that's fine. I don't really care about the content of the call. i just want the big bad business to pay a tech support worker 80 cents an hour to answer the calls.

Netflix should encourage every customer to call Comcast tech support. which ought to cost the company more money than it's worth. But it would still result in Netflix going out of business, Amazon shutting down their video on demand services, and Comcast finally being the only option available. We can go back to cable company monopolies like in the good old days!

caches installed at Comcast locations would be a great idea, and honestly big ISPs ought to pay Netflix for hosting such things because it reduces the amount of traffic that comcast must switch outside of their network (which is part of their costs). The "pay" might be a discount for co-location that helps cover the rack space and electricity, but seems like a useful idea.

expect to pay the same rate, but get less for your money.

A proper upbringing means taking responsibility for one's actions. Given the tone of the post, I'm going to say that there were some consequences for the young man beyond what the county gave him. Grounding, chores, and other consequences seem likely to me.
After having a good upbringing and you still make bad choices, then you deserve to be called an idiot.

What happened to using your brains in order to think about what you're buying?

Indeed, there are things that I think are best done by the government. They probably represent less than 10% of the actual government spending hence the ire at the 90% of the budget which could be drastically reduced.

2/3rd of the roads in sweden are private. That's not what I call the "odd private road" by any measure. That's mostly small rural roads, not the most profitable kind where you can put a toll. And it works fine. I really don't see the need for the government here.

In many countries, public healthcare is only providing the absolute minimum, and things work fine. Sure, you can carpet-bomb the field and make everything public, but that leads to a waste of resource, and most countries cannot afford it - they get indebted more and more and while every country is in this situation everybody agrees that it is not sustainable.

in the Netherlands, 2/3rd of schools are run independently. Granted, they are mostly government funded, but the money comes from somewhere anyways. Most revenue from the government coming from VAT, everyone pays for it, including the poor. The point is that the government doesn't need to handle the education, subsiding it (partially) is more than enough.

The global point is that in general, a field taken over by the government removes incentive by removing competition, and ends up costing much more for everyone. In general, except for the fields I cited, public money well spent is public money that A) the government has and B) that will significantly improve the field it is spent into. More often than not, none of these conditions are met, so the government shouldn't do them.

Name one and I'll find a country in which it works just fine by private enterprises, save police, military and maybe fire fighting but I can't see why it wouldn't work.

They are a danger to the Jerusalem Jesuit society my good man.

Does it have a crossfade plugin like Winamp does out of the box?

I use Winamp exclusively when I throw parties at home for the unique reason it has a nice crossfade plugin that allows music transition without any awkward silence in the middle.

I'm sure there are plenty of other players that do just that out there, but Winamp has worked great for me so far so I haven't looked for an alternative.

If the system is automated, how does the FB API knows there's a valid subpoena behind the request?

Flamebait? You US dudes live in a pretty fucked up country, that's for sure.

We went to the MA-Bell/(insert local phone company here) pay phone that was on nearly every block and dropped a dime in the slot, made a call and wandered on about our business. If you were a drug dealer, or so self absorbed that you could not be out of touch you carried an ancient device known as a pager.

WOW, you are very correct, it has been that long since I was in school that I had completely forgotten the absolute joy at getting a programmable calculator and putting away the slide rule. Dang I feel old now...

Love the quote, thank-you. Asimov and your signature author Heinlein are two of my favorites. On a side note I also collect authors' signatures, and that is hard to do on an electronic version. I've spent countless hours in pursuit of authors and had great luck getting them to sign my books. Like I posted to previous reply, I share around a circle of friends and they also buy books so the costs are shared, with the added benefit of getting to chat at our bi-monthly pen and paper RPG sessions. We've been playing D&D, and Gurps together for more than 20 years now.