Technically true. The federal government will pay 100% of the cost for the first three years, then 95% of the cost, dropping to a minimum of 90% of the cost in 2020. So the state is on the hook to pay... 10%!

Sure, it's crazy that a state should have some responsibility for it's citizens, even a 10% responsibility. As you say, we should give all responsibility and money and power to the federal government.

From what I have heard, some years ago the government cut funding to NASA and told them "you need to have public/private partnerships to make money".

As part of this initiative, NASA leased part of AMES which they were not using to Google (for quite a lot of money), and did a deal where they could use planes for NASA science missions. Note that they didn't do this because they wanted to; they did this because the US govt told them to do this sort of thing.

So Google got preferential treatment by... renting excess space at market rates. A good deal for Google since it is close to their headquarters, and a good deal for NASA because they could continue doing science even when Congress cut their funding.

I suspect that if Apple, Cisco, and Facebook had wanted to pay the same market rates then they could have also leased space at AMES, though since that is a farther distance from their headquarters (especially with Bay Area traffic) it would be less tempting to them.

So how do you explain the anti-vaxxers or the AGW-deniers?

Sadly, I assert that anyone who fears the radiation in Japan has already demonstrated that hard information is unimportant to them.

So, as long as all of your friends turn on an obscure option (which is off by default) you won't be locked in. What could go wrong?

Choice A: Keep around old, poorly- or un-supported versions of the OS for a certain task.
Choice B: Buy a PDF annotator for a few bucks which runs on the latest OS-X hotness.

Choice A is a valid business decision, I guess, but not one that I would recommend to anyone.

Very logical. In related news, many things can make you ill, not just toxic waste. Therefore, any laws which discourage dumping toxic waste on your property are not about health, and are probably just about governmental control of companies.

Peering limits are certainly used as a rough form anti-net-neutrality, but they're not ideal; they have the pinpoint accuracy of a sawed-off shotgun at 100 yards and they are very obvious. The proposed laws tend to target the subtler, better directed forms. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Nah. Increasing bandwidth is expensive; paying shills to write anti-Google articles is much cheaper.

With their $300-installation-then-free plan Google is doing far more to bridge the digital divide than any of their competitors.

And you somehow believe that private sector investments don't go through way too many layers and have bits filtered off at each layer? How cute.

Funny, I thought I voted for my government. Sure, the voting works far worse than it should (witness the folks trying to remove voting rights from voters who may vote "the wrong way" in so many states; also, gerrymandering), but overall it sounds pretty damn voluntary to me. And you always have a choice! Emigrate to someplace without an effective government (Somalia, maybe?) and test out your "everything is better without government" theories. Please.

I was involved with an institution which worked on (among other things) the Human Genome Project which was done with a LOT of public money. It was not something which would produce money in 2-5 years, so no private company would pay for it. But now, a decade later, many many biotech firms (both old big ones and small, nimble startups) are using that data to grow and make money, and thus pay taxes which could fund the next public research projects.

But since we're dropping most federal funding for research (because people like you complain about it and vote against it... Look! It's voluntary!) where will the next big economic surge come from? Not from the US at this rate, sadly.

Sure. Except when Exxon and BP dumped tons of oil into the water. Or when Wall Street banks and auto manufacturers were failing.

True, but the green energy investments were far, far more successful than private sector venture capital investments. And even if they were less successful, the government investments were for things which will benefit the entire economy, not just a few venture funds. You need both private and public funding or your economy falters.

It would be no problem, and in fact that is what Aereo already does.

Currently, local viewers who cannot get an OTA signal need to buy cable or satellite. Local stations get paid per subscriber for cable and satellite viewers. Aero does not pay this extra fee.

Local stations could improve their broadcast range to covert the cable/Aero/satellite viewers. This would cost money and would lose them the extra fees.

There is a leech involved. I do not think it is Aero.

It's even less similar than that, since Apple hasn't actually discontinued security updates. So it's bullshit all the way down.

I'm amused how many people actually believed this article, though. Sometimes I wonder why the quality of journalism is so low, but then I realize that the journalists are giving us exactly what we want. Sigh.

Different problems.

All of the services overload their delivery drivers. This means that they give their drivers more packages than the drivers can reasonably deliver, so some won't be delivered. If you're at the end of a driver's route, this may happen a lot.

Bad weather means both that the packages take more time to arrive at the correct shipping center, and that the drivers can deliver even fewer packages per hour (due to slow traffic and poorly-plowed streets and driveways, mostly).

This year we got both problems: poor planning (a failure of capitalism) and poor weather (a failure of nature). Add in a late buying surge (a failure of expectations) and you have 2013.

From what I can tell, the "packages are weeks late" is a very different problem from "last minute buying surge overwhelms capacity", which is what TFA is about. And for TFA, "dur, shoulda shipped it sooner" is an appropriate response.

The "weeks late" problem is IMO far more interesting. Did the retailers lie about shipping them? Did UPS/Fedex lose or damage them? This is a sign of a serious structural problem somewhere.

As you said, 10% extra capacity pays for itself, and UPS had that. They probably had 50% excess capacity and had plans for 100% excess around Christmas, but then they suddenly needed 150% and that was a problem. (Numbers made up.) And 150% excess capacity does NOT pay for itself.

I'm sure that the wintery storms across much of the USA for the second half of December just made a bad problem worse.