I disagree that innovation in social is dead. You could have said the same thing a year ago, but who saw Pinterest coming? There are still lots of unmet needs.
Microsoft continues to do very well in enterprise markets. It's true that their consumer mindshare is almost zero except for XBox, but there is a lot of growth to be had from enterprise servers and their various cloud offerings.
The difference is that your Amazon content can be used on virtually any device, whereas Apple has little interest in bringing iX to any additional non-Apple devices.
His account was created 106 days ago and has 7 posts, 4 of which are about Anon/Lulz. From this you conclude that he is a sock puppet paid by someone (the FBI?) to lead us astray with his constant one liners. Seems like a stretch, but hey that's just me.
I don't understand the concern about typing non-ASCII Unicode characters on a Windows box. I know of at least 3 easy ways: charmap, alt+numpad, and editor-specific support.
I have Qwest because Comcast can't provide reliable service to my 1920s apartment building, and I only get 2.6 Mbps down. I wouldn't think I'd have to explain on HN why that's not a viable alternative. It's certainly not for the OP's use case of streaming video.
Sorry, Comcast has been handed a monopoly franchise for broadband in many parts of the US, including Seattle. With their obscene profits comes an obligation to provide acceptable service in all reasonable cases. This is not an equal bargain between two independent parties -- the OP has ZERO alternative broadband providers and the real battle Comcast is fighting is against Netflix.
Missing features:
- Mothball feeds I'm not reading lately but might want to pick back up in the future.
- Topical aggregation of feeds/posts.
- De-duping.
Not sure if I'd pay extra or switch readers for any of those features, however.
I used Live Mesh from launch up until about a year ago and had similar experiences. Lots of sync errors, lots of pain upgrading when MS decided to shuffle Live Mesh over to the Windows Live team.
On the other hand, Dropbox has been incredibly reliable and easy to use, plus it works on Android and Linux.