The mobile payment market is completely fragmented. Apple is by far not the first company to announce a payment scheme, however it is the first that has managed to make some concrete deals with several companies and it's the first that actually has a chance at taking off.

Apple has locked it down? So what? How is that any different from the last several years where competitors have had NFC and payment support? Why is the upcoming year suddenly going to backfire them right at a time where service providers will likely be questioning whether it's a good idea to promote a system which can't be used on Apple's much advertised phone?

I'm no fan of Apple, but you can't argue that they aren't strategically clever bastards.

Bull. The only reason anyone pays minimum is because they get away with it. Why the heck should I pay more than minimum wage if I can get what I want for that? Do you honestly think anyone would go "gee, that guy is good, I needn't pay him more 'cause there's nothing he can do, but 'cause I'm so impressed with his great work, here's five bucks more per hour!"?

So socialism doesn't give you a choice, you're a slave or if you refuse, you get paid by the state by wellfare.

Capitalism gives you the choice to be a slave or to starve.

I dunno. Most people would probably prefer socialism. But hey, what do I know about socialism, being in Europe. That's something I should leave to the experts across the big pond who have loads and loads of first hand experience with socialist systems...

That's a great story. And where, say, do you get your customers? Where did you meet them? How did they learn that you're in the market? And that you're worth any dime they pay you?

Valuable experience in how to bullshit customers, invent colorful descriptions of events and places she's never seen or experienced and finding visual proof of those aforementioned stories.

Great resume for a political career, everything you need to convince your people to go to war with some country is right there.

Odd. A good deal of Europe won that war. Well, at least 'til we decided it would be a great idea to copy the idiocy of the US in that matter.

Societies depending on slavery (or any kind of cheap labor) are by definition behind when it comes to invention, industrialization and progress. Simply because R&D is expensive. If it's cheaper to stick to employing humans, there is zero incentive to develop machines.

So it's like today?

You have NO idea how hard it is to refrain from pulling a Godwin right now...

Mostly cause you have to feed and shelter slaves. It's simply cheaper to pay people to work for you. If you need proof, try to feed&shelter your family on a slave-level job today.

Religion, Ideology... a rose by a different name...

Reading Genesis (the book, not the band) alone is sufficient proof thereof.

the real capitalists are global. They benefit from us competing with cheaper labor. Marx predicted this but all anyone can remember about him is that a few dictators used his books for rhetoric.

As for Adam Smith, he actually as against this sort of naked capitalism. He wrote at a time of small merchant artisans. He didn't see the industrial revolution coming and if he had probably wouldn't have written the books he did. These days he's like Marx: all anybody remembers about him is what fits in with what they want.

Slaves were very expensive compared to immigrants. With immigrants you could treat them just as bad and when they got weak move on to the next batch. With slaves you had money sunk in. The south also had huge amounts of capital sunk into slaves. If you're selling someone's buying, and that costs money. It's one of the reasons they were so far behind the curve on the industrial revolution...

Why? Justify that statement without using any reference to the UNIX way or it being the way things have always been designed.

IMHO a coordinated set of functions that are used in a common way should be combined. Why is it that to parse a log file I need to run grep, and sed, and all these other utilities in a continuous pipe? For that matter why should the tail command be able to open a file, is that against the unix way because everything should be grepped into it?

I'm getting sick of using 1000 different utilities to do one task or manage one system. Hate me, down mod me, argue with me, but I for one am a big fan of big software with multiple functions approach. If that one program does it well why wouldn't you let it manage multiple coherent tasks like getting a computer from nothing to at least a login prompt?