The OP made the point that with GSM hardware is decoupled from paid services, so he was talking about the advantage of the GSM (2GSM, UMTS, LTE) standard.

The GP is wrong in suggesting that it would have been shortsighted and is using a lot of the myths that Qualcomm spread about GSM to promote that view. Qualcomm could have made a decent phone standard, but they felt the carriers wanted "a digital version of AMPS" and that's pretty much, functionally, what they originally created, with messaging and data being grafted on, clumsily, later, in a game of catch up that they never really won. By the time the TIA standards finally supported SIM cards the carriers were so locked to a SIMless platform they weren't prepared to implement it. And at that point it was pretty much clear that GSM/UMTS standards were so far ahead that Qualcomm would never catch up.

CDMA is being phased out. Sometimes the market works... over a period of decades...

It's easy to fuck up if you decide to try to do the entire thing yourself. If you go to a (cheap) tax preparer like H&R Block, you generally end up filing a tax return that's unlikely to be audited, and if it is is likely to be accurate as long as you answered the preparer's questions truthfully.

And if you're about to tell me how terrible it is you might need a tax preparer's services, then consider the fact that before such companies existed it was common to hire a considerably more expensive accountant to do this kind of thing. The tax code is only superficially more complex than it was fifty years ago.

Fine and jail you? Only if you've been dishonest, and continue to be dishonest throughout the audit.

I'm not scared of the IRS and I'm pretty sure, FWIW, that if I did make a single mistake on a tax return they would (a) be unlikely to notice, and (b) if they did notice they'd refund me the difference (or if the error means I owe more taxes, require I pay the difference, with interest. Either way, I end up paying what I should have done to begin with.)

I seriously doubt that the number of people terrified of the IRS is particularly large. I know there are a lot of irresponsible tax evaders who want all the benefits of civilization with none of the duties it entails who hate the IRS, but that's rather different.

I'd say yes, it's a bad thing. But then I like commenting on articles occasionally.

You're going to have go into more detail. At the very least:

1. Explain how having to reload the page (Jump to Disqus and then bounce back) going to be positive for the user's experience. I certainly don't see how it would be remotely positive.

2. How is this going to work without the host installing something on their server? As I said, a selling point of Disqus is that it doesn't need anything on the hosts' server at all, just some boiler plate HTML that inserts the Disqus Javascript script.

I don't see your solution as being "How they should have done it all along". It's inefficient, kludgy, and fails the ease-of-installation test.

I stand corrected. That said, I stand by the point that reason for the NEC's success is that Amtrak owns it, not because it's near Washington DC.

Well, I actually fit in an Amtrak coach seat (I'm 6'2", which, as I understand it, is ridiculously tall in America, nobody could possibly be that tall, and that's why airline seats are designed for people no more than 4' high, which is presumably normal.)

That's a good reason to begin with.

Also: the ability to get up and walk around, the view out the window, and the fact I can arrive at my destination relaxed. Show me someone who says they're relaxed after a long distance bus or air trip, and I'll show you a liar.

The bankrupt Penn Central was then reconstituted as Amtrak and Conrail

This is poorly worded. What I meant was that Penn Central's assets were divided between Amtrak, and Conrail, the latter being a new government corporation specifically created to take over the bankrupt entity's assets. Amtrak, of course (as should have been obvious from what I'd written earlier) already existed.

Historical accident, not politics. The NEC is the only part of the national rail system Amtrak actually owns.

Amtrak exists because a giant railroad company that operated most trackage in the North East called Penn Central was going bankrupt. In the early seventies it went to Nixon and said, essentially "We might survive if we can get rid of passenger service. which costs lots of money and isn't covering its costs for us. Hey, whatsay we make passenger service a government program, and then you guys can screw it up even more and close it down after two years? Then we can sell all the track we no longer need, cover our debts, and just do nice profitable freight in future."

(You probably think I'm doing a dig at Amtrak there with the "government program" and "screw it up" bit, but actually, that really was the plan. I'm not kidding. A few years after Amtrak's creation, Louis W. Menk, the then chair of the Burlington Northern, actually blurted it out in public, saying that the government was making a mess of screwing it up. Look it up.)

So, anywho, the other railroads were also invited to join, as most (but not all) were having similar problems. Amtrak was formed. Penn Central went bust anyway.

The bankrupt Penn Central was then reconstituted as Amtrak and Conrail. Amtrak got the NEC. Conrail got the rest. Conrail became amazingly profitable, was privatized, and finally split between CSX and NS. Amtrak has finally gotten the NEC to be profitable over the last few years, though the rest of its passenger service is still technically "loss making". But the non-NEC services suffer from not being under its control. It can't run Acela Express services on CSX tracks, for example, because it would need massive upgrades to lines that Amtrak would barely benefit from.

How is Disqus supposed to fix the problem? The entire selling point of Disqus is that it's a single-login discussion system that can be added to any website without any need for server support. Just add the Javascript to the page and bingo, you have a discussion system.

Without "third party cookies", Disqus has no way to provide anything resembling a single login or respect for your own preferences. About the nearest thing I can think of is that it could pop-up a new window whenever you want to respond to a comment, but given that would, by itself, be broken by a kajillion different pop-up blockers, I wouldn't describe that as an improvement.

Third party cookies are why systems like Disqus work.

Good for you, but I have to say that while it's kinda an argument from authority, it's a good case of an argument from authority. If 97% of people who are expert in something have an opinion that contradicts mine on a specific issue, then it's at least reason to review what I believe and really confirm I know something that the world's experts seemingly do not.

And this is especially the case when I genuinely don't know as much as they do on the subject.

So it's a useful fact to know. And it's a useful fact to use.

By and large most of the objections to government-provided healthcare on this side of the Atlantic (and this side of the Canadian border ;-) really come down to prejudice against government provided services in general, coupled with well funded anti-government propaganda from the Healthcare industry, right wing think tanks and lobby groups, inflating stories of failure in foreign single-payer systems while ignoring the severe problems with the current system.

The funny thing is that the US government does provide general healthcare services to certain groups, such as the elderly and the military, which are well run and immensely popular with those who eligable to receive treatment.

Unfortunately, the entire issue is so toxic that even with a Democratic majority on both houses, the last Health Care Reform push was little more than a tinkering with the current system, providing some subsidies to people who couldn't otherwise afford private insurance, while striking a deal with insurers that the industry would cover pre-existing conditions in exchange for everyone being pressured to get insurance. Not only was single payer not brought to the floor, but in the congressional hearings to discuss the nature of HCR that lead to Obamacare, single payer was banned from discussion.

We're governed by terrible, terrible, people.

Technically, users of Microsoft's tool may actually be breaking the law under the CFAA's infamous "Exceeding Authorized Usage" provision. And if the only purpose of certain parts of the tool (such as the downloading videos feature) is to use Google's webservers in a way they've not authorized, then it's hard to see how many judges would not penalize Microsoft on this.