A EULA is not a contract.

IANAL, but I suspect that it is in fact a contract. It may be a bad contract, and somewhat unenforcable, but if it wasn't a reasonable valid contract people would be suing the shit out of MSFT for every BSOD and error that was encountered in windows and Office. There aren't a bajillion lawsuits out there, so I suspect this means that the EULA is sufficiently a contract to protect MSFT in the majority of cases.

This is a really bad idea. Browsers shouldn't be able to elevate privileges. That's a key mechanism in preventing content from being able to hijack the system. The LAST thing I want in a browser is for it to operate as admin/root.

It seems that your beef should be with Verizon, not microsoft. MSFT just cut a deal. It's verizon that treated their customer like shit in your situation.

As a whole, Postgres started as an open-source Oracle clone.

Not accurate, please see this, which notes that postgres is descended from Ingres, an early object/relational effort. It's not even close to an Oracle clone, which you will see if you bring up the command line client and try to display a table's structure.

I tried to look up SOGo to figure out what the heck you were talking about, but google doesn't find it. Mind giving us a few more keywords?

Then, if somebody gets a job, decrease benefits by 1/4 to 1/5th the earnings.

One problem with your approach is that economically it doesn't work very well. If you decrease benefits by 1/5 of your earnings (just to pick a number), you are in effect taxing those earnings at 20%, which is far higher than the income tax rate paid by poverty level workers otherwise. It's the equivalent of taking the $8/hr job and turning it into a $6.50/hr job. It's not hard to see that this might disincent many people that would be eligible. Add to this the costs of transit, child care, and work clothes, and it's possible that working may be a zero gain for some of these people.

Unless Murdoch is going to have some very unique, in-depth content that you can't find anywhere else, I can't imagine anyone with half a brain would be willing to pay for it.

Murdoch -does- have unique content, that is uniquely appealing to people with half a brain. There are few other sources which give the relentless right wing spin on everything, and those who are inclined to view the world that way are attached to Fox News in a way that is different than how I and probably you consume news. CNN is not an alternative for some of these people. I wouldn't be surprised if this works for him.

This is Fox News we're talking about. It's consumers aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer, and are fairly attached to their source of propaganda. This may actually be a brilliant move on Murdoch's part.

If the consumers of Fox media had to go to, say, the BBC, or the Washington Times, they might encounter information counter to their views. The resulting cognitive dissonance is painful, and might be sufficient to make them pay for the comfortable conservative pablum ranting of the Murdoch press.

This is plenty of time to transform the safety of buildings and overpasses and tsunami zones throughout the Pacific Northwest.

Seattle had a large quake in 1949. Building codes are pretty earthquake aware already, and most construction of roads and buildings has happened since the advent of strong building codes. I live here, I'm not worried, I don't pay extra for earthquake insurance.

slashdot ate my link, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_Nisqually_earthquake

However, it appears that while the Pacific Northwest doesn't get struck by earthquakes often,

Actually we get small to medium quakes quite often. There was a big one in Seattle in 1949, and there was a mid sized one in 2001. See this for some discussion. There was a 4.something discussed on the news a couple of nights ago. Little window rattlers aren't rare at all.

I know you meant this to be funny, but MSFT ( and google) are all over this earthquake thing. That, along with access to power, is why they are building data centers in eastern washington, away from the fault lines.

The trees are growing back, it's just that trees take time to grow. The biologists are actually a bit surprised at how fast regrowth is proceeding. Likewise the fish have returned to the Toutle River much faster than was expected.

It's still a pretty impressive sight and story from the observatory, though, isn't it?

Um, the whole event that we are discussing happened because liquidity (buyers at a market price) disappeared for a few seconds. That sounds like liquidity might be pretty important.

To see this, consider for a second how you'd feel about your bank account, if you didn't know from day to day how much your $5000 was really worth. That is what liquidity is, and I'll bet your daily behavior suggests you value it highly.

They produce nothing except market crashes.

They produce one other thing, that is important to you and I, and that is liquidity and price accuracy. Before electronic trading, stocks traded in spreads of 1/16 to 1/2 point, or even more. That's 12 to 50 cents. Per share. That the market maker put in his pocket, from the average stock purchaser.

With electronic trading, spreads are commonly 1 to 5 cents. That difference is real money when you buy or sell your shares. On a 1000 share lot of a $20 stock (typical for me), the improvement in liquidity means 1 to 2% improvement in return on each end of the trade, simply from the improvement of the market economics. That's money that the ordinary investor gets, that used to go into the pockets of the big brokers that make up the exchange.

The folks doing millisecond trades are arbitraging between various instruments, and I don't think the daily action of their business hurts us. This situation appears to have been due to a technical malfunction of the market, rather than a basic pernicious practice such as the whole sub-prime loan debacle was based on.