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Many (but not all) can choose another locality.

So why over the past decade and a half hasn't Microsoft added additional support in Windows Notepad for LF, on which every other major platform has since standardized?

Last time I checked (which was today), creating a Gmail account required a mobile phone number. So for someone buying a mobile phone in order to have a mobile phone number in order to create a Google account, where is one supposed to search for reviews of mobile phones? If a different web search engine, then why not just stick with that instead of using Google Search?

I was building up to that. An oligopoly can have the same negative effect on buyers as a monopoly.

Let's just say that curation helps keep a flood of amateurish games from cluttering the list of new releases presented to prospective game buyers.

The relevant market here is not Windows but operating systems compatible with widely used applications. And at the time, enough of those were exclusive to for Windows that Microsoft was using its monopoly in one area (copyright in Windows) to secure or strengthen market power in other areas.

I agree. Access to rights of way is a natural monopoly that has been allocated inefficiently in the past, and I presented an alternative to this inefficiency in another post.

I wonder how much of "invented here" syndrome is related with frustration with curation on the popular curated platforms (iOS, Windows Phone, Windows RT, and game consoles). Cryptographic lockdown applied by the operating system publisher blocks end users from writing their own applications or writing a mod for an existing application. Because people are unwilling to go through the organizational overhead of becoming a licensed developer, they stick with the vanilla version of whatever they can get from the platform's official app store.

In a broader sense, Windows monopolizes the users of the large set of applications that are exclusive to Win32. The findings of fact in United States v. Microsoft spelled out the "applications barrier to entry" responsible for Windows market share.

Phrasing my point in a manner that you will most readily understand depends on your answer to the following question: If cellular weren't a cartel, then how could all four cellular carriers get away with raising pay-as-you-go texting rates at the same time?

Just to be sure: You mean keep the gaming PC and run the non-gaming stuff on the $199 PC, right? Then the question for households that currently have a $199 PC becomes whether to buy the expensive gaming PC or to buy one of the consoles.

Don't worry; I agree that PC users are masters of their own respective experiences.

Some other Slashdot users would argue that this curation serves a purpose, namely saving people's time from having to wade through the crappiest of the crap, which is 90% according to Theodore Sturgeon, and that the profitable majority of people have been Stockholmed into not "feel[ing] hampered by that. Have you looked into what caused the North American video game recession of 1983-1984?

With Jerry, Fievel Mousekewitz, Elizabeth Brisby, and others, who needs Mickey Mouse?

You need an animal with an upright neck. Humans have a huge muscle connected to the back of our skull. When we're standing, our neck is straight, with the weight supported by bones. Big brains are heavy, along with the extra bone in the skull to accommodate it.

Nope, if the bottleneck was USB, it would be in the order of a few seconds. 4MB/s is the interface speed of the hard drive that comes with the laptop mentioned.
In practice, USB 2.0 speeds are in the order of 20MB/s - 10 seconds to transfer 177MB, assuming the hard drive is completely full.

If you had two hard drives with PIO mode transfer on the same IDE bus, it would be painfully slow to copy between the two.

F-Droid does not require root. It requires "Unknown sources", a checkbox that appears in the "Security" or "Apps" settings of virtually all Android-powered phones and tablets except about the first year of AT&T phones. And in what way is Amazon Appstore useless?

I have an ASUS Nexus 7 (2012) tablet computer with Wi-Fi. My aunt has an iPad 2, also with Wi-Fi. Both get updates straight from the manufacturer. What "carrier" are you talking about? Do you mean an ISP?

True, visibility of priced apps outside the United States was a significant problem in the Android 1.x and possibly early 2.x days. But I thought Google had expanded the set of countries in which priced apps are available over the past half decade.