Perhaps. But isn't Musk's argument that the current trajectory of computer simulations (i.e. from Pong to Virtual Reality) suggests that our world is the result of another civilization's similar trajectory? Nothing in our trajectory hints at computer consciousness / self-awareness. Not to say his sci-fi fantasies couldn't be true, just that his evidence of it is questionable.
This sort of bogus "there's really no significant difference between them" is the reason we got to the situation you describe. There's no denying that the country has been tilted sharply to the right since Reagan got in. That's been done through a combination of
1. phony 'economic theory' claiming that tax cuts pay for themselves
2. playing off of people's discomfort with cultural change - in areas of sexuality, but yes, mainly in the area of racial equality
3. using some examples of government inefficiency to promote the idea that government is 'always the problem'
These tactics have been remarkably effective, and yes, the Democrats have been sucked rightward in order to compete for votes. But if nothing else, the dueling Trump/Sanders narratives this time have shown that the Republican strategy has run out of gas, and contradicting it head on has far fewer consequences than politicians have been trained to imagine. So Clinton may actually push for - and accomplish - a few left-ish things, and certainly will get more left-leaning Supreme Court picks confirmed than Trump, who probably would nominate knee-jerk business friendly judges in the first place. Hell, Obama got Sotomayor through, and Bill Clinton got Ginsberg. What makes you think Republican obstructionism will continue to work once it loses them the Senate.
But hey, don't let any of that get in the way of your 'at least Trump will shake up the establishment' fantasy. Those are the words of someone who thinks he has nothing personal at stake. I'd suggest you think again...
It's not the simulation that's beyond our current rate of progress - it's the interface to make you actually believe it's real. That would have to fool all the senses, and we're nowhere near being even on a trajectory to be able to do that.
It's funny how futurists like Musk have a bias toward believing in the feasibility of sci-fi fantasies that's kind of the mirror image of my bias toward not believing the impossible. Of course, Musk's bias brought us landable space launch rockets, and mine - perhaps some realistic Slashdot posts, otherwise...
Sounds like a colossal pain - just to get Windows to boot reasonably fast. Linux boots much faster on my box than Win7, and it's sounding like, without this weird semi-hibernate thing, Win10 would boot even slower than Win7. Fun - more reason never to boot into it.
To be fair, all android phones from the Galaxy Nexus era had lousy battery life. Only recently has the hardware - and the OS - gotten to the point that it's possible to build an Android phone with good battery life. The Galaxy Nexus had other problems - like a way too short OS upgrade path. Mine also stopped charging altogether at one point...
I kind of doubt they're overly concerned about a few individuals like you that go to such lengths to avoid using their stuff. Remember that they only want your info in order to target ads at you - that you actually click on. I assume you're also using an ad-blocker, so you're kind of beside the point to Google and the like.
On the other hand, if say and LG G4 could be made to take full advantage of it's OIS-equipped camera under stock Android, that'd be really nice. So if Google's talking about making it easier for OEM's to limit their customizations to things that really take advantage of their hardware innovations and stop trying to out-flashy the competition's UI, you'd end up with an Android that's more 'standard' (i.e. that customers could switch to painlessly), gets regular security updates (and even OS updates), but can still compete where it counts. That sounds like a good deal for everyone except maybe Samsung - and Microsoft if they're looking to get into the Android device business...
I'd have a G4 today - and be running Cyanogenmod on it - if it were possible to get full use out of the camera in that configuration. As it is, I'm still on a Nexus 4 - but with Marshmallow c/o CM 13. Runs pretty well, but ready for a hardware upgrade. And I'd like T-Mobile wifi calling to work. So, yeah, 3 1/2 years is longer than the current 'standard' refresh cycle OEM's count on, but maybe if they didn't spend so much on useless software, they could still make money from the likes of me. Offload costly OS software development / maintenance to Google, and focus your software efforts where it counts - offloading distribution of your special sauce to the Play Store.
So, if I'm reading you right, you have to force a complete shutdown on win10 - which is not the default - in order to be able to safely access a Windows partition under Linux? Or is that only if you intend to write to that partition under Linux (which i guess I occasionally do, so...)?
I was under the impression that if you have Windows 7 set to auto-update, it installs most of the new telemetry 'features' anyway, so there's no escaping that regardless. Is that not true - or do they only log a fraction of what Win10 logs? I haven't upgraded because I rarely use Windows on my home machine (run Linux Mint as my main desktop), and I've heard some stories about the Windows 10 installer wiping out other OS's - or messing with the partitioning so those OS's no longer work. Anybody know if that's true - or is it a crapshoot (which in a way would be worse). For what it's worth, I've got an EFI boot/partitioning scheme and no secure boot.
Otherwise, I'd figure there's nothing much to lose - since they're already phoning home when I (or my partner - who still uses the Win7 partition regularly) boot to Windows 7.
Except they can stop it. If it gets to the point that it's seriously affecting their bottom line, they can encrypt the stream and require a plugin to view it (or whatever Netflix does).
Has Samsung started making their stuff in China - just like all the American companies do? If so, they're being undercut by the same model they used to undercut their competition before they all started doing it too. If not, I kind of feel their pain - but this is still a lousy way to compensate.
At some point companies or governments are going to have to do something about the race to the bottom in manufacturing. Either China remains 3rd world (if they still are...), and goes back to making dumb trinkets, or they nurture a real (i.e. well-payed) middle class that's able to buy stuff as well as produce it. In either case, free trade is supposed to be about actual trade - as in I buy what you make and you buy what I make. But it's become I buy what you make and you make what I pretend to 'make'. That's not trade - it's exploitation, circumvention of labor and environmental laws, etc. In a way, it's good that this is coming back to bite big companies like Samsung and Apple. Maybe they have the clout to change it.
It's one (sleazy) thing for a state like Delaware to decide to be a tax haven for corporations - and write their tax law to encourage corporations to 'locate' there.
It's another thing for supposedly neutral judges in a jurisdiction to decide to interpret the law according to their personal beliefs - or to alter their personal beliefs - to generate legal traffic to their jurisdiction - if that's what you're saying is happening in East Texas.
Just maybe that's because she only deleted personal stuff - or stuff she honestly didn't think was important. So she didn't see the need to delete it in a way that prevented recovery. That doesn't excuse using the server. It just maybe suggests that she didn't use it to intentionally compromise the security of the US - or pass US secrets to our enemies - as some Clinton haters are all too eager to assume.
The simplest explanation also makes the most sense - and all you logic hounds would agree if you weren't blinded by your politics. She used a private server because she didn't want personal emails made public in the case of an FOIA request. And given the enemies she has, an FOIA request on any flimsy pretext (yes, a non-existant 'coverup' of what went on in Benghazi is just such a pretext) was a sure thing.
None of that makes it a good idea - so sure, that's a knock against her candidacy. But it also doesn't make her Ethyl Rosenberg. Nor does that make Whitewater the equivalent of Iran/Contra. Even Ken Starr admits that - and he oughta know.
Hillary did not start a war in Libya. She did advocate the US support the action that our European allies wanted to take there, and that involved some military air strikes. So, yeah, she advocated US participation in a limited war effort. The aftermath of that was botched, in keeping with the US's overall lousy track record of involvement in the Muslim world. And of course, our relationship with that world was poisoned by the war in Iraq - started with every intention by Bush/Cheney.
Trump is a lunatic - not worth discussing.
Sanders has gotten every vote he earned - pretty impressively - in the Democratic primary process. He wasn't robbed of votes, no matter how much his supporters insist he was. He was helped by the rules in some states (caucuses, open primaries - where he got lots of Trump supporters' votes, by the way), and hurt in others (closed primaries). The superdelegates are a non-issue, because they are not going to determine the outcome. But for the record, Sanders' current strategy is to ask the superdelegates to overturn the will of the primary voters (yes, the same strategy Ted Cruz had at the end). The only problem with the superdelegates (and it is a bit of a genuine problem) is that they provided an early sense of inevitability for Clinton - at least in the eyes of the media. Doesn't seem to have made much difference, though. Sanders came out of the gate doing as well as he ever did.
Nonsense. Hillary Clinton never started a single war - campaign money or not. People look at her 2002 vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq and somehow come up with the formulation that she single-handedly started that war. She, and just about every other Senator, was cowed into voting for that bill by the Bush administration - which at the time was feeding phony stories about nuclear intelligence to the New York Times, and then citing those very stories as proof that Saddam Hussein had WMD's and the intention to use them against the US. In the light of that - and with the rest of the media providing a non-critical pile-on (yes, there were some exceptions), that vote was, yes, politically expedient. No, not any kind of personal driving force to 'start a war'.
In Libya, she advocated air support for an insurgency under way that was facing a Syria-like atrocity. There were no good options, and I suppose she could've advocated hands-off and let the chips fall where they may. But to characterize that as 'starting wars on behalf of the defense industry' is to exaggerate to the point of outright lying.
Trump, on the other hand, wants to bomb Syria into the stone age on Monday, and not engage on Tuesday, but 'take care of ISIS really fast' on Wednesday.
That's less of a problem than not having supported WIN32 code on Windows RT. They're able to seed Metro into the marketplace by giving away free Windows 10 upgrades - but they can't actually get people to rewrite WIN32 code for Metro when the whole world's moving to either web-based apps or iOS/Android. But if WIN32 code could've been easily ported to Metro, then they'd have stood a chance. They're now trying to make it easy to port Metro stuff to iOS/Android, but there's no Metro stuff to port. If they'd done the same with WIN32, they'd have had to deal with some of the weaknesses of WIN32, but they'd at least have had a huge developer base behind them.
Perhaps if they'd introduced Metro back when Windows 7 was introduced, they could've courted their developer base before iOS and Android got them. But that would've required some foresight - not Microsoft's strong suit...
Okay, this is gonna sound crazy, but the system I worked on originated on the IBM Series/1 - and was written in assembler. In order to outlive the Series/1, we wrote an interpreter for S/1 machine code, and built a unix system that supported running new native unix apps as well as legacy Series/1 code seamlessly from the same front-end. Unbelievably, although most of the code nowadays is several generations down the native unix branch, there is still some legacy S/1 assembler code used on a daily basis. Sometimes it's just downright hard to kill this stuff...
To be fair-ish, the reason for this was to be able to say "windows 10 recently crossed 300 million" to *developers* - who've abandoned Microsoft's roadmap en masse. And they did that largely because Microsoft's roadmap was "throw out your existing WIN32 code and rewrite it for our great new mobile/desktop/xbox platform that nobody uses yet". About 4 years after those same dev's started rewriting their existing WIN32 code the for iOS/Android/web platforms that everybody uses. Now they've bought Xamarin, in an attempt to allow devs to target iOS and Android like they want - and get Windows support 'for free'. Except, again, they're counting on those devs to do yet another rewrite to get support for that platform that nobody uses. There are some real benefits to being able to target iOS and Android from a single code base (to whatever limited extent Xamarin actually enables that), but is that worth starting over?
Or... they would bring it back if they couldn't keep it offshore and continue to defer the taxes. Just because you think lowering the corporate tax rate as an unambiguous ideological 'good', doesn't mean that's the only solution to the problem. We can argue about the appropriate tax rate to apply to offshore earnings - after we solve the idiocy of calling earnings artificially applied to a dummy office in Ireland 'offshore earnings' deserving of different tax treatment in the first place. Supporting that just because it's an end-run around taxes you like is as bad as keeping the tax rates high to compensate for such cheating.
The whole laptop market is 'stagnating' in the sense that most of current laptop users don't really need traditional laptops at all. No incremental features or hardware bumps are going to make most laptop users go out and buy a new one - when all most of them need is a Chromebook. Companies tied to Windows, will keep buying replacement laptops for a while, I suppose. And those who are not tied to Windows might buy Macbook Airs as party favors for their 'high-status' employees - but for the most part, if a company has weaned itself from Windows dependency to the extent that it's users can get by with a Mac, they're well on their way to being able to hand out Chromebooks to everyone as party favors. That can run Android apps too... or RDP... or Citrix.
But it's the nature of a 'personal assistant' to tie it to a search engine. In Apple's case, these days, it's Bing, Do you think that's any more private than competing services - just because the searches originate from Apple?
Reagan raised taxes on the rich after dropping them precipitously. To his credit, he realized trickle-down wasn't working as advertised and did what he needed to. If only the rest of his party were as sensible. And, by the way, he raised taxes (in the form of a large social security tax increase) on the middle class - putting the trust fund into a surplus that lasted (and was used to mask large deficits elsewhere) for 2 decades.
Meanwhile, you may be right about the 50's and 60's, but that doesn't mean that a large shift of the tax burden from those with largely investment income to those with wage income was the correct solution to a change in economic conditions. We essentially had a brief burst of high inflation - caused mostly by an oil embargo - that was used to accomplish political goals, convincing many Americans - you included, apparently - that the only way to avoid economic collapse was the very shift in priorities.
You're right that tax avoidance is perfectly legal. So would be a system that makes most tax avoidance schemes illegal. We currently have 3 branches of government pretty much bought and paid for by big moneyed interests - and even there, the Supreme Court has said that some campaign finance regulations are okay - like eliminating large anonymous political expenditures. Of course, the Congress won't pass the laws necessary to accomplish that (seems the Republicans in there think that the status quo favors them), and the Federal Elections Commission won't do anything to enforce what legal regulations we still have (seems the Republicans on the commission...).
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps. But isn't Musk's argument that the current trajectory of computer simulations (i.e. from Pong to Virtual Reality) suggests that our world is the result of another civilization's similar trajectory? Nothing in our trajectory hints at computer consciousness / self-awareness. Not to say his sci-fi fantasies couldn't be true, just that his evidence of it is questionable.
This sort of bogus "there's really no significant difference between them" is the reason we got to the situation you describe. There's no denying that the country has been tilted sharply to the right since Reagan got in. That's been done through a combination of
1. phony 'economic theory' claiming that tax cuts pay for themselves
2. playing off of people's discomfort with cultural change - in areas of sexuality, but yes, mainly in the area of racial equality
3. using some examples of government inefficiency to promote the idea that government is 'always the problem'
These tactics have been remarkably effective, and yes, the Democrats have been sucked rightward in order to compete for votes. But if nothing else, the dueling Trump/Sanders narratives this time have shown that the Republican strategy has run out of gas, and contradicting it head on has far fewer consequences than politicians have been trained to imagine. So Clinton may actually push for - and accomplish - a few left-ish things, and certainly will get more left-leaning Supreme Court picks confirmed than Trump, who probably would nominate knee-jerk business friendly judges in the first place. Hell, Obama got Sotomayor through, and Bill Clinton got Ginsberg. What makes you think Republican obstructionism will continue to work once it loses them the Senate.
But hey, don't let any of that get in the way of your 'at least Trump will shake up the establishment' fantasy. Those are the words of someone who thinks he has nothing personal at stake. I'd suggest you think again...
It's not the simulation that's beyond our current rate of progress - it's the interface to make you actually believe it's real. That would have to fool all the senses, and we're nowhere near being even on a trajectory to be able to do that.
It's funny how futurists like Musk have a bias toward believing in the feasibility of sci-fi fantasies that's kind of the mirror image of my bias toward not believing the impossible. Of course, Musk's bias brought us landable space launch rockets, and mine - perhaps some realistic Slashdot posts, otherwise...
Sounds like a colossal pain - just to get Windows to boot reasonably fast. Linux boots much faster on my box than Win7, and it's sounding like, without this weird semi-hibernate thing, Win10 would boot even slower than Win7. Fun - more reason never to boot into it.
To be fair, all android phones from the Galaxy Nexus era had lousy battery life. Only recently has the hardware - and the OS - gotten to the point that it's possible to build an Android phone with good battery life. The Galaxy Nexus had other problems - like a way too short OS upgrade path. Mine also stopped charging altogether at one point...
I kind of doubt they're overly concerned about a few individuals like you that go to such lengths to avoid using their stuff. Remember that they only want your info in order to target ads at you - that you actually click on. I assume you're also using an ad-blocker, so you're kind of beside the point to Google and the like.
On the other hand, if say and LG G4 could be made to take full advantage of it's OIS-equipped camera under stock Android, that'd be really nice. So if Google's talking about making it easier for OEM's to limit their customizations to things that really take advantage of their hardware innovations and stop trying to out-flashy the competition's UI, you'd end up with an Android that's more 'standard' (i.e. that customers could switch to painlessly), gets regular security updates (and even OS updates), but can still compete where it counts. That sounds like a good deal for everyone except maybe Samsung - and Microsoft if they're looking to get into the Android device business...
I'd have a G4 today - and be running Cyanogenmod on it - if it were possible to get full use out of the camera in that configuration. As it is, I'm still on a Nexus 4 - but with Marshmallow c/o CM 13. Runs pretty well, but ready for a hardware upgrade. And I'd like T-Mobile wifi calling to work. So, yeah, 3 1/2 years is longer than the current 'standard' refresh cycle OEM's count on, but maybe if they didn't spend so much on useless software, they could still make money from the likes of me. Offload costly OS software development / maintenance to Google, and focus your software efforts where it counts - offloading distribution of your special sauce to the Play Store.
So, if I'm reading you right, you have to force a complete shutdown on win10 - which is not the default - in order to be able to safely access a Windows partition under Linux? Or is that only if you intend to write to that partition under Linux (which i guess I occasionally do, so...)?
I was under the impression that if you have Windows 7 set to auto-update, it installs most of the new telemetry 'features' anyway, so there's no escaping that regardless. Is that not true - or do they only log a fraction of what Win10 logs? I haven't upgraded because I rarely use Windows on my home machine (run Linux Mint as my main desktop), and I've heard some stories about the Windows 10 installer wiping out other OS's - or messing with the partitioning so those OS's no longer work. Anybody know if that's true - or is it a crapshoot (which in a way would be worse). For what it's worth, I've got an EFI boot/partitioning scheme and no secure boot.
Otherwise, I'd figure there's nothing much to lose - since they're already phoning home when I (or my partner - who still uses the Win7 partition regularly) boot to Windows 7.
Except they can stop it. If it gets to the point that it's seriously affecting their bottom line, they can encrypt the stream and require a plugin to view it (or whatever Netflix does).
Has Samsung started making their stuff in China - just like all the American companies do? If so, they're being undercut by the same model they used to undercut their competition before they all started doing it too. If not, I kind of feel their pain - but this is still a lousy way to compensate.
At some point companies or governments are going to have to do something about the race to the bottom in manufacturing. Either China remains 3rd world (if they still are...), and goes back to making dumb trinkets, or they nurture a real (i.e. well-payed) middle class that's able to buy stuff as well as produce it. In either case, free trade is supposed to be about actual trade - as in I buy what you make and you buy what I make. But it's become I buy what you make and you make what I pretend to 'make'. That's not trade - it's exploitation, circumvention of labor and environmental laws, etc. In a way, it's good that this is coming back to bite big companies like Samsung and Apple. Maybe they have the clout to change it.
It's one (sleazy) thing for a state like Delaware to decide to be a tax haven for corporations - and write their tax law to encourage corporations to 'locate' there.
It's another thing for supposedly neutral judges in a jurisdiction to decide to interpret the law according to their personal beliefs - or to alter their personal beliefs - to generate legal traffic to their jurisdiction - if that's what you're saying is happening in East Texas.
Just maybe that's because she only deleted personal stuff - or stuff she honestly didn't think was important. So she didn't see the need to delete it in a way that prevented recovery. That doesn't excuse using the server. It just maybe suggests that she didn't use it to intentionally compromise the security of the US - or pass US secrets to our enemies - as some Clinton haters are all too eager to assume.
The simplest explanation also makes the most sense - and all you logic hounds would agree if you weren't blinded by your politics. She used a private server because she didn't want personal emails made public in the case of an FOIA request. And given the enemies she has, an FOIA request on any flimsy pretext (yes, a non-existant 'coverup' of what went on in Benghazi is just such a pretext) was a sure thing.
None of that makes it a good idea - so sure, that's a knock against her candidacy. But it also doesn't make her Ethyl Rosenberg. Nor does that make Whitewater the equivalent of Iran/Contra. Even Ken Starr admits that - and he oughta know.
Hillary did not start a war in Libya. She did advocate the US support the action that our European allies wanted to take there, and that involved some military air strikes. So, yeah, she advocated US participation in a limited war effort. The aftermath of that was botched, in keeping with the US's overall lousy track record of involvement in the Muslim world. And of course, our relationship with that world was poisoned by the war in Iraq - started with every intention by Bush/Cheney.
Trump is a lunatic - not worth discussing.
Sanders has gotten every vote he earned - pretty impressively - in the Democratic primary process. He wasn't robbed of votes, no matter how much his supporters insist he was. He was helped by the rules in some states (caucuses, open primaries - where he got lots of Trump supporters' votes, by the way), and hurt in others (closed primaries). The superdelegates are a non-issue, because they are not going to determine the outcome. But for the record, Sanders' current strategy is to ask the superdelegates to overturn the will of the primary voters (yes, the same strategy Ted Cruz had at the end). The only problem with the superdelegates (and it is a bit of a genuine problem) is that they provided an early sense of inevitability for Clinton - at least in the eyes of the media. Doesn't seem to have made much difference, though. Sanders came out of the gate doing as well as he ever did.
No, Nixon was more Democrat than Obama is. That's how much things have changed.
Nonsense. Hillary Clinton never started a single war - campaign money or not. People look at her 2002 vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq and somehow come up with the formulation that she single-handedly started that war. She, and just about every other Senator, was cowed into voting for that bill by the Bush administration - which at the time was feeding phony stories about nuclear intelligence to the New York Times, and then citing those very stories as proof that Saddam Hussein had WMD's and the intention to use them against the US. In the light of that - and with the rest of the media providing a non-critical pile-on (yes, there were some exceptions), that vote was, yes, politically expedient. No, not any kind of personal driving force to 'start a war'.
In Libya, she advocated air support for an insurgency under way that was facing a Syria-like atrocity. There were no good options, and I suppose she could've advocated hands-off and let the chips fall where they may. But to characterize that as 'starting wars on behalf of the defense industry' is to exaggerate to the point of outright lying.
Trump, on the other hand, wants to bomb Syria into the stone age on Monday, and not engage on Tuesday, but 'take care of ISIS really fast' on Wednesday.
That's less of a problem than not having supported WIN32 code on Windows RT. They're able to seed Metro into the marketplace by giving away free Windows 10 upgrades - but they can't actually get people to rewrite WIN32 code for Metro when the whole world's moving to either web-based apps or iOS/Android. But if WIN32 code could've been easily ported to Metro, then they'd have stood a chance. They're now trying to make it easy to port Metro stuff to iOS/Android, but there's no Metro stuff to port. If they'd done the same with WIN32, they'd have had to deal with some of the weaknesses of WIN32, but they'd at least have had a huge developer base behind them.
Perhaps if they'd introduced Metro back when Windows 7 was introduced, they could've courted their developer base before iOS and Android got them. But that would've required some foresight - not Microsoft's strong suit...
Okay, this is gonna sound crazy, but the system I worked on originated on the IBM Series/1 - and was written in assembler. In order to outlive the Series/1, we wrote an interpreter for S/1 machine code, and built a unix system that supported running new native unix apps as well as legacy Series/1 code seamlessly from the same front-end. Unbelievably, although most of the code nowadays is several generations down the native unix branch, there is still some legacy S/1 assembler code used on a daily basis. Sometimes it's just downright hard to kill this stuff...
To be fair-ish, the reason for this was to be able to say "windows 10 recently crossed 300 million" to *developers* - who've abandoned Microsoft's roadmap en masse. And they did that largely because Microsoft's roadmap was "throw out your existing WIN32 code and rewrite it for our great new mobile/desktop/xbox platform that nobody uses yet". About 4 years after those same dev's started rewriting their existing WIN32 code the for iOS/Android/web platforms that everybody uses. Now they've bought Xamarin, in an attempt to allow devs to target iOS and Android like they want - and get Windows support 'for free'. Except, again, they're counting on those devs to do yet another rewrite to get support for that platform that nobody uses. There are some real benefits to being able to target iOS and Android from a single code base (to whatever limited extent Xamarin actually enables that), but is that worth starting over?
...taxes you don't like, that is ;-)
Or... they would bring it back if they couldn't keep it offshore and continue to defer the taxes. Just because you think lowering the corporate tax rate as an unambiguous ideological 'good', doesn't mean that's the only solution to the problem. We can argue about the appropriate tax rate to apply to offshore earnings - after we solve the idiocy of calling earnings artificially applied to a dummy office in Ireland 'offshore earnings' deserving of different tax treatment in the first place. Supporting that just because it's an end-run around taxes you like is as bad as keeping the tax rates high to compensate for such cheating.
The whole laptop market is 'stagnating' in the sense that most of current laptop users don't really need traditional laptops at all. No incremental features or hardware bumps are going to make most laptop users go out and buy a new one - when all most of them need is a Chromebook. Companies tied to Windows, will keep buying replacement laptops for a while, I suppose. And those who are not tied to Windows might buy Macbook Airs as party favors for their 'high-status' employees - but for the most part, if a company has weaned itself from Windows dependency to the extent that it's users can get by with a Mac, they're well on their way to being able to hand out Chromebooks to everyone as party favors. That can run Android apps too... or RDP... or Citrix.
But it's the nature of a 'personal assistant' to tie it to a search engine. In Apple's case, these days, it's Bing, Do you think that's any more private than competing services - just because the searches originate from Apple?
Reagan raised taxes on the rich after dropping them precipitously. To his credit, he realized trickle-down wasn't working as advertised and did what he needed to. If only the rest of his party were as sensible. And, by the way, he raised taxes (in the form of a large social security tax increase) on the middle class - putting the trust fund into a surplus that lasted (and was used to mask large deficits elsewhere) for 2 decades.
Meanwhile, you may be right about the 50's and 60's, but that doesn't mean that a large shift of the tax burden from those with largely investment income to those with wage income was the correct solution to a change in economic conditions. We essentially had a brief burst of high inflation - caused mostly by an oil embargo - that was used to accomplish political goals, convincing many Americans - you included, apparently - that the only way to avoid economic collapse was the very shift in priorities.
You're right that tax avoidance is perfectly legal. So would be a system that makes most tax avoidance schemes illegal. We currently have 3 branches of government pretty much bought and paid for by big moneyed interests - and even there, the Supreme Court has said that some campaign finance regulations are okay - like eliminating large anonymous political expenditures. Of course, the Congress won't pass the laws necessary to accomplish that (seems the Republicans in there think that the status quo favors them), and the Federal Elections Commission won't do anything to enforce what legal regulations we still have (seems the Republicans on the commission...).