I'm not entirely sure I understand what's going on there, netbooks were well refined products that seem to have gone out of favour and everyone is designing Chromebooks from scratch.

The storyline that I've heard is that Microsoft killed the Netbook with their licensing requirements for Windows. To qualify for cheap copies of Windows, the hardware had to stay shitty. 2 gigs of ram, slow and small hard drives, weak CPU's and GPU's.

So, for the consumer, why would you want to pay $300 for a laptop with 3 year old hardware when for $350 you can get a larger screen, more ram, dual core processor, etc etc...

Which is why I think Microsoft are shooting themselves in the foot by trying to force everyone to their shitty Windows 8. Either Chrome or Windows 8 will break their previous user experience, so why not try the cheaper Chromebooks? Major PC manufacturers ditching Windows for some of their laptops is another sign, since that would have been unheard of 5 years ago...

You have no right to drive a car on public roads.

Yeah. You do. First Amendment guarantees you the freedom of association. Freedom of association requires the freedom to travel. And traveling, in many parts of the United States, means the freedom to drive.

That's why you need to be licensed to do it.

Changes nothing. Voting is a right, but comes with certain requirements - that you be a citizen, that you be at least 18 years old, and not be a felon. Gun ownership is a right, but you have to get a restricted license before you can purchase a machine gun.

Israel has to "deal" with gunpowder rockets that even the IDF admits are a psychological, not military weapon. You're more likely to die in an accident with a passenger bus in Israel than die from a quassam rocket.

What you (and others that share your "The thrill is gone" sentiments simply don't understand Product Development cycles.

So why has Apple brought Thunderbolt to the rest of their line through the Product Development cycle, but their workstations are the last to the new high speed bus? And USB 3?

Its called a contract.

That's called "wishful corporate lapdog thinking". If it's not something you and Valve sign beforehand, it's not a contract. If you cannot modify the terms by mutual agreement, it's not a contract. If the agreement is not signed before the sale is completed, it's not a contract.

Everything else is brownshirt talk.

Centralized banking IS banking run by the biggest banks themselves. One big private bank whose actions are confidential, yet has complete control over the currency and securitizes the entire banking system. Since when did you think that anything tied to government was not run by the biggest private interests they influenced?

Since when do banks have to be corrupt for-profit industries that, as Matt Taibbi said in 2010 in describing Goldman Sachs

"a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money"

...that literally rip everyone off. National governments, state governments, city governments, conservatives, liberals, anarchists, fascists, pensioners, investors, homeowners, 401k holders, taxpayers...everybody.

Banks should be a non-profit utility or service, just like your local municipal water company or the USPS. North Dakota has a non-profit state run bank that has managed to avoid crashing it's state economy or create massive asset bubbles on junk assets or tell investors they were buying AAA backed securities it privately knew were junk...

No, it's an argument against the government involving itself in even the most absurdly simple economic situations. If

Simplicity is irrelevant - the question is, should government be regulating xyz, or not. And the answer when it comes to the banks: of course, yes. Look at the history of bank crashes before the (flawed) creation of the Fed. Look at our 70 year history of crisis-free banking before the deregulation fetishists took over and repealed Glass Steagall. Look at other countries like Canada, that avoided the financial collapse in 2008 entirely, because they regulated their banks.

If the government had not forced themselves by law to trade a certain ratio of silver for a certain ratio of gold (and vice versa), they wouldn't have gotten themselves into the horrific situations they did.

Hardly. The problem was the banks were gambling with 60 to 1 debt-to-asset ratios. What would a backed currency have done to prevent that? Jack and squat, and Jack left town.

If the government had not forced themselves by law to trade a certain ratio of silver for a certain ratio of gold (and vice versa), they wouldn't have gotten themselves into the horrific situations they did.

Nevermind all the horrific stations we've had on a backed currency. Gold Bugging, like drinking drano to cure an ulcer, is the wrong cure for the disease. "Backed" currencies are subject to the same mass manipulation seen in commodities markets, which defeats the purpose of having a backed currency in the first place: having a stable monetary base free from wild fluctuations.

And I have yet to see any Bugs explain how the deal with the problem of hoarding. You switch to a gold, silver, or chicken backed currency, and the Waltons and Kochs will take their annual profits and buy gold. Doing so limits the publicly available supply of the metal, which increases the value of their existing holdings. This will then dramatically worsen income inequality, as the richest can afford to buy the most gold, increasing their own riches, whereas the working poor are especially screwed. And of course, this will lead to an ever-increasing price of gold (or silver or chickens), defeating the stated purpose of having a backed currency: a stable value on your money. Unless of course, a new and plentiful supply of gold is found to reduce the value of the hoarders - but that would also distort the value of money.

Local banks would be far more stable and would probably be based off a franchise system with networked multiple-commodity-based currency systems. A very few currency systems would come out on top; their value would be determined by their stability.

And when the system goes down, it wipes out everyone. Compared to FDIC, which protects the first $250,000 of any depositor. Hmm, which to chose, which to chose...protection or absolute ruin...

Oh noes! They lost $15 to prevent a complete collapse of the economy and monetary system! That maybe a tragedy among historical tragedies, but calling it "fraud" is Randian hogwash.

It might sound callous, and it is: if you're living in the street, begging handouts, you're a great big human parasite.

When there's six unemployed people for every job opening? When that homeless person you're sneering at might in fact be working, but sees the bulk of his wages go to health care or garnished for student loan payments on a now-worthless degree?

I'm sorry, I thought I was talking to a human being, and not a brownshirt sucker of Satan's cock living on rarified air. But that's where you're lucky: if you lose your job through no fault of your own, you'll still enjoy a safety net provided by those commie pinko socialists, nevermind your past history of being a Randian shitbag.

I am not the original poster.

Original poster was not the problem. That would be the AC who decided to get snippy over a simple question.

You were browbeating

Asking a person to back up a claim they are making is browbeating on what planet?

being just as much an ass yourself

The ass was the AC who started making snippy comments on "not reading" rather than responding to the point. You're being an ass with this selective hall monitor crap and browbeating, gaslighting projection.

Who absorbs the cost of all the re-downloading bandwidth?

Probably the same company that absorbs the re-downloading any time I install my 8 year old copy of Counter-Strike on a new or reformatted computer: Valve.

If you were to google you could find all of the information you needed

Not my job to prove your points for you. It's the job of the person making the assertion to back it up.

instead of brow beating someone

Who you talkin bout, Willis? There was no browbeating, only beating back asshollery in response to a simple question of overall profits vs smartphone profits.

More than 70 percent of its mobile revenue came from smartphone sales.

Wonderful! Now why didn't you say that the first time instead of being an asshole?

Any state fund or pension fund that lost money on a bond sale or interest rate hedge will (and can) sue the banks for fraud, wiping out any profit banks may have had.

Not if the Feds get out in front with a "settlement" that forces the banks to pay back .001% of the money they made through fraud but gives them partial or full immunity from further suits. Like they did with the ~$20 billion settlement for hundreds of billions in mortgage fraud.

The period most liberals point to when defending the institution of the Fed is the middle-to-end of the 19th century

Wanting centralized banking with some regulation != wanting said centralized banking to be run by the biggest banks themselves.

First, the government passed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, in which they agreed to purchase wild amounts of silver in return for fiat currency - which backfired, due to the fact that anyone selling silver would take the silver tickets and immediately exchange them for their equivalent value in gold, completely depleting the government's gold supply. Suddenly, silver's value goes up and gold plummets; the government ends up on the wrong end of the scale.

That's an argument against Gold Bugging, not having regulated banking.

No, not really; the real solution would have been to allow banks to issue their own private currencies.

LOL! Because everyone wants their life savings to go down the toilet when BOA or Citi fail. Because merchants would love having to deal with 5,234,987 different domestic currencies rather than just one. Whatever it is you're smoking here, did you bring enough for everyone?

On the whole, Capitalism has a far-better track record for delivering a higher standard of living to the people generally.

On what planet is that? Socialism is what keeps the unemployed fed, with access to health care, and puts a roof over their heads. Capitalism would have then die in the street.

Since you were too busy being an asshole to think for two seconds:

That includes ALL of LG's mobile profits, but does not separate that number out into sales of SMART phones and sales of DUMB phones, dumb ass.

When making the claim that LG is making a profit on their smart phones, you need to - stay with me for a second here - talk about the profits from their smart phones. Not their overall mobile revenue stream which includes millions of other products. LG could be taking an average of a $5 loss on each Android handset it sells, and still be making an overall profit because they make an average of $15 on each of the millions of dumb phones they sell every year.

I'm not saying they are taking such a loss. I'm saying that figure does not back up the claim that smartphones are more than "breaking even" for LG, anymore than you can look at Sony's profits for their entertainment division and declare that the PlayStation 3 is more than "breaking even" for the company.