I think you're missing the point. Sending a letter from New York City to Los Angeles isn't cheap because of Government Efficiency, and it's a poor example for AC to present to those "anti-government" types.

You picked a terrible example. The United States Post Office loses billions of dollars every quarter.

Your larger point is sound--government bureaucracy doesn't necessarily mean higher overhead. But, I would rather see the one-cable-co one-phone-co monopolies broken up. Arkansas of all places has terrific connectivity because the Comcasts of the world never bothered locking the market up.

I'm pretending the groom is the weatherman.

I find it ironic that the states who want to fine Google for Street View and recording stray broadcasts are preparing to DPI the entire internet.

Yes, I said "ironic." Come at me, pedants.

Yup; Dave's is hot. I dip Fritos into their ghost chili sauce, but that stops being pleasant after a half-dollar-sized amount.

Let me be the first to welcome you to Slashdot, an American technology site.

There is no "natural" monopoly in search, and switching to a competitor is so trivial it's sad. In America, at least, you have to do more than win a popularity contest to be a monopolist.

"But where's the ability to choose another map data provider?" you ask. It's in that bar, at the top of your browser. If anyone actually wanted Bing maps, bing.com is even shorter to type than google.com.

And if Google's spidering is "directly hampering"F a business' "ability to stay operational," they deserve to go bankrupt. Google respects robots.txt.

All this presupposes that Google has a "monopoly" in search, which is retarded beyond measure. You can make a much more compelling case that they have a monopoly in advertising, but that has nothing at all to do with poor MapQuest.

Funny how Google doesn't, either.

Of course MapQuest would be happy if Google wrote them a massive check for no reason. The question is how you managed to decide Google owes them money.

And fuck you. I'm not a shill; you're just some combination of retarded and European.

You don't have to be a "shill" to realize your scenario, as presented, is ridiculous. You don't want a map, but claim Google is unfairly depriving MapQuest their share of the "people who don't want a map" market?

Google is trying to put something useful in that spot. Search for "Keanu Reeves" and, instead of a map, you'll get a short bio. Search for "Pb" and you'll get it's periodic table entry.

Bing and Yahoo! could do something like that, but they'd rather fill that space with ads.

And thank God. When I type <name of store>, City, State I want a map. Not a plug for MapQuest. Not a plug for Bing. And most certainly not iOS 6 telling me I'll have to charter a kayak, and, by the way, Gander Mountain has a great deal on paddles.

A related problem: My local Wal-Mart has a Subway inside the store. Why don't you go picket them? There's clearly no way other sandwich services can compete.

This comment made my day.

Surprised I had to scroll so far to see this. Ever notice how in every court case worth caring about, they've at least filed an amicus?

I'm going to assume you're managing a large XP network with roaming profiles, because none of your complaints make sense otherwise. I'm also not a Windows admin, so forgive some lack of familiarity.

* I can't set the local cache size (what browser in their right mind saves 1GB(sic!) on the local hard drive?)

Did you redirect the entire Application Data folder onto a network share? If you did, stop it--it's huge even without Chrome's cache. If you didn't, stop worrying about a gig of local disk.

* It saves it's EXE in the Windows profile. I thought Program Files existed for a reason....

This is so non-administrators can install and update Chrome.

* We have re-routed MyDocuments to a home directory. Chrome default saves downloads in Downloads under MyDocuments. EVERY single file! Attachments from mail or not doesn't matter. 99% can be deleted but I still need to check with the user for the of chance that he/she has edited something in the folder.

So go change Chrome's download folder. This isn't rocket science. Google also provides an MSI installer and group policy objects, which I'd imagine makes that easier.

And do you really spend time deleting individual files out of other users' Documents folders? Windows has supported disk quotas since NT, and it probably costs more to pay you for an hour of download deleting than just buying a new disk for the file server.