I love this line of reasoning. It's the same reasoning that blames the Union Auto Workers and a guy who tightens bolts for a living for making shotty cars instead of the CEOs and Engineers who made the decision to use cheap bolts.

If the regulators are untrained it's by design. You don't just 'forget' to train the people that inspect your Nuclear power plants you know...

Why does your kid have a computer, ipad, ipod, and cellphone? More specifically, why do you continue to let him have them after he's repeatedly rebelled against you? Have you tried selling all of them and disconnecting the internet from your house, then reintroducing them when he's learned to behave?

Parenting is only affective when you're consistent.

I can get one from t-mobile for the same or less than a Samsung S-4. I agree you can't do as much. I wrote a little Android program (Shameless Plug) that pops up a contact's picture (sadly the cute girl in the screenshots is a stock pic from the Creative Common's main image site) and keeps it there because I got tired of not noticing the itty bitty missed call notification. It's only pretty recently that I could distribute it to others on the iPhone without jumping through a _lot_ of hoops.

the powers that be aren't going to let us go to war. It's bad for business. Take that one terrorist attack ages ago in India that was traced back to Pakistan. The Indian people called for blood, the corps said no (since real war cuts into their profits) and everyone backed down.

Oh, for sure you're going to see a lot of human misery for the sake of the super rich being super rich. But large scale wars that wipe out the pleebs aren't going to happen again.

Isn't this a feature pretty much taken for granted? My $80 Hauwei Ascend II has bluetooth for pete's sake... It's a $10 dollar chip (maybe $2.50 at the bulk Sony buys)... I get that margin's are slim but come on...

Are the people of N Korea 'responsible' for Kim Jun Un? No, but they're powerless to do anything about it. The only thing that can stand up to concentrated wealth is a black plague that wipes it out or a strong central gov't. There's a reason we had a 'Dark Ages'

You once again state that I want the super rich to be able to abuse the gov't, ignoring my point that no matter what you or I want their going to, so same to you, my comment stands.

I'd love to live in a magic world of fairy dust and pixy farts where something as powerful as a central gov't doesn't get abused. Instead, I'd rather work around the inevitable abuse. It's kinda like floods. In 4,000 years we might have weather control. We don't have it today, so I'll build levies instead of just prayin' to god to make the water stop.

You seem to have grasped my point about gov't being controlled by people to enrich themselves while being completely oblivious to my point that _you_can_do_that_too? There's enough gov't to go around. Just like there's enough food, shelter and health care to go around. People like you perpetuating the lie that there isn't is what's wrong with the world...

I don't think you can really phase in stuff like this. Letters wouldn't really help. With the internet you already know the site is up. I guess you could put a code in the letter, but then there's the political element. Delays could be used to put the service on hold indefinitely. Plus the codes become yet another piece of infrastructure to fail.

Whether you fail gracefully or not you've still failed. The only difference is a pretty little message instead of a 404. Incremental growth is hard, because you've got so many factors fighting for the status quo that a large change is the only thing that can survive multiple lobbying efforts. If you want health care reform (debatable, but let's assume you do) You've got to strike while the iron's hot and there are people in office with the political will to implement it.

The point you disagree with them on is that society should bend over backwards to accommodate children rather than leaving it up to parents to explain adult things to their kids. If kids don't have decent parents, they have bigger problems than seeing tits.

Therein lies the irony since these are the kids that grow up to be the perverts.

the last one should recognize that he had a _lot_ of help along the way (which he did) and be willing to pay it forward.

In the real world kids from the projects don't make it big. In the real world they're crushed by daily life and their lack of education. Look up the unemployment rate and average income of project kids (especially the ones that speak Ebonics, which sadly makes them more or less unemployable outside of manual labor and fast food). It's not a fun read.

This happens every time a major new internet service is launched. And it _always_ will. See, here's the problem: at launch everyone is interested and wants in. After a few weeks/months the interest dies off and the site hits a BAU point. So if you're designing one of these sites you're stuck either:

a. Spending billions on infrastructure for 3 months tops of high volume and then getting ripped to shreds in the press for 'wasting' all that money. or...

b. Taking your lumps up front and waiting a few months for people to forget about it.

The guys running healthcare.gov opted for 'b.', and I would too. The kinds of people that just want to say bad things about the ACA would have a field day with 'a.', with 'b.' they'll have to acknowledge (or at least ignore) the fact that in a few months it'll be working more or less as intended.

past $9 million a year then no. You're not 'working hard to earn more' any more then. You're riding on someone else's hard (that sounds dirty). Do you seriously think the Chinese billionaire that owns Foxconn 'earned' that? Or to go more extreme how about the southern cotton plantation owners in the 1800s? Yeah, I'm being inflammatory, but the point is still valid.

The people building search engines and inventing cancer drugs top out around $100,000 a year. A few big winners in the dot com bubble stand out, but by and large the habit of giving billions to people that make things has been gotten under control. Kinda like how Atari made it a point of not letting their game makers credit themselves (look up how Activision got it's start).

I'm sorry you had a falling out with your sister, but I don't think pulling her gov't assistance is the answer to her problems. People in her situation don't pull themselves up by their boot straps when that happens. They implode, and usually end up without a home. I'm glad your sister has held onto her house, and I hope she continues to.

I didn't say I support the super rich using the tool of gov't, rather I recognize that it's inevitable. The rich will use their wealth and power to build institutions that protect that wealth and power. We usually call those institutions 'Government'. They're going to do this whether I want them to or not. The only question is can I wrest those institutions from them. Kinda like how the house of commons gradually became more powerful than the house of lords...