It's not about countries, it's about cultures.
Some cultures (e.g. Western European culture) favor more serious subjects versus others. Some others (e.g. Northern American) favor lighter subjects (unwind-type). Asian cultures apparently favor explosive feeling-related and augmentative headlines ("It's SUPER effective!"; "AMAZING performance!").

Nobody's to blame, really, except companies not doing their homeworks and trying to vomit their own culture-specific successes over other cultures and promptly failing.

did this take so long to occur. It amazes me both that people fall for this, and that the credit card companies allow these services to operate under merchant accounts.

It tends to be; but I think regulatory authorities only get nervous if it shows signs of being dangerously effective, or if there is reason to believe that the pockets behind it are deep enough to ignore losses almost indefinitely(as with international dumping/tariff slapfights, where a mixture of xenophobia and the fact that a nation state can typically afford to keep dumping longer than a company can afford to keep competing).

In the case of Intel trying to break into tablets, my understanding is that it's a known matter of fact that Bay Trail parts are being practically given away(along with a nontrivial amount of Intel software work, including an emulator to handle ARM NDK stuff and general porting and polishing to make the x86 Android not look like, say, the blasted hellscape that is MIPS Android); but it is less clear whether Intel has been able to dump hard enough to actually damage competition.

The one product line that they definitely helped bury was Windows RT (which was mostly an unloved bastard child anyway, even before you could cram an x86 into the same chassis, and definitely had no reason to exist afterwards); but that didn't hurt MS much, since the quality of Windows tablets went up. In the wider ARM ecosystem, ARM Ltd, themselves seem to be riding high and unbelievably cheap SoCs continue to pop out of the woodwork.

Their Bay Trail pricing has definitely made x86 Android something you might actually see in the wild, and tablet-Windows something you might actually consider at a sub-Windows Surface price point; but it doesn't seem to have crushed the ARM market very much.

There are plenty of things that can use all the computing power you can throw at it these days. As you mentioned, weather forecasting - though more generally, climate science. Somebody from one of the National Labs mentioned at a college recruiting event that they use their supercomputer for (among other things) making sure that our aging nukes don't explode while just sitting in storage. There are thousands of applications, from particle physics to molecular dynamics to protein folding to drug discovery... Almost any branch of science you can find has some problem that a supercomputer can help solve.

Additionally, it's worth noting that these generally aren't monolithic systems; they can be split into different chunks. One project might need the whole machine to do its computations, but the next job to run after it might only need a quarter - and so four different projects can use the one supercomputer at once. It's not like the smaller computing problems end up wasting the huge size of the supercomputer. After all, many of these installations spend more in electricity bills over the 3- or 5-year lifetime of the computer than they do to install the computer in the first place, so they need to use it efficiently, 24/7.

This is just Comcast trying to get some good PR before they force their agenda through. There is no purpose in companies kissing up to President Barack "Lawnchair" Obama, as he has consistently caved to the demands of conservatives and big businesses every time it was important to do otherwise during his administration.

Every. Single. Time.

Remember how he said he was going to stand up to insurance companies, and offer a single-payer option for health care? Remember how that was going to be his crowning achievement as president? Did we get any of that? No.

Remember how he said he was going to help the middle class instead of helping wall street fat cats? Remember how that worked out?

Comcast is just waiting for the attention to blow over. Eventually public attention will wane and then Comcast will kill off the net neutrality proposals and get their way.

There is no downside to lower gas prices. lower prices on anything is always a positive.

  we as a group are saving billions a day after a very long recession. The gas prices are still not low enough to help those who need it most, the poor and lower middle class.

Technically, you still have to pay state sales tax on purchases made over the Internet. You just exploit the fact that the states can't force Internet retailers to collect those taxes and send them to the state as a way to skip out on paying your taxes.

There's no state sales tax on out of state purchases; that would be an unconstitutional tax on interstate transactions. There is a use tax on out of state purchases that you didn't pay sales tax on. I consider this "use tax" to be a transparently obvious evasion of the restriction on states taxing interstate commerce, and therefore invalid. Then I exploit the fact that the states can't force Internet retailers to collect those taxes to avoid getting into a dispute with the state over whether they are actually invalid.

Canada, is that you?

I'm not worried about history. It's their present actions I want to see corrected.

1. Stop blocking open file/document formats and start actively working towards interoperability. I want to be able to use any tool of my choice on my data.

2. Stop astroturfing EVERY tech forum in existence. I want to be able to discuss Linux and other OSs/software etc without harassment from MS damage control drones.

3. Lose the control-freak attitude towards competitors. Don't try to patent-bomb/bleed/cross-license them out of existence.

4. Don't buy/bribe government customers to keep them locked in. We have a right to use free and open tools on documents written on taxpayer dollars.

5. Stop manipulating hardware manufacturers. Locked/broken bootloaders, closed drivers etc are dirty ways to compete.

There's a lot more, but the point is made. Until I see some fundamental changes to the way MS does business, I'll have to keep assuming this current cosying up to the community is cynically motivated and dangerous.

You'd be surprised how much damage an incompetent executive can do. It may not be immediate, but it poisons an organization systemically. A bad boss can be fired. Firing a bad exec may not remove the toxins fast enough for the organization to recover.

How about Safari?

Don't think I'm defending Microsoft here because I am old enough to remember Microsoft at its worst and still have the deep seated hatred of Gates and Balmer era MS. Hell, anti-trust BS aside I still hate them for what they did to my MechWarrior franchise alone! However, under the new leadership that seems to be taking the company towards an era of Glasnost and Perestroika, the hatred is given pause as I wait for the next dick move that may never come. At the very least, Microsoft has moved into a position that is no more or less "evil" than Google (yes, do no evil no longer applies here) or Apple. Given this, I wonder how many people here truly rationally hate MS anymore as opposed to hatred through nostalgia (like me) or hatred through "it's the way we do things around here" syndrome. As a developer that uses MS products and support in his profession, and develops Linux, Android, and Arduino apps as a hobby, I still prefer the current open source way of doing things over the MS way... but as far as the hatred? It cannot be said yet that Microsoft is the same company it was in the Balmer days. They at least *look* like they're moving towards a path that looks similar to the one Sun Microsystems was beating through.

Is that parody or is that news? I cannot believe that one-sided, war-mongering, short-sighted propaganda piece is called 'News'. It packs more lies, ridicule, non sequiturs, and manipulation into three minutes than I've even seen before. Are people really expected watch that and then form their own opinions? If that is how Americans get their news, it explains so much about American ignorance, xenophobia, and thirst for war.

I want my home to be stupid, to not have a telescreen, and to not track me or sell my habits to third parties. ;)