Do me a favor and extend your hypothetical back to the 1800s and see how it changes your hypothesis.

You've been able to get a 6850 for darn near $100 for some time now. It's a pretty good deal unless you only buy high-end GPUs, which honestly seems like a waste anymore. My 4 year old 8800GT is just now starting to feel inadequate. I'm looking for the second coming of the 8800GT to emerge from this generation so I can hold on to it for another 4 years.

This is almost always an addon issue. I only use a few addons and have never seen Firefox use much more than 400mb in versions 5 & 6. With 7 it hovers in the mid 200s.

What kind of computer are you running that draws 500W from the wall?

I've been using Twitter to get realtime high school sports scores for a year or so. It's really the only way I've found to do this because even local news websites don't post scores until hours after a game is over at best, and usually not until the next day.

Episode 1 was not originally sold in a box set. The Orange Box included Ep1, but I think the GP meant he bought it standalone when it was first released.

And while OpFor may still be the best FPS expansion ever, I seriously doubt Valve would give up control like that anymore.

I don't know where you live, but here in the US it was $30 compared to the normal $50.

Federal taxes nearly doubled last year. Not only that but they are closing loopholes for loose tobacco so the overall effect will be more than double the amount of federal tax collected. Add to that the outright banning of most types of flavored tobacco because somehow menthols are really roping in the kids (won't someone think of the children!), and you can see government is going nuts over the issue.

Google tries to making using the internet faster and easier because that generally means more people will use existing Google products that serve ads and mine data. This doesn't mean Android or GoogleISP will be pulling an NSA and DPI-ing every last bit that flows through their devices. And really if you're worried about that, who can you trust because your existing ISP or mobile phone manufacturer can pull the same stunt.

I have a 2006 base model Macbook and thus far I've replaced a failed hard drive and it still runs wonderfully. The battery lasts about 2 hours unless you start playing lots of video. It's much more than I can say about any cheap windows laptop I've ever seen except for older IBM-made Thinkpads.

You forgot about the finance guys who set up a system where anyone could buy insurance on the CDO's (even ones they didn't own) so there was such a top-heavy system of people betting against them that it became impossible for any company to have been able to pay out the policy. Also the finance guys that didn't disclose they were doing this to their investors. Saying the finance guys were not primarily to blame is like saying it's your fault for standing in the way of my knife as I swing it wildly in your direction.

What? So when I pay for a chunk of data every month, my ISP should make me pay more for a method of utilizing the service that allows me to use that chunk faster? What?

Heh, I love VB but don't understand the appeal of Archer at all. Every new show the Sealab guys do gets worse and Archer finally dropped below the acceptable quality for me. It seems far too obsessed with the cheap laugh, although it may have gotten better than the first few episodes.