Why is there no such thing during the middle ages? Because to a degree, people were generally happy, had what they needed and were left to their own devices instead of being at the mercy of a control freak.

Citation needed. Big time.

Sure, people must have been happy under the whole feudal serfdom/slavery system. I mean, it was great if you were a noble or king but it sucked big time for everyone else. Existing (you could hardly call it living) in squalor, ignorance, and poor health in a vermin-infested hovel with no opportunity for a better life is what we should all strive for.

Actually, no. The Arabs preserved most of the learning from the Greco-Roman era, and added some of their own. Moorish Spain was more technologically advanced than the rest of Europe at the time.

Because nobody's ever cracked phone-home activation. Most everybody has at least one "friend-of-a-friend" who can hook them up.

Windows 8.1 isn't too bad after I put Classic Shell on there. Everybody at work who has a Win8 computer has learned to ask for it by name whenever they get re-imaged.

Even exempting food is a bad idea. (Better to increase benefits etc to compensate the poor.)

The problem is, this country is full of politicians (nearly all right-wingers) with hearts as cold as the intergalactic void. They never do anything to make life easier for regular people. Those assholes would starve the poor just so they give the rich another tax break.

I wish I could move.

Not always. I'm not sure if the Cryptowall authors are just incompetent, but it sometimes leaves the shadow copies intact. A user at work was hit with Cryptowall last year. There were no backups at that time, but I managed to recover nearly everything from shadow copy. Oddly, the malware also jumped to one of the shares, but left most of them untouched.

Or Delphi.

Some older coders don't seem to know what they're doing, either. At my job I've taken over development of our in-house applications from the guy who was doing it before. Every single project apparently started out from the same template. That means there's lots of code in each project that is never used and just adds bloat. The code is spread out all over the damn place across different classes (when there is no reason for it to be), there are almost no comments, and having so much shared code means that fixing one problem inevitably causes something else to break. Oh, and there wasn't any source control in use when I started, either. The code must have moved around a few times because older stuff was missing and I had to redo it from scratch on one occasion.

I haven't seen regular for $2.xx since the early 2000s. The last few years, I haven't seen it under $3.xx more than once and that was only for a day or two.

I'm against regressive forms of taxation like sales taxes and excise taxes (some states even tax food, I shit you not). Tax the rich instead--they can afford it.

At least the Soviets had bread lines. Today's Republicans would simply let the lower classes starve because the rich need yet another tax break.

We can also get Yuengling east of the Mississippi and it's way better than Coors.

20% isn't steep enough. If employers really can't find qualified people in this country, then they won't mind paying double or triple the market rate to get people with the necessary skills.

My Photoshop CS2 serves me very well and will continue to do so until Gimp catches up.

Me too, especially since CS2 is effectively free now. Adobe shut down the activation servers earlier this year so they actually gave out activation-free CS2 installers AND their serials. It's the only non-douchebaggy thing Adobe has done in recent memory.

The rest of the world can finally see how god-awful their code really is.