Because when we invaded the US and committed genocide against the native populations, it put a bit of a damper on their ability to continue to produce a functioning society. That's why they're "worth something" even when they don't exist anymore. Based on your response I wouldn't expect you have the ability to understand the value provided by even a basic knowledge of world history though....

It's quite a leap to say that communism will never work in this world when the human race has yet to actually attempt it on a national level (which is what I assume you're referring to when you say it won't work, since there are countless examples of communes working in the past and presently).

Why stop at Standard. Let's talk about AT&T. You know, where long distance fees never went down, and you had to RENT your telephone because they wouldn't support attaching a phone to their network that wasn't owned by them. But, but, but, monopolies are good!

Regardless, your non-sensical Standard rant has NOTHING to do with my point: which was the history of Larry. If you spent 30 seconds dealing with Oracle, you'd see that lowering prices, only to raise them when a market is cornered is EXACTLY how he operates. Throwing around insults when you're too ignorant to do even a basic fact check of the "CAPITALISM FIXES EVERYTHING!" bullshit is an infantile response that sounds like it's coming from someone who's too emotionally unstable to have a rational discussion. IE: You.

As for energy prices falling, that had nothing to do with standard, and everything to do with discovering larger and easier to get at oil reserves. But why let the details get in the way of your fantasy?

That depends entirely on what the private company is offering. If the private company owns the only road between your house and your job, how are you planning on boycotting?

At least with government I know their motivation for building and maintaining that road isn't a 60% gross profit margin every quarter. You can argue about inefficiencies but I can tell you first hand there isn't a fortune 100 company in this country that is anymore efficient than our federal government. Size breeds inefficiency, it's just a fact of life.

And when he decides to "maximize" his investment by increasing the cost of water a hundredfold, and turning all the roadways into tollways, get back to us about how it's so much better than the government doing it for cost vs. a private enterprise doing it to make a profit. And if it's anything like Larry's main business, a grossly inflated, borderline criminal profit. This reeks to me of the same thing: insert yourself into a company (or island in this case), get them hooked on a service (water/roads), and then just charge them insane amounts of money once they've built their business up around your product because it's so difficult to get out from under you.

I'd imagine his end-goal here is to make the remaining population entirely reliant on his services, then he'll make the prices so high for basic services the ones who refused to sell the first time around will be forced into selling to him. Then it will be Larry Island plus a small chunk of government land.

Then your procedure is broken. There are many industries which accomplish this without issue. If you hire an untrained person who can't handle verifying the data is there before moving from one location to another, OF COURSE you're going to have issues.

This EXACT scenario occurs today in many organizations and it works just fine. You act as though this were an impossible feat prior to the invention of networking and that's just not true.

You can air gap, it just requires more work - having a human manually transfer the data using known clean media.

Troll on brotha, troll on.

Not at all true, his ultimate goal was the downfall of the US. Just like previous to that the Taliban's ultimate goal was to get Russia out of Afghanistan. The success of his endeavor can't be measured in the scope of a decade. The results of his actions have set the US well down the path of collapse. It opened the floodgates for the corrupt among us to take every last straw of power they could and abuse it to no end. It's very unlikely we'll be able to close the spigot of unregulated executive power that DickBush exerted and ObamaBiden have extended.

He's done that for the closed source code Google runs as well then, right (prior to giving Google time to fix it)? Because anything else would be hypocrisy at best.

Basically every application in the enterprise that isn't written by Microsoft is built on Java, so good luck. Storage management consoles, ethernet/infiniband/fibre channel switch GUI's. Database/application/server gui's. The list goes on and on. Java isn't going to die anytime soon if for no other reason than legacy. And the fact it's cross-platform with little to no work. C and open source is a great solution, right up until you have to make an identical GUI work across a Microsoft and *nix platform.

Two things: you mean aisles, not isles. You're walking through a grocery store, not an island.

Angry birds was about the worst example you could use. There's a biblical amount of prior art. Angry Birds was in no way original, and had no copyright of their concept because they weren't original. They ripped off countless "slingshot" flash games that came before them... YEARS before them.

You're assuming this generation thinks like we do. This generation has grown up with the concept of "you don't own anything, you simply borrow it". Want an MP3? Download it. Buy a new device? It's not compatible, buy it again. A CD? Why would I want a physical copy when I can just buy a new copy for $0.99?

The current/next generation has been conditioned to keep buying the same thing over, and over, and over again. I can only semi-fault them. We were brought up on the same thing, but at least we were sold on "better quality". CD's sounded better than tapes sounded better than vinyl. The industry saw the writing on the wall when SACD was a complete failure, and Napster took off. Unfortunately, the numbers indicate they're still winning. They're losing with the 30-somethings, but the teen-somethings are slowly more than making up for it.

That's all well and good if they're up front about it, but I strongly doubt they're advertising the console at point of sale as needing a broadband internet connection (along with required speeds) to play the vast majority of titles available.