20 years of rated life, and a complete lack of mercury in the landfill.

Not true, actually. Your property value does not always determine directly your property tax. In King County, WA, all it determines is the proportion of the levies you owe.
In most cases, this means that if your house value goes down, so does your tax. In the specific case of the housing market crash, however, your taxes remain largely unchanged because all the houses in the area have decreased value, so the proportion you owe of the total levy (which has not decreased) is still the same.
http://www.kingcounty.gov/sites/Assessor/QuickAnswers/Residents.aspx#3582DCBCFB7943938B8B6D4892594C1F

(Didn't mean to dump on you, specifically, but you don't need to be raped or cheated on to get the disease either)

In South Africa (Where a lot of these funds will be used) 30% of pregnant women attending antenatal clinics in 2010 were HIV+. A lot of those children will be HIV positive. Even more of them would have been if not for the treatments and funding from organizations like the AIDS fund.

In 2008, almost six hundred thousand people died from AIDS in South Africa (That's 1% of the population, by the way, _in a single year_). The year before that? The same. And the year before that? Also the same.

(I was in the first responder community in south africa many years ago, and the only statistic more scary than the HIV+ rate among people admitted to one very large hospital was it's corresponding Hepatitus B rate)

With that in mind, do you see why I find your flippant comment just a little annoying and condescending?

From: http://www.avert.org/south-africa-hiv-aids-statistics.htm

Your point? Incest is legal in some states, and in some others only after the partners are no longer breeding age. Rhode island only prohibits it when a parental figure is involved.

But to answer your question, if closely related people have children, the person being harmed is the child. Also incest issues are often also about power, it's generally not a good idea to be in a relationship with a significant power differential, like teacher/student, boss/employee and mother/son.

In fact, Microsoft was the very first of the fortune 500 to offer benefits to SSDPs. I imagine it caused an uproar at the time with threats of boycotts, just like it did when MS supported the more recent lawmaking attempts.

I suppose being a monopoly has a few advantages, you can safely ignore people who claim they're going to boycott you.

And note that I'm referring to the original poster's claim that microsoft is engaging in anti-competitive practices (like the bundling) and that the response was not in reference to apple bundling anything, but that they get away with anti-competitive practices.

So when did you last install Linux on your iPad?

You can't?

Well... fuck.

There's nothing stopping the manufacturer from selling you an android version of the same tablet. It's just that if they sell it as a windows tablet, it stays a windows tablet. It's no different from the phone example you mention.

As for apple not getting away with things, you're talking about a company that has successfully (twice) sued other companies to death for the horrible crime of making and selling devices capable of installing and running Apple's OS.

Can't do that, actually. Refusal to consent to a search cannot be used as grounds for reasonable suspicion.

I always read things like this on slashdot. People conveniently ignore all the innovations coming out of Microsoft. Try comparing office 2010 to office 95 sometime. Unlike Android, Windows Phone is not a copy of apple, but quite innovative. Windows 8 is bringing innovations that will change the face of computing in their implementation of Contracts. I don't think anyone has realized yet how huge a sea change the contract system is. The idea that my App can support social networks, data feeds, or other systems not even invented when I wrote it, is incredible. There have been hundreds of innovations sinc.e windows 3 that make the OS more intuitive and easier to use, as well as under the hood changes that people never see, like the back compat subsystem that actively patches old apps as they load.

In 20 years, linux has not managed to make a single desktop OS GUI I could teach my mother to use. Just because you don't see the innovations, doesn't mean they're not there.