Who needs to insert a backdoor into Java? Isn't Java just one gigantic back door these days straight from Oracle?

We bring it up because it's the argument you're already making. The existing government has issues so the solution is apparently to eliminate it and replace it with some form of magical private enterprise which is somehow angelic despite all evidence. Government has issues, but it also does a lot of good and tends as far as I can see to be slightly less evil than most alternatives. Libertarians could work with the rest of us to try and fix the broken bits, or offer some form of viable alternative, but instead it's " government bad".
I think that our justice system should be about trying to convert criminals into productive citizens, but most people seem to want blood. I think our current trial system leads to a stupid con job on both sides which leaves the outcome a crap shoot and encourages this kind of press bargaining malarkey as opposed to legit charges (and in this instance, punishments aside and with all respect to the dead, legit charges did exist).
Problem is, replacing government with private enterprise isn't going to fix any of that, because it's what people want and if they don't get to vote for it, they'll pay for it instead, only the mega rich will be even more unaccountable.

We've all done stuff in the past the difference between you and Aaron is two fold. One the times, which is sad but true, but more importantly you were in all likelihood a minor, Aaron was in his twenties. The guards even back then probably would have treated an adult differently.

The foreign exchange market is a market just like the stock market. This means it's full of wildly irrational people and ultra fast trades done by computers. There are underlying factors which affect the value of a currency(most importantly a combination of the interest rates you can get for buying bonds in said currency and the overall strength of that economy), but the actual fluctuations in price are just as irrational and insane as any other market. People buy currency X with currency Y at price Z and this determines the value of said currency. It doesn't matter how many of currency X or Y there are or how Z relates to the actual buying power of either currency.

This means that yes, the current state of the dollar is both irrational and based on sound economic principles and is fundamentally a contradiction in terms. Welcome to the modern markets my friend.

I do so love the people who insist that there's been some ridiculous amount of inflation when it's patently obvious and provable that there hasn't. The value of any given currency is at it's core, about what you can buy with it, and in a country like the US it's what you can buy locally(exchange rates impact countries that buy goods from overseas as opposed to the US which manufactures them overseas but sells them in US dollars). How many dollars there might or might not be really has no impact beyond the degree to which it affects the previously mentioned ability.

In addition to this, you have to separate out places where the cost of something has increased or decreased as compared to how your buying power has been affected. As a specific example which I'm sure, as a fiat currency is evil nutter, is near and dear to your heart, the cost of gold has skyrocketed over the last decade or so. This is not an issue of the dollar being worth less gold, but an issue of gold being worth more dollars. Whenever the economy gets a bit shaky nutters like you purchase large amounts of shiny gold metal to make themselves feel safer, and the Chinese government, for a lot of the same largely insane reasons, is doing the same thing. Demand for gold goes up against a relatively fixed supply and so prices increase. When the economy gets back on track of course, as always, gold will start to lose significant value and all the paranoid nutters will end up broke, but they won't notice because the economy will have picked back up and they'll decide it was inflation all along.

The value of the dollar is what you can buy with said dollar in the united states which barring a bit of inflation here and there(some inflation is a good thing) is about the same as it was last year or the year before.

If you're talking about the currency exchange rate, that value is set by the currency exchange market and is therefor bound by no sense of reality or sanity whatsoever in much the same way as stocks. The Australian dollar was trading at about 93 cents to the US dollar right before Lehman brothers and two months after it was sitting at 58 cents. Our economy barely had a hiccup and the US one was in the toilet, but the value of the US dollar rose dramatically. The most important factor causing the US dollar to drop has dick all to do with quantitative easing or the trillion dollar coin(which actually won't affect inflation at all since the effect on the money supply is essentially zero), mostly it has to do with the fact that the US economy is in the toilet and US interest rates are near zero, with interest rates being the bigger factor.

Microsoft are big on dogfooding, as they should be. If the people who make a product aren't using it then they aren't doing their job. I don't mean that using the product is part of their job, but if you make Windows Phones and you don't want to use that phone then you've not made the phone you should have. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't explore your competitors products, but the reason that most of the very best software written tends to be things like compilers and IDEs is because the people who write them use them for a living. When they suck, they fix them.

From what I've seen (my experience with the phone is limited to 7.5, but I've been to a bunch of Microsoft presentations about Win8 in general). It's likely to be managed C++ with a WinRT library. All the "making C++ a first class citizen" was a bit misleading as yes you could write code in C++, just as you always could, but if you wanted any of the "first class citizen" stuff you needed to use Microsoft's managed variant.

IE 10 has Do Not Track enabled by default, Google don't want do not track, but simultaneously don't want to look like they're violating it, so they blocked IE 10 on phones, not a shocker.

Microsoft have denied access to anyone, period, writing native code for Windows Phone. It's perfectly possible for any of the major vendors to release a browser(even a pretty decent one) in managed code, but it would involve all of them creating and maintaining a parallel code base which none of them want to do. If you want to port webkit to a managed language supported by windows phone and build a browser around it, nothing I've seen in Microsoft's Terms of Use will stop you(unlike Apple which allowed native code but forbid browsers).

Depends where you live. Here in Oz, the price of an average paperback is about $AU20, you'll only pay that for an ebook from amazon if it's a new release(which in hardcover would be well over $AU30 here). Can I find cheaper books if I get them shipped or find them used, sure, but the price is better than local and I will have the new book in about a minute, no matter where I am which isn't half bad.

I can't get into an e-book on a back lit screen, but on e-ink, I can and have read till the wee hours of the morning just as I did when I was a child and as a bonus my library fits in my pocket.

Getting rid of your citizenship is piss easy, you need to have somewhere else to go and if you've got more than two million in assets they'll take capital gains as if you sold all of them today and if course you have to be square with the IRS, but once you've got that sorted it's a formal declaration at an embassy or consulate. Heck if you take an office requiring an oath you lose it automatically.
Of course if what you want is to renounce your citizenship to avoid taxes or start in the us without the obligations of a citizen, you're but otherwise it's really easy. You cab never get it back of course, but you want out, just get citizenship somewhere else and expatriate.

Just to put this out there yet again, .NET WORKS PERFECTLY FINE ON WINDOWS 8. Microsoft allowed managed C++ to access the new Windows RT runtimes, and the RT framework only allows a subset of the .NET framework, but all your old apps run just fine outside the metro stack regardless of your development methodology.

Yes, if you want to run your local apps locally on a surface RT some redevelopment will be required, but given your local app is probably shockingly bad under a touch interface it probably needs redevelopment for surface anyway, and converting it will be no worse than putting it on an iPad or android tablet, and in the best case might actually be fairly simple. For that matter your app is probably a web application and requires nothing at all unless you're upgrading your server and using an appallingly old version of NET.

I'm aware, though I suppose that a child hood in the home of a gun nut who was convinced the apocalypse was coming and had a readily accessible arsenal could be described as slightly deranged. Funny how all these mass murderers grew up in houses full of guns and had all the safety and target training that the pro gun folks always say will stop the problem.