I actually have no beef with steam because it doesn't try to be two things. A steam game is a license no matter where you bought the game, but you get all the benefits of that a license should give you. Most DRM companies try to give you as physical copy when it suits them and a license when it doesn't.
Current office installs work the same way. You get x machines and there is no way to remove a machine. You use your x licenses and you're done. However a quick call to Microsoft and just like windows they'll fix it for you.
Steam is an online game distribution network run by Valve Software. It's a little bit like iTunes in the sense that you can buy stuff through it and it handles DRM for your downloads, but it's significantly more integrated with the games you're playing to the extent that physical copies of many games these days still require a steam account. It involves DRM and "always on" functionality, but doesn't pretend to be selling you a physical product. That is to say it doesn't allow you to resell your games and if you're a douche and get yourself banned from Steam you lose your games, but you can install your games on as many systems as you want and download any game you are licensed for whenever you want(even if you bought it on physical media). Unlike a lot of companies they don't try to have their cake and eat it to.
Why you care depends on what your position on Linux is, if you don't care about it, there's no need for you care about any story mentioning the word "Linux". If you're a disciple of RMS you care because it's a proprietary(not open source) system delivering DRM'd product which is the very antithesis to all you believe in. If you like Linux and want it to succeed in the desktop market, you care because gaming is one of the places where Linux really suffers and having a controlled reliable method of distribution should at least mean that companies for whom a Linux port is very little work should be willing to port their games to Linux and if that happens eventually companies for whom a Linux port is a significant amount of effort may start to do so. Lastly if you rabidly hate Linux or Ubuntu specifically you care because it makes them slightly more successful.
Essentially the problem with progress bars is that what people want from them, they can't do. No one really give a crap what percentage of stuff is done in the purest sense, they care about how much longer it's going to take and more specifically when is it going to be done. The issue is that telling people when it's going to be done is impossible except in the most trivial of instances and even those trivial instances it's not hugely accurate. Progress bars are getting better, XP's copy dialogue only showed you how long it was taking to cache the file you wanted to copy(which is why Vista and 7's copy seemed to take so much longer for network copies), Windows 8 shows throughput. Fundamentally though, all progress bars are a disappointment because they cannot give the answer people actually want.
Your case should actually be solved by dealing with the stupid id laws, realistically no one living in the us should actually need these services unless they are sending money overseas, but this is how such systems go.
They don't want the fraud. It's simply more expensive to fix it than it is to lose the money and given that it's only money being lost for the most part(identity theft is a very different sort of issue with much broader consequences), no one gives a flying fuck. Sure there's a principle involved, but in the end is it righteous to spend tens of thousands of dollars chasing down a guy who stole a few hundred? Especially when you had dick all when it came to evidence. You hearing the guy whinging about not being able to afford a plane ticket shouldn't even be enough to get a warrant let alone an arrest and proving that the guy the tickets were bought for is the guy who bought the tickets isn't really all that cut and dry either.
Yes, the cost is passed on to you the customer. The whole point of the exercise is that the cost of actually doing something about it(which will also be passed onto the customer) is orders of magnitude higher than the cost of the fraud. They don't actually have insurance for this, it's just cheaper to write it off than it is to fix it.
Well essentially every libertarian on Slashdot and a whole mess of criminals would complain that you've made it very difficult to move untraceable cash around(which is sort of the point). To be honest I'm not sure this is a particularly big deal since you can still drive around with a big old briefcase full of cash.
Fundamentally though you'd make life harder for people who don't have access to computers and the modern world. In particular you'd make it difficult for immigrants to send money back to their families in whatever third world shit hole they came from. You can make the judgement about whether this is actually a tremendously bad thing(transferring cash from the US economy to somewhere else isn't necessarily great for the US economy, but it's pretty great for the people receiving the money and the people sending it), but the impact would be pretty massive. Not quite as massive as the impact of banning third party check cashing(apparently there are people who are sufficiently poor that having a bank account is a waste of money), but the old school economy is a pretty big thing(isn't it interesting that with all this crying about electronic banking and stolen passwords, most fraud works through mechanisms which have been in place for centuries(western union is basically a telegraphic letter of credit).
Being a good guy white-hat doesn't get you arrested. Not realizing the difference between telling someone "Hey your door is open" from the outside of their house and saying "Hey your door is open from in someone's bedroom" is what gets you arrested. Well that and the kind of self righteous attitude that makes "white hats" believe that if a vulnerability isn't fixed within a day of them having reported it they have the right to take down the system or reveal said vulnerability to the world. In other words, the fact that I have forgotten to lock my door doesn't give you the right to enter my house and if you do so, even to tell me that I've forgotten to lock my door you aren't a "good guy", not even if you have some of your stuff in my house.
Is Slashdot so desperate for something to bash Microsoft over that they're restoring to this? Storage has been measured in our powers of ten and memory in powers of two since before some of the people posting in this thread were born.
It was irritating twenty years ago, but it wasn't by any means an invention of Microsoft. This is how it works now, welcome to the nineties.
A more apt point is that the non family members you pay for are someone else's children, which is to say that if you don't want to die alone in a ditch no matter how much money you may have, someone needs to have kids, or build much better robots.
It doesn't help that whenever the government tries to throw parents a bone and help out with things like education, the childless get outraged that money is being spent that doesn't benefit them. The fact that without a next generation to do the actual work even people like Mitt Romney will have a pretty crappy retirement(money can't buy what isn't there) and most of us won't be able to retire at all, but we parents are just a bunch of freeloaders who didn't think to use a condom.
Your server equipment, as you've discovered, wasn't built to last a decade. I know it's tragic and it grates against your middle aged soul, but that's how it is. You want to keep it, that's fine, but don't expect it to turn on tomorrow and when it doesn't accept it.
You've already said the raid controller was starting to fail, it's massively past the point where anyone sane is going to warranty it for any price you'd accept paying so you were on your own. You tried to fix the raid controller and it finished up dead. You don't even know for sure if it was the BIOS update that killed it or whether whatever was eating it to begin with did. You also appear to have done a decades worth of firmware updates at once, again on already failing hardware, which is never a great idea.
Phone support isn't actually too bad if you're an asshole.
The basic issue is that phone support is(or at least was when I dealt with them) apparently given a bonus for reducing costs by not sending out a tech or replacement parts. Therefor when you call them up, they tend to try and convince you not to solve the problem. If you don't particularly go into the problem knowing what the solution is and basically steam roll them till they give you what you want, they're not so bad.
That said, e-mail or online chat is substantially easier as there's no one their to suggestive sell you the idea of not getting what you want.
I don't rely on the police force to protect me, that's not what they're for and they're not particularly good at it. That's not to say they don't try, but they've got a lag time on their response and they're only human. The police are there to make crime more risky and therefor undesirable, and to reduce the amount of time a criminal has. They don't necessarily protect you from the crime that is happening right now, but they reduce the likelihood that you will be a victim of crime. In my jurisdiction, the police are pretty damned slack when it comes to chasing down burglars, they'll catch em if they find them, but when I got robbed we saw forensics take a quick look for prints but no uniformed officer ever turned up, that's not abnormal, if you weren't in the house with them, they wont' send anyone. Cross the line into harming people though, and the cops are all over it, so rational criminals know to avoid houses where people are home. Getting broken into sucks, but it's only stuff, and that's why I pay insurance premiums.
Guns can sometimes protect you, but the problem is that they're also not particularly good at it either. If you store your gun safely(gun safe, trigger lock, unloaded, ammo in a separate location), your response time isn't actually going to be a lot faster than the police(presuming of course that you live in a middle class white neighborhood, if you live in the ghetto you'll see retirement before you see a cop). If you don't store it safely you're substantially more likely to shoot yourself or others than you are to ever actually need it for self defense(this goes double if you have kids in the house). Even if you do have a gun, if you wait long enough to know who you're shooting you probably have at best a 50/50 shot and you've just escalated what might have been just a robbery into someone leaving dead. That's assuming that the person who wants to kill or rape you is a stranger breaking into your house and not someone you live with or someone with legitimate access(which no gun will ever protect you from). On top of that, every legitimate gun you have on the streets provides another source for criminals to get them(where do you think illegal guns come from?) and makes the society as a whole more unsafe.
I get that you want to protect yourself and your family(if you have one), I sure do, but if you want to be safe, your best bet is to GTFO and call the police, your likelihood of walking away from a shootout unharmed is minute unless you act in such a way that massively endangers others(keeping a loaded gun unsecured, shooting at shadows, etc), and even if you do.
Some day I might be appallingly unlucky and have someone enter my home by force when I or my family are still in it, I live in a reasonably safe city in a reasonably safe country(guns are not banned here, but are heavily restricted, gun crime happens, but it's rare), but it may happen. It may happen that I or a loved one are hurt in such an event, perhaps in appalling ways, but to be honest, I'd rather face that possibility than face my son shooting himself with my gun or accidentally shooting him if he comes home from university in the middle of the night some day. I'd rather run and feel like a coward than risk my family by trying to protect them from something which is incredibly uncommon even in the US, let alone here.
Or maybe a strong person knows that in a democracy not everything goes their way and strives to change the way people think whereas a weak person devices that when democracy doesn't go their way democracy is broken and so they arm themselves to the teeth age make it so the cops have to go around in body armor.
Lunatics like these are the ones who give the government the justifications it needs for oppressive laws, because their deranged world view paints the rest of us as enemies. You're not making yourself more safe and you're actively breaking the Democratic process.
Except the op is wrong. Negative ads are illegal in the US and in Europe if they mention the other company and are not factually correct. Even in the US opinion is not protected in this context. This is why so many ads say things like "other brands", because if you name names it has to be true. The issue which makes the op wrong is that Google does this. The ad doesn't say humans look at it, that would be illegal because it's not true. The ad is fine.
It really is a nice OS, and if you can accept that you won't be using the mouse very much to navigate around it because the "must use touch" has ruined that experience, it's not even irritating. There's even some value to some of the "create native apps for websites" stuff that's moved in from the tablet world. The big issue is that people load it, and try to find the start menu and it's not there and they get grumpy. Then when they eventually find the start menu they can't find their apps and when they work out how to search it uses clumsy non intuitive mouse movements, especially on dual screen. Your first few minutes of the OS show you all of the horrible mistakes that were made. Most people won't learn all the keyboard shortcuts and will either hate the OS or install stuff to bring back the old look and miss out on some of the new things. Microsoft seems to think that people will learn to use it and love it, I have my doubts.
With a keyboard though, it's actually quite nice, press the win key and start typing, you find your apps, win+x opens a neat little system admin menu, win+f opens file search, plus a whole bunch of others. The "touch and mouse work the same" was an idiotic decision, I get why they did it, but I still believe it's a fundamental OS. Underneath all that though, they've improved the OS quite dramatically. It was also the easiest in place upgrade I've ever done for Windows as well as being the cheapest windows upgrade I've ever bought.
Windows 8 rocks, it's faster and more responsive on the same hardware when compared to Windows 7(at least that's my personal experience). The start screen however is an abomination which, with appropriate use of the keyboard becomes substantially less annoying.
The key to Windows 8, is essentially to give up the mouse, if you use the keyboard you don't even notice the issues anymore. Doesn't stop the start screen from being an abomination, but it moves to being a "it could have been better" compared to a "get this out of my face". Underneath the start screen it's actually a really good OS, I upgraded and when I learned enough shortcuts to get stuff done I don't even notice anymore. Mind you it helped that I'd started doing [win] and then typing to get my app in Win 7 ages ago and that just translated straight into the start screen but faster.
Mandatory private retirement funds certainly cause this kind of issue, and not just in the US. What however is the alternative? What do we do to provide for the people who don't invest on their own(and remember we need these people to exist or we're back to the same problem we have now)? Are you happy to expand Social Security out so that it's actually enough to live comfortably on? Are you prepared to means test it? Raise the retirement age dramatically (and ensure that older people can actually get jobs)? How do you balance it all? Having large 401k providers who cozy up to the corporations is also part of the problem, but smaller companies simply cannot generate the same amount of ROI (see how 1 investor providing 50% of the capital to a start up fairs vs 5000 providing.01% each, same capital investment, vastly different result).
Somalia is not what libertarians want, but it is the result of what most libertarians say they want.
In theory what libertarians want is to given the country without allocating their power to a representative. That is to say they want to be free to make all their own decisions, and fit everyone else to be the same. The problem is that like anarchists they have no suggestions on how this would work. They don't all agree on what the actual rule of government would be, they don't have as mechanism for arbitrating conflicts between different ideas of the role of government, and they tend to believe you can have relationships with people without mutual obligation.
tldr; libertarians believe in as postcode we would all want to live in, but which wouldn't work.
There is a big difference between being on Telstra Infrastructure compared to Telstra controlled monitored and maintained internet service, you're absolutely right. The NBN Co however will not be providing you with controlled maintained internet service, they will be providing your ISP(who will be providing you with controlled, maintained, monitored internet service) with infrastructure over which to run their service. Specifically, unless you choose to run your own ISP, you won't be a customer of the NBN, you'll still go through the same sort of people you go through now.
As to, "if they wanted it they'd buy it". From who? No one is offering high speed connectivity unless you live or have your business located over existing fibre or are willing to run your own, which is cost prohibitive for even most businesses. The NBN has relatively low uptake so far, mostly because in a lot of areas that have roll out so far, internet connectivity was fairly good to begin with, people are under contract and all the usual stuff. I'd be willing to bet that in my area where we can't get ADSL and people are already paying prices higher than the NBN uptake will be a lot higher.
Except that there's already one pipe(Telstra), the NBN isn't replacing your ISP(they're replacing Telstra). There are a couple of places where the direct connection to your home might be provided by Optus or a wireless provider, but eventually you'll end up on Telstra infrastructure. You will still have exactly the same degree of choice you have now, you'll just be using fibre built and paid for by the government and owned by a privatized government entity as opposed to using copper built and paid for by the government and owned and controlled by a privatized government entity.
The core driver of this is not actually reducing bandwidth usage, the ISPs for the most part don't actually care about that. The driver is the fact that ISPs are starting to provision VOIP services, both because it's profitable and in preparation for when the NBN rolls out and everyone's phones are VOIP. They don't really care if you download 50 GB of data or 10 GB so long as you've paid for it, they care whether the people paying them for VOIP calls are getting the service they are paying for. QoS(which is what this actually is) allows them to do that.
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I actually have no beef with steam because it doesn't try to be two things. A steam game is a license no matter where you bought the game, but you get all the benefits of that a license should give you. Most DRM companies try to give you as physical copy when it suits them and a license when it doesn't.
Current office installs work the same way. You get x machines and there is no way to remove a machine. You use your x licenses and you're done. However a quick call to Microsoft and just like windows they'll fix it for you.
Steam is an online game distribution network run by Valve Software. It's a little bit like iTunes in the sense that you can buy stuff through it and it handles DRM for your downloads, but it's significantly more integrated with the games you're playing to the extent that physical copies of many games these days still require a steam account. It involves DRM and "always on" functionality, but doesn't pretend to be selling you a physical product. That is to say it doesn't allow you to resell your games and if you're a douche and get yourself banned from Steam you lose your games, but you can install your games on as many systems as you want and download any game you are licensed for whenever you want(even if you bought it on physical media). Unlike a lot of companies they don't try to have their cake and eat it to.
Why you care depends on what your position on Linux is, if you don't care about it, there's no need for you care about any story mentioning the word "Linux". If you're a disciple of RMS you care because it's a proprietary(not open source) system delivering DRM'd product which is the very antithesis to all you believe in. If you like Linux and want it to succeed in the desktop market, you care because gaming is one of the places where Linux really suffers and having a controlled reliable method of distribution should at least mean that companies for whom a Linux port is very little work should be willing to port their games to Linux and if that happens eventually companies for whom a Linux port is a significant amount of effort may start to do so. Lastly if you rabidly hate Linux or Ubuntu specifically you care because it makes them slightly more successful.
Essentially the problem with progress bars is that what people want from them, they can't do. No one really give a crap what percentage of stuff is done in the purest sense, they care about how much longer it's going to take and more specifically when is it going to be done. The issue is that telling people when it's going to be done is impossible except in the most trivial of instances and even those trivial instances it's not hugely accurate. Progress bars are getting better, XP's copy dialogue only showed you how long it was taking to cache the file you wanted to copy(which is why Vista and 7's copy seemed to take so much longer for network copies), Windows 8 shows throughput. Fundamentally though, all progress bars are a disappointment because they cannot give the answer people actually want.
Your case should actually be solved by dealing with the stupid id laws, realistically no one living in the us should actually need these services unless they are sending money overseas, but this is how such systems go.
They don't want the fraud. It's simply more expensive to fix it than it is to lose the money and given that it's only money being lost for the most part(identity theft is a very different sort of issue with much broader consequences), no one gives a flying fuck. Sure there's a principle involved, but in the end is it righteous to spend tens of thousands of dollars chasing down a guy who stole a few hundred? Especially when you had dick all when it came to evidence. You hearing the guy whinging about not being able to afford a plane ticket shouldn't even be enough to get a warrant let alone an arrest and proving that the guy the tickets were bought for is the guy who bought the tickets isn't really all that cut and dry either.
Yes, the cost is passed on to you the customer. The whole point of the exercise is that the cost of actually doing something about it(which will also be passed onto the customer) is orders of magnitude higher than the cost of the fraud. They don't actually have insurance for this, it's just cheaper to write it off than it is to fix it.
Well essentially every libertarian on Slashdot and a whole mess of criminals would complain that you've made it very difficult to move untraceable cash around(which is sort of the point). To be honest I'm not sure this is a particularly big deal since you can still drive around with a big old briefcase full of cash.
Fundamentally though you'd make life harder for people who don't have access to computers and the modern world. In particular you'd make it difficult for immigrants to send money back to their families in whatever third world shit hole they came from. You can make the judgement about whether this is actually a tremendously bad thing(transferring cash from the US economy to somewhere else isn't necessarily great for the US economy, but it's pretty great for the people receiving the money and the people sending it), but the impact would be pretty massive. Not quite as massive as the impact of banning third party check cashing(apparently there are people who are sufficiently poor that having a bank account is a waste of money), but the old school economy is a pretty big thing(isn't it interesting that with all this crying about electronic banking and stolen passwords, most fraud works through mechanisms which have been in place for centuries(western union is basically a telegraphic letter of credit).
Being a good guy white-hat doesn't get you arrested. Not realizing the difference between telling someone "Hey your door is open" from the outside of their house and saying "Hey your door is open from in someone's bedroom" is what gets you arrested. Well that and the kind of self righteous attitude that makes "white hats" believe that if a vulnerability isn't fixed within a day of them having reported it they have the right to take down the system or reveal said vulnerability to the world. In other words, the fact that I have forgotten to lock my door doesn't give you the right to enter my house and if you do so, even to tell me that I've forgotten to lock my door you aren't a "good guy", not even if you have some of your stuff in my house.
It was irritating twenty years ago, but it wasn't by any means an invention of Microsoft. This is how it works now, welcome to the nineties.
A more apt point is that the non family members you pay for are someone else's children, which is to say that if you don't want to die alone in a ditch no matter how much money you may have, someone needs to have kids, or build much better robots.
It doesn't help that whenever the government tries to throw parents a bone and help out with things like education, the childless get outraged that money is being spent that doesn't benefit them. The fact that without a next generation to do the actual work even people like Mitt Romney will have a pretty crappy retirement(money can't buy what isn't there) and most of us won't be able to retire at all, but we parents are just a bunch of freeloaders who didn't think to use a condom.
Your server equipment, as you've discovered, wasn't built to last a decade. I know it's tragic and it grates against your middle aged soul, but that's how it is. You want to keep it, that's fine, but don't expect it to turn on tomorrow and when it doesn't accept it.
You've already said the raid controller was starting to fail, it's massively past the point where anyone sane is going to warranty it for any price you'd accept paying so you were on your own. You tried to fix the raid controller and it finished up dead. You don't even know for sure if it was the BIOS update that killed it or whether whatever was eating it to begin with did. You also appear to have done a decades worth of firmware updates at once, again on already failing hardware, which is never a great idea.
Phone support isn't actually too bad if you're an asshole.
The basic issue is that phone support is(or at least was when I dealt with them) apparently given a bonus for reducing costs by not sending out a tech or replacement parts. Therefor when you call them up, they tend to try and convince you not to solve the problem. If you don't particularly go into the problem knowing what the solution is and basically steam roll them till they give you what you want, they're not so bad.
That said, e-mail or online chat is substantially easier as there's no one their to suggestive sell you the idea of not getting what you want.
I don't rely on the police force to protect me, that's not what they're for and they're not particularly good at it. That's not to say they don't try, but they've got a lag time on their response and they're only human. The police are there to make crime more risky and therefor undesirable, and to reduce the amount of time a criminal has. They don't necessarily protect you from the crime that is happening right now, but they reduce the likelihood that you will be a victim of crime. In my jurisdiction, the police are pretty damned slack when it comes to chasing down burglars, they'll catch em if they find them, but when I got robbed we saw forensics take a quick look for prints but no uniformed officer ever turned up, that's not abnormal, if you weren't in the house with them, they wont' send anyone. Cross the line into harming people though, and the cops are all over it, so rational criminals know to avoid houses where people are home. Getting broken into sucks, but it's only stuff, and that's why I pay insurance premiums.
Guns can sometimes protect you, but the problem is that they're also not particularly good at it either. If you store your gun safely(gun safe, trigger lock, unloaded, ammo in a separate location), your response time isn't actually going to be a lot faster than the police(presuming of course that you live in a middle class white neighborhood, if you live in the ghetto you'll see retirement before you see a cop). If you don't store it safely you're substantially more likely to shoot yourself or others than you are to ever actually need it for self defense(this goes double if you have kids in the house). Even if you do have a gun, if you wait long enough to know who you're shooting you probably have at best a 50/50 shot and you've just escalated what might have been just a robbery into someone leaving dead. That's assuming that the person who wants to kill or rape you is a stranger breaking into your house and not someone you live with or someone with legitimate access(which no gun will ever protect you from). On top of that, every legitimate gun you have on the streets provides another source for criminals to get them(where do you think illegal guns come from?) and makes the society as a whole more unsafe.
I get that you want to protect yourself and your family(if you have one), I sure do, but if you want to be safe, your best bet is to GTFO and call the police, your likelihood of walking away from a shootout unharmed is minute unless you act in such a way that massively endangers others(keeping a loaded gun unsecured, shooting at shadows, etc), and even if you do.
Some day I might be appallingly unlucky and have someone enter my home by force when I or my family are still in it, I live in a reasonably safe city in a reasonably safe country(guns are not banned here, but are heavily restricted, gun crime happens, but it's rare), but it may happen. It may happen that I or a loved one are hurt in such an event, perhaps in appalling ways, but to be honest, I'd rather face that possibility than face my son shooting himself with my gun or accidentally shooting him if he comes home from university in the middle of the night some day. I'd rather run and feel like a coward than risk my family by trying to protect them from something which is incredibly uncommon even in the US, let alone here.
Or maybe a strong person knows that in a democracy not everything goes their way and strives to change the way people think whereas a weak person devices that when democracy doesn't go their way democracy is broken and so they arm themselves to the teeth age make it so the cops have to go around in body armor. Lunatics like these are the ones who give the government the justifications it needs for oppressive laws, because their deranged world view paints the rest of us as enemies. You're not making yourself more safe and you're actively breaking the Democratic process.
Except the op is wrong. Negative ads are illegal in the US and in Europe if they mention the other company and are not factually correct. Even in the US opinion is not protected in this context. This is why so many ads say things like "other brands", because if you name names it has to be true. The issue which makes the op wrong is that Google does this. The ad doesn't say humans look at it, that would be illegal because it's not true. The ad is fine.
It really is a nice OS, and if you can accept that you won't be using the mouse very much to navigate around it because the "must use touch" has ruined that experience, it's not even irritating. There's even some value to some of the "create native apps for websites" stuff that's moved in from the tablet world. The big issue is that people load it, and try to find the start menu and it's not there and they get grumpy. Then when they eventually find the start menu they can't find their apps and when they work out how to search it uses clumsy non intuitive mouse movements, especially on dual screen. Your first few minutes of the OS show you all of the horrible mistakes that were made. Most people won't learn all the keyboard shortcuts and will either hate the OS or install stuff to bring back the old look and miss out on some of the new things. Microsoft seems to think that people will learn to use it and love it, I have my doubts.
With a keyboard though, it's actually quite nice, press the win key and start typing, you find your apps, win+x opens a neat little system admin menu, win+f opens file search, plus a whole bunch of others. The "touch and mouse work the same" was an idiotic decision, I get why they did it, but I still believe it's a fundamental OS. Underneath all that though, they've improved the OS quite dramatically. It was also the easiest in place upgrade I've ever done for Windows as well as being the cheapest windows upgrade I've ever bought.
Windows 8 rocks, it's faster and more responsive on the same hardware when compared to Windows 7(at least that's my personal experience). The start screen however is an abomination which, with appropriate use of the keyboard becomes substantially less annoying.
The key to Windows 8, is essentially to give up the mouse, if you use the keyboard you don't even notice the issues anymore. Doesn't stop the start screen from being an abomination, but it moves to being a "it could have been better" compared to a "get this out of my face". Underneath the start screen it's actually a really good OS, I upgraded and when I learned enough shortcuts to get stuff done I don't even notice anymore. Mind you it helped that I'd started doing [win] and then typing to get my app in Win 7 ages ago and that just translated straight into the start screen but faster.
Mandatory private retirement funds certainly cause this kind of issue, and not just in the US. What however is the alternative? What do we do to provide for the people who don't invest on their own(and remember we need these people to exist or we're back to the same problem we have now)? Are you happy to expand Social Security out so that it's actually enough to live comfortably on? Are you prepared to means test it? Raise the retirement age dramatically (and ensure that older people can actually get jobs)? How do you balance it all? Having large 401k providers who cozy up to the corporations is also part of the problem, but smaller companies simply cannot generate the same amount of ROI (see how 1 investor providing 50% of the capital to a start up fairs vs 5000 providing .01% each, same capital investment, vastly different result).
Somalia is not what libertarians want, but it is the result of what most libertarians say they want.
In theory what libertarians want is to given the country without allocating their power to a representative. That is to say they want to be free to make all their own decisions, and fit everyone else to be the same. The problem is that like anarchists they have no suggestions on how this would work. They don't all agree on what the actual rule of government would be, they don't have as mechanism for arbitrating conflicts between different ideas of the role of government, and they tend to believe you can have relationships with people without mutual obligation.
tldr; libertarians believe in as postcode we would all want to live in, but which wouldn't work.
There is a big difference between being on Telstra Infrastructure compared to Telstra controlled monitored and maintained internet service, you're absolutely right. The NBN Co however will not be providing you with controlled maintained internet service, they will be providing your ISP(who will be providing you with controlled, maintained, monitored internet service) with infrastructure over which to run their service. Specifically, unless you choose to run your own ISP, you won't be a customer of the NBN, you'll still go through the same sort of people you go through now.
As to, "if they wanted it they'd buy it". From who? No one is offering high speed connectivity unless you live or have your business located over existing fibre or are willing to run your own, which is cost prohibitive for even most businesses. The NBN has relatively low uptake so far, mostly because in a lot of areas that have roll out so far, internet connectivity was fairly good to begin with, people are under contract and all the usual stuff. I'd be willing to bet that in my area where we can't get ADSL and people are already paying prices higher than the NBN uptake will be a lot higher.
Except that there's already one pipe(Telstra), the NBN isn't replacing your ISP(they're replacing Telstra). There are a couple of places where the direct connection to your home might be provided by Optus or a wireless provider, but eventually you'll end up on Telstra infrastructure. You will still have exactly the same degree of choice you have now, you'll just be using fibre built and paid for by the government and owned by a privatized government entity as opposed to using copper built and paid for by the government and owned and controlled by a privatized government entity.
The core driver of this is not actually reducing bandwidth usage, the ISPs for the most part don't actually care about that. The driver is the fact that ISPs are starting to provision VOIP services, both because it's profitable and in preparation for when the NBN rolls out and everyone's phones are VOIP. They don't really care if you download 50 GB of data or 10 GB so long as you've paid for it, they care whether the people paying them for VOIP calls are getting the service they are paying for. QoS(which is what this actually is) allows them to do that.