giving the federal government only specific, enumerated powers. Then FDR told the court where it could stick its Constitution (as the GP said) and told them that if they didn't back down, he would stack the court with yes-men who would give him his way. The court backed down, and the result was 75 years of the federal government encroaching into everyday life until you couldn't buy a shower head without Uncle Sam's permission, and people like you who don't even realize anymore that it was supposed to be a government of specific, enumerated powers.

It seems like it might work better to say, "San Francisco still sucks-- which might not be so bad, depending on which side of the glory hole you sit."

I didn't even call Libertarians out by now, and already the morons with mod points who compromise the Ron Paul Commemorative Movement are out to stomp on me.

Well fuck you, maters. I've got karma to burn.

A lot of people who complain about government are people who would like to terminate most, if not all, labor protections. They bury that desire in ideological ruminations, and have convinced vast legions of rubes that the only good government is a non existent government, and somehow the magic of market forces will protect workers.

> it's not that hard to find a loyal customer

Then please, do name one. Please don't say "it's easy to do". If it's that easy, feel free.

> But there's a fair number of people who said they really liked their Zunes just for playing MP3s (back when they used them), they just didn't like the crappy sharing feature or the MS music store or the way MS screwed up "PlaysForSure".

I'm afraid that you've just reinforced my point.

I am a big Scalzi fan and have loved every bit of his fiction that I have read - except for Redshirts. So I don't get it either, but a lot of people love it. A TV show will come of it and that escapes me as well. Apparently we are just not in touch with something a lot of other people see in it.

I don't actually browse the entire internet and have no interest in guaranteeing equivalent revenue to everyone selling penis enlargements. My share of the burden is only a dozen or so websites visited regular. But since many of those are content aggregators let's go ahead and say I visit 100 x that many websites, and consider these casual visits as equal to supporting the website for an entire year.

This makes $230 / 1,036,878,123 websites (internetlivestats.com) * 1200 = 2.7*e-4 dollars to cover my website burden. And I feel I probably deserve some credit for subscribing to Netflix and Amazon prime. Obviously bandwidth is a better measure of the 'cost' I need to cover for these websites to remain hosted, but averaging over all websites does (in a difficult to quantify way) account for the fact that many of the websites out there even now are not profit-motivated.

I hope the authors of this study were also sure to deduct the cost users already pay due to web advertisements in the form of malware infections, including the compromise of bank accounts, identity, etc.

> It would appear that the only place he failed is in your mind.

I'm afraid that Mr. Ballmer was considered a liability by various stock analysts and stock holders by the end of his tenure. The failures of the smartphone, Zune media player, Surface tablet and Windows 8 to make their sales goals or to generate loyal user bases were demonstrable failures of his leadership. I'll challenge you to find _one_ loyal customer of any of those products, one who actually prefers it to an Iphone, Ipod, cheap notebook, or Windows 7.

Compounded by the failure to complete the migrations from Windows XP for thousands of businesses worldwide, he created grand visions for a series of failed projects. So yes, he became a failure in many stockholders' minds, as well.

Blanket bricking of cell phones, or selective bricking of those of "ringleaders", is an inevitable problem for the most peaceful and well behaved political rally with this kind of technology in government hands. Remember the "Arab Sping", and Tianenmen Square, and even the more recent and quite peaceful "Occupy Wall Street" protests.in the US, and understand exactly why and how law enforcement want this kind of power.

I agree completely. When I first started using an dreaded (an old LG keyboard phone with a JavaME spun reader I had hacked on to it) I found reading a bit of a chore. It took me a few days to get really comfortable with the seemingly small and yet ultimately pricing differences. Now I regularly read books on my smartphone and tablet without a hitch, and have noticed no recall problems.

It makes me suspicious that you weren't around in the 90s. That's not what web application UIs looked like.

About 40,000 people die in car accidents every year, in the US alone. It's one of those things that I keep pointing out because people keep seeming to fail to realize how many people that is. When people say, "We can't have solar power because it'll kill a thousand birds!" or "We can't have freedom (i.e. NSA spying and CIA torture is ok!) because otherwise we might have another 9/11, which killed a thousands of people!"

40,000 people die every year due to car accidents. Nobody is talking about giving up cars.