It is not just leftists. Numerous far right people have advocated violence as well. I think the problem is anyone too far entrenched in ideology of any sort.

Touché

Does Google well and truly own the internet now?

Yes. Or can you tell me the last time you "Bing'd" something or "Yahoo'd" something?

Didn't AOL try this back in the 90s with the 'AOL Keyword'? IIRC, it failed miserably.

I believe Yahoo tried this with their directory as well back in the day. That didn't make it either...

it is still causing ships to sink and taking their crew with them.

Are crews actually being lost? Seems like it wouldn't sink so fast that they wouldn't be able to abandon ship to lifeboats first. That seems a bit dramatic unless the ships capsize so suickly there is no hope for reaching the boats.

I'm quite certain Amazon cares more about AWS than their retail services.

No. I buy nothing from Amazon. Whether they are worth a trillion dollars or they go out of business tomorrow, it is meaningless to me.

When they drive the last of their competitors out of business, will it still be meaningless to you?

Or more importantly, how much does the OP rely upon AWS (either through their employment or web apps on the internet such as Netflix)?

On the positive note, as least you can blame the outage on Microsoft and not take the heat yourself for Exchange crashing and being down for 4.5 hours.

Not really...the unintended side effect is having millions of people only listening and communicating to those with similar views. So rather than have discourse and thought engagement, people are only listening to those who spout things that align with their personal beliefs Facebook is mob mentality through technology.

That's ok, I gave up my star charts and sextant/compass for GPS too. This is how modern technology works. There is a reason we don't teach people how to churn butter or plow a field either.

Hmmm...someone watched the movie Volcano too many times.

The lava in Hawaii can run over any obstacle...including its own walls. These are the "breakouts" you may hear about...when the lava pours over the solidified wall it built earlier. Creating a dirt or rock berm is not going to stop the lava flows.

I've had a Hotmail account that I use for distribution lists and Spam. I registered it when Hotmail was still Hotmail...before the Microsoft acquisition (how many of you know Microsoft did not create Hotmail?).

Well, good. I'm tired of staring at my neighbors anyway...I'd love to replace my lawn with all trees.

I like Linux, and prefer using it on the backend. For client side, this is the right move. The vast majority of software companies do not write Linux software, which means too many departments and divisions will need Windows anyway. Running a fractured environment will be tougher and hard to justify more resources for unless there is a legitimate need to run all Linux. In this case, there was not.

Well sure, but most users are more concerned about the applications. I can see so many of you are caught up in the operating system and office suite. You do realize there are 100s of apps that governments use that only run on Windows. There is no sense to run Linux just for the sake of running Linux. You are adding the overhead of Linux admins to do nothing more than run the operating system on the clients. Might as well run Windows. Linux has great use cases. Using it for political purposes is not one of them.