Perhaps... I just got off the phone with them and they're mailing me a check to reimburse me for a MBP that I had repaired through an Apple Store last year.

Dell previously sold computers preinstalled with Linux at higher prices than identical hardware preinstalled with Windows. Their continuous parade of sales and promo codes only applied to Windows configurations, making Linux usually more expensive.

And how would this affect landline telephone service offered by Time Warner and Comcast? Would the law force them to prioritize my Vonage traffic?

Exactly. Ask your optometrist for one Rx optimized for computer monitor use, and another Rx for general use. Or, take your existing Rx and add +0.50 or +1.00 diopter to each eye to make a pair of computer goggles. Vision-correction is an approximation anyway.

Nothing survives. Not even bacteria.

Same situation. If running Exchange, for example, configure Comcast's SMTP as a smarthost.

I doubt anyone working at AT&T actually had a sinister plan to advertise a $200 promo and offer only $100.

At these big companies it's more likely due to corporate disorganization, with one department not knowing what the other department is doing. The promotions are developed by marketing geniuses, who tell the IT people to put them into the computer, then at point-of-sale they're supposed to be able to locate the promotion in the computer. That fails, so then you call customer-service where the people have even less clue what's going on so they refer you to go back the store where someone more knowledgeable can help you out.

It's also a problem of over-marketing as much as disorganization. Twenty years ago, you could open up a 1994 phone book and on the 3rd page would be a list of local telephone plans and prices. There were no time-limited promotions and codes to complicate things. Instead, all customers paid the same rates. Long distance was a totally different matter. People were switching carriers monthly hopping from one promotion to another. But local telephone had simple pricing. Today broadband needs to be more like that.

The $499 version is bait and switch. Upgrade to an i7-4610M with 16GB RAM and a 256GB SSD, and the price hits to $1399..

Don't confuse "nonprofit" with "charity". While virtually all charities are nonprofits, not all nonprofits are charities.

The NFL being nonprofit is simply a reflection of how the league is organized and equity and earnings are allocated. In this case, most of the equity in the NFL is held by individual teams and the teams' billionaire owners, and all the earnings are targeted to those same teams. The league acts as just a vehicle for the teams to coordinate functions like marketing, scheduling, and league matters. So when the league gets $10 billion in TV contracts, all the profit is distributed to the teams, which then pay taxes on it. Being structured as a nonprofit, the NFL league has trustees and beneficiaries. It could reincorporate as a for-profit, in which case it would have owners and shareholders. In that case, each team owner could be granted one share. If that were to happen, Paul Allen instead of receiving one tax bill for $100 million for the Seahawks, would get two tax bills for $70 million (for the Seahawks) and $30 million (for the NFL share). From the taxman's point of view, it's pretty much the same.

There's nothing sneaky about the NFL being a nonprofit. It's just reflects how the league was originally set up.

A lot of people are directing outrage at the healthcare worker who dropped the ball, but what about the patient? He reportedly didn't tell the nurse/doctor "I just came here from Liberia a few days ago and was recently in contact with people who died of Ebola." which is what any sane person would have done. I'm guessing he did the opposite, and downplayed it like "Have you been to Africa? / Yes I used to live in Africa."

Since the 1990's cities have had their own street-view like platforms. Both the data-collection and the UI were not nearly as refined as street-view is today. Cities would pay to have vans photograph the streets every couple of years. The vans had only 1 or 2 cameras, and the Windows software was crude and hard to use, but still saved a lot of time compared to dispatching an inspector to check for things like newly installed decks, carports, and sheds.

It's a value decision. Consumers didn't want to pay a $100 premium for the additional 16GB.

A few years ago, Microsoft released a Windows security update that changed the default autorun/autoplay behavior, prompting the user to select either browse/execute when media is inserted instead of executing automatically.

Gotta love the analog loophole.

When it comes to history, experts are just people convinced their version of the facts is better than everyone else's versions.