You have a strange view of the American Dream. The American Dream is that the playing field is level so that if you're smart enough and work hard, you can be successful. I think the statistic is that 80% of all millionaires are first generation rich.

That's not to say that the people who have made it don't try and use the government to throw up barriers of entry, but that's not part of the American Dream. Those are people who are trying to foil the American Dream, but it's still out there and as viable as ever.

How about McAfee? That could be interesting :)

iGoogle was already monetized. The whole purpose of iGoogle was to make sure that when you opened a browser, you saw Google. If you first see Google and you need to search for something, you'll use Google's search engine. That's it. It was meant to drive people to continue to use Google Search instead of another search engine.

Completely agree as I believe everyone agrees. The point is that the originial context of the argument is to justify a higher rate of taxation on the successful business based on the fact that the government is the reason that the business is successful yet everyone enjoys the same infrastructure whether you are successful or not.

There are many reasons to have a progressive tax structure (and many reasons not to). Being successful at your business is not one of them. To argue that the owner's blood, sweat, and tears is secondary to the government's role in providing infrastructure and therefore they should pay a higher tax RATE is insulting.

The argument Obama was making is poor and downright terrible politically. Who's running his campaign, anyway?

So I have a question that maybe you can answer.

The vast majority of new businesses fail in this country. So if you have 2 businesses in a business park. One is wildly successful and the other goes bankrupt after a couple of years. The same road runs in front of both businesses. They both have the same mail service. They both have the same internet piped into their office suites. Who is PRIMARILY responsible for the business that succeeds? Is it the government or the owner?

Really? Do you have a citation?

Better to blame the software than the user.

If Amazon and B&N can still offer more variety of books at a lower price then more power to them. Apple has made no attempts to prevent eBooks from other sources from being read on the iPad.

The problem is the 6 largest publishers got together and decided that they would only use the agency model with a 30% profit for the retailer. End of story or else the retailer can go suck rocks. It's not like 1 or 2 publishers did this independantly. All 6 agreed to the exact same terms at the exact same time when Apple made the exact same agreement with all 6. Amazon didn't have a choice at that point.

If you look at the complaint, the DOJ has plenty of emails and phone conversations that show that they definitely colluded together to do this.

If they did it alone, then that is true. Unfortunately all 6 publishers got together and combined forces with Apple to make this happen. That is what makes it collusion.

While that's true, there's more than one supplier. If Chevron artificially limits supply in order to drive prices up, then Shell comes along and pumps more in order to make more money on the back of Chevron's restraint. When Chevron gets a whiff of this, they start pumping more too. The problem with this kind of collusion is that there's incentive for some to cheat.

This happened in the oil embargo of the late 70's. OPEC decided to limit production. Saudi Arabia limited theirs and drove prices up. All the other OPEC nations were pumping like mad to make as much profit as possible but since Saudi Arabia was the largest producer, it kept prices high. Finally Saudi Arabia got sick of it and pumped like mad to punish the other cheaters and drove down prices even lower than they were before.

Embargos and price fixing usually don't last long because of the incentive to cheat. If you look at the complaint, there was a lot of discussion between the different publishers just to make sure nobody was going to cheat and cut a different deal with Apple.

It's simply because the bluetooth api isn't open on WP7.5 yet. I think that's a major pain but it does only affect a limited number of potential applications.

What price difference? MS based development is usually much faster thanks to great tools like Visual Studio.

It's actually the Border Patrol and not the military. We don't have a militrized border on either side but especially on the Canadian border. These are not military Predators.

Most states have an uninsurable option already in place. They require insurance companies operating in the state to pay a certain percentage of the premiums the receive and place it in this pool. This goes to the uninsurable who can then receive this insurance for the average premium rate in the state. Obamacare is so not needed.

Ice Cream Sandwich has added a peopl hub integrating social networking like WP7. It has a new "Roboto" theme that resembles metro. It now does app switching similar to WP7. It also has added a lock screen to camera feature like WP7 has.

iOS5 has added the split keyboard like WP7. It has also added twitter integration like WP7 (though in a terrible way). iMessage has copied features from WP7. Auto-uploading of pictures was added much like WP7 already has. Made the volume button a hardware camera button along with a lock screen shortcut to camera which are both features that WP7 had from the beginning.

It's really not that big of a deal. Everyone takes what is working from each other and incorporates it in their own way. The point is that there are enough features that are really good in WP7 that Android and Apple feel the need to copy. It definitely shows it to be a contender.