While there are plenty of worthless managers out there, they are far more rare than useless software developers.

Maybe in absolute numbers, but certainly not as a percentage.

You had to had their phone, pay rental for it, you only had a choice of colors unless you wanted to pay £400 for one of six speciality phones, service was crap, international calls were out of the stratosphere and many other things besides. Things are a long way from perfect but if you want to see bad, give it to the government.

But they brought service to the rural areas, which is something private industry would never have done. They created that network on which you could make calls and made sure it was universally available. You really don't have any evidence that the "special phones" would have been any cheaper back then if private industry was in charge.

Just be grateful that it was the government that created the Internet and not private industry, or it just would have been cable television from Day One.

They are using publicly subsidized infrastructure on publicly owned land to seek rent on a network they are not investing in or improving.

That is the heart of the matter. They're so used to huge profits for next to no effort that the notion of giving customers value for their money never enters their mind. And they'd laugh at the suggestion of "invest in your own network".

There really needs to be some anti-trust cases brought against the biggest telecoms. Threaten to do to them what was done to AT&T decades ago. You'd see service improve everywhere in a big hurry.

aren't there laws against monopolistic practices?

There are but they were pretty well gutted back in the days of the Reagan Administration. Now, the ones that are left are mainly ignored. The big exceptions, like the Microsoft case, usually come as political punishment or when the infraction is so blatant that it cannot be ignored.

If we had a Justice Department that was more than a bunch of cronies and amateurs, there wouldn't be a single telecom with any interest in content providers, and there certainly would not have been any of the mega-mergers in the airline industry and others.

We haven't had a real Justice Department since before the days of Ed Meese. Meese is really the very model of the modern attorney general, who believes his main job is to make sure no rich people get in any trouble and to find ways to subvert the Constitution.

They ran 2 (or likely 2 million) situations through some great combonator. In situation A, they don't phone home every 24 hours and more people can buy the box, but publishers get mad that they can't impose draconian DRM. In situation B, they do phone home every 24 hours and less people can buy the box, but the publishers are happier. Situation B made them more money in spite of losing them customers, so that's what they went with.

As symbolist already said, you are definitely giving Microsoft too much credit. I guarantee there's some team leader who came up with a great Powerpoint presentation on "always on" connectivity and it got kicked upstairs and then some C-level exec talked to a Hollywood exec at a party over a soup bowl full of coke and it became a "strategic" idea with "synergy" and "legs".

God, if they could only concentrate enough to hold "situation A" and "situation B" in their heads at the same time they might be more than a hated leviathan that even their most avid customers hate most of the time.

the creative ones buy macs....

The really creative ones build their own systems and roll their own kernels.

Considering you can pick up a video card with similar capability to the new consoles for around $150 there isn't a huge barrier to at least trying it.

If you can up that to about $200, you can get a video card that will let you see things in games that you'd never imagine in a console game.

Try this: play a little bit of Metro:Last Light on a PC with an nVidia 660 or better. It will blow your mind. It's like an entirely different game. I saw a few minutes of that game on a PS3 and couldn't believe how far degraded the game was on that system.

How's the used game market for PCs?

Great. I recently bought Saints Row Third for $4.99 on Steam.

Oh wait. That was a NEW game.

Death puts an end to all schemes driven by personal ego

Not in the Corporate Age.

As long as there are lawyers and registered agents and corporate trusts, Ellison can exert his will long after his death.

MS want you to have a decent internet connection because they want you to see the Xbox as more than just a games console.

Well, then I guess there's a fundamental misunderstanding over the producer/consumer relationship.

Who cares what Microsoft wants? It's not about what THEY want, it's about what the consumer wants.

And let's not BS. Microsoft doesn't "want you to have a decent internet connection" at all. They don't care about your bandwidth. You could probably use a dialup and as long as Microsoft has its hooks in you to see that you're not using your XBONE in some unapproved way they don't care.

"Microsoft wants..." I like that.

To be frank, I think they're pretty much saying that if you don't have a reliable internet service, they don't want you as a customer.

That's not what they're saying at all. If you only have an internet connection on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 4am to 5am guess what, Microsoft still wants you to buy an XBONE and they'll let you play it during those hours. C'mon, you don't really believe Microsoft cares about how reliable your internet service is, do you? When you go to the store to buy an XBONE are you going to have to prove that your service is reliable before they'll let you swipe your credit card? "Sorry, your ping rates are too high, you can't buy an XBONE". I don't think so.

All Microsoft cares about is control. Not even for the profit on the XBONEs themselves, but for the future control that having that plugged-in consuming/spying device in your house.

Fuck Xbox One.

And what a great time, coincidentally, for there to be a renaissance in PC gaming.

Now having had a peek at the next-gen consoles, I realize I've never been happier about being a PC gamer.

Tens of millions of urbanites are more profitable than millions of ruralites.

But without the phoning home requirement, you'd get some of those millions of "ruralites" to buy an XBox One.

Man, that sounds so great.

I love travel writing. Even when it's just simple description, it's like poetry.

there is a very large population of salamanders in forests, but they are rarely seen. Saw a Douglas squirrel, brown and small. Saw various birds: robin, junco, some ravens.

See? Pure poetry.

I'm leaving Tuesday for Door County and the Upper Peninsula. Your post has whetted my appetite for unseen vistas.

The average consumer is smarter than the 15 year old gamer living in his parent's basement.

You have something to back up that statement?

The full Wal-mart parking lot that I drove by this morning is evidence that the opposite is true.

""I do not know whether it is to yourself or Mr. Adams I am to give my thanks for the copy of the new constitution. I beg leave through you to place them where due. It will be yet three weeks before I shall receive them from America. There are very good articles in it: and very bad. I do not know which preponderate. What we have lately read in the history of Holland, in the chapter on the Stadtholder, would have sufficed to set me against a Chief magistrate eligible for a long duration, if I had ever been disposed towards one: and what we have always read of the elections of Polish kings should have forever excluded the idea of one continuable for life. Wonderful is the effect of impudent and persevering lying. The British ministry have so long hired their gazetteers to repeat and model into every form lies about our being in anarchy, that the world has at length believed them, the English nation has believed them, the ministers themselves have come to believe them, and what is more wonderful, we have believed them ourselves. Yet where does this anarchy exist? Where did it ever exist, except in the single instance of Massachusets? And can history produce an instance of a rebellion so honourably conducted? I say nothing of it's motives. They were founded in ignorance, not wickedness. God forbid we should ever be 20. years without such a rebellion.[1] The people can not be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had 13. states independant 11. years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half for each state. What country ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it's natural manure. Our Convention has been too much impressed by the insurrection of Massachusets: and in the spur of the moment they are setting up a kite to keep the hen yard in order. I hope in god this article will be rectified before the new constitution is accepted." - Thomas Jefferson to William Stephens Smith, Paris, 13 Nov. 1787

So where are your "public hangings"?