I don't know about that -- this article which ran recently in the NY Times would seem to back the notion that Germany's energy policy is complicated and is making electricity expensive enough that it is beginning to have unintended consequences.
I don't know if it's a "real" phrase, but you might call it energy poverty -- when electricity is so expensive it becomes a driver of poverty. The guy in the article basically lives off a 5w lightbulb.
While electricity costs in the third world are high, energy scarcity is driven by poverty instead of driving poverty, and offset in a lot of ways by climate and ways of life which are more rural and traditional.
I almost never mod stories when I have mod points. Why? Because the stories that I have enough interest in to read through I want to post in and you can't mod in stories you post in. Stories I don't post in I usually don't have any interest in.
This leads to a paradox where things you have knowledge of you can't mod, and things you don't know about you can mod.
I think you should be able to apply mod points into stories you post in, but make the limitations more specific -- ie, you can't mod the parent you replied to and you can't mod the replies to your post. This would prevent the self-promotion and group think because you wouldn't be able to promote favorable responses, either.
People who are inclined to be whistleblowers are probably people who are independent minded and who reject groupthink and default acceptance of mainstream opinions and attitudes.
It would not be surprising if this carried over into other areas of life, including sexuality. In the case of marginalized persons (ie, homosexuals), the fact that their starting point is outside the mainstream may actually contribute to a rejection of local authority and a desire to be a whistleblower. It's not their sexuality per se but the fact that they aren't socially part of the "mainstream".
Of course when caught, it's turned around -- they are deviant persons BECAUSE of their sexuality and the whistleblowing is just another deviate behavior.
I have a friend who is a police officer and when I asked him why a neighboring suburb (Edina, MN) was so aggressive about traffic tickets. He lives there (but is an officer in Minneapolis) and said that only a couple of locations are they actually interested in the "safety" component of traffic citations.
He says the rest are just about opportunities to "interview" drivers to fish for other charges -- drugs, drunk driving, etc. He says that some of the speed traps around Southdale shopping mall area nab shoplifters occasionally -- he says they find 10 of the same clothing item in a car and if the guy can't provide a receipt they confiscate the stuff, book the driver on suspicion of shoplifting and impound the car.
It's basically just another kind of "papiere, bitte" situation.
Pricing is one issue, but the larger issue IMHO is the lack of carrier-independent radio standards. Sure, it's mostly solvable by handset makers including radios that handle all possible standards, but they often don't do that for various engineering reasons. I'm not enough of a geek to know if the eventual shift to LTE by all carriers will result in a more shared standard (it won't help in terms of radio bands).
I think the issue of pricing would be helped greatly in a world where there isn't massive duplication of effort -- theoretically we could eliminate half the towers and provide the same service in aggregate, plus we could have double the bandwidth to the towers.
Along the lines of your idea, another idea might be forcing the carriers to spin off their tower/backhaul business separate from their voice/retail business and require them to provide unified radio support & handset association to all voice/retail carriers on their towers at the same cost per kb/minute to all carriers.
Novell's problem was less about licensing than the fact that Netware was a "feature phone" OS that did file sharing very well and general applications very poorly. This was fine until the rise of the internet when people needed a general application platform for servers, and NT did that AND file sharing.
Novell's NDS is STILL a superior directory service, but AD was good enough and with the ability to run server apps, directory services and file sharing over IP networks, NT was a pretty easy choice.
Had Novell ported NDS and file sharing as services to Linux they may have had a fighting chance.
Sure, the risk is that it turns into an oligopoly with fake competition, no carrier independence for devices with high prices and an impossible barrier to entry for competition.
....need to be a single, highly regulated monopoly, or at least a mandatory cellular radio spec that provides universal compatibility with all handsets.
It is absolutely nuts that we have *four* major competing carriers in the US (and probably more regional ones I don't know about) all building towers, installing radios, building backhaul networks, and implementing basically the same technology with wide geographical overlap.
Instead we should have a SINGLE highly regulated entity running the towers and providing the cellular radio service and running a nationwide tower-tower backhaul to IP data networks and switched voice (aka landline) networks. What we call cell carriers would then provide the voicemail and value-add services that span beyond voice connections and data connectivity.
The regulated network entity would get a legislated maximum profit margin of N% and have network expansion and modernization as mandatory percentages of profits. Whatever profit left would be avaialable for executive compensation and other employee incentives. No jets, no company supplied Mercedes.
Network Access would be sold wholesale at operating cost to anyone wanting to be a cellular carrier.
This would provide us a single nationwide cellular standard and eliminate executive gluttony at the expense of network modernization. Universal device portability to any "carrier". It would enable startup carriers to get access to a nationwide network to offer more unique, niche products that existing carriers won't sell now or charge a bundle for.
I'd be more than willing to buy a cellular enabled modem with hard-capped data rate and data volume I could use for, say, a remote camera that send a JPG every 60 seconds. Doing this now requires "a plan" and overpriced network access at speeds I don't need or want and its impossible for me to buy more limited access because it doesn't fit into the big-company spreadsheet.
I don't know how other transponders work, but my Minnesota EZ-Pass turns off when I remove it from the windshield-mounted holder -- there's a pin in the holder that hits a recessed switch.
I remove it when I am using an HOV lane as an actual carpool so I don't pay the toll for using it.
I would assume that this would keep it "off" for all other uses of it, unless the apparent off setting is only valid for HOV lane readers, same with the "beep" it generates when the HOV readers scan it.
I had plenty of PhD candidates who taught my 1xxx and 3xxx level undergrad classes. The more senior PhD candidates are probably as knowledgeable as tenured profs because they are actively involved in learning and have more recently read and absorbed a lot of the material within the field.
Some tenured profs who are research heavy may even do worse than this because they are focused on specific research areas and may not even be reasonably current on certain areas within their fields.
Other adjuncts may be just failed PhDs who can't get tenure, and the quality there can vary from people hoping to get tenure track positions and working hard to stay current to people just looking to make rent.
A $100 spent on a decent (eg, Samsung) SSD takes a low-end Core2 system and makes it really usable again.
I have salvaged nearly a dozen client systems with SSD upgrades -- 3-4 year old Core2 systems that went from intolerable to downright speedy with a drive swap.
99% of the time RAM isn't enough -- you can't stuff enough RAM into the box, and even if you do, Windows RAM caching just isn't sufficient for the virtual memory and DLL thrashing you get with a dozen app windows and web pages open. Video card upgrades do nothing for generic desktop users. Gigabit NICs have been built-in forever, so that isn't an option nor would it do anything for most users anyway.
The smarter move for them is to clone your device onto their hardware and give it back to you. No matter what you do, you're still owned, since presumably whatever they give you back has extra stuff (memory/software/hardware) to make sure they have access to your information and possibly remote access to the device.
This wouldn't be something trivial they would do for random people getting the standard cavity search, but for select targets it wouldn't be impossible. Surely the NSA has the leverage with Apple, Samsung and other makers to either make this easy for the NSA or the raw horsepower in terms of resources to do this themselves.
The thing I find oddly comforting about the whole NSA scandal is that I no longer "worry" about monitoring. I just assume that NOTHING is secure from the NSA and everything is cracked, exploitable and compromised. There just isn't anything you can call "private" anymore.
I'm fairly convinced that the emerging brouhaha over e-cigs has really nothing to do with health risks.
I think the motivation by the FDA is over turf and a possibly legitimate desire to manage what is a drug delivery system. From what I've seen the chemistry of e-cigs isn't terribly complicated, but in the gold-rush kind of mentality associated with a product like this, it's not hard to see a new player trying to make up some margin with poor fluid.
Outside of that, I think the motivations are far more dubious and have more to do with the American gut instinct to ban something because somebody might be enjoying it. There's also the quesiton of money, government at many levels gets a ton of money from cigarette taxes and ongoing tobacco settlement taxes. A long-term switch away from tobacco by smokers will have a lot of states wondering where to make up the difference.
Prosecutors didn't fail to pursue charges, they knew they could not charge him with a crime, so they didn't. Not every event that occurs needs a grand jury investigation.
The eventual prosecution failed miserably because there was no case to try. It was entirely a politically motivated hatchet job pushed by Holder's DOJ in pursuit of the Obama Administration's gun control agenda and to mollify the Democratic party's black constituency.
A lot of people want to believe in some fantasy narrative where Zimmerman is hunting black kids as part of some racist agenda despite the fact there is zero evidence to support this, only because it fits in with an ideology of gun control, white racism and oppression of minorities, despite there being zero evidence of any of that in this case.
I would think it would be cheap and easy to put together a bunch of ground-based IR emitters, possibly with the ability to be solid or blink or all of the above in random increments. A related idea would be an object that emits light in the same manner as the reflected laser targeting system.
I could see where having a lot of these in a concentrated space might make it harder for targeting and laser guidance, and they should be cheap to build and operate.
> Supposedly this is better in HDMI 2.0, but we will see how the actual implementation compares.
And probably largely moot. I doubt support for HDMI 2.0 will make it into any of my existing gear (even if it could, my understanding is that this is a protocol update not a hardware update but I assume that support for some features requires hardware..)
When I replaced my TV with an HDMI-capable model I moved all my components that supported HDMI to HDMI, and have HDMI links between my TV (Sharp), Tivo, Receiver (Pioneer) and BluRay player (Panasonic) and AppleTV.
If I leave on the HDMI communication option on my components, turning on the TV is supposed to turn on the receiver. In theory without a smart remote, I turn on my TV and I'm watching TV with audio through my stereo.
But it doesn't work like this. Invariably when the TV comes fully on, it switches the input on my receiver to a dormant device (usually the Apple TV but sometimes it's the BluRay player). Never the Tivo input, although my Series 3 HD Tivo has some kind of HDMI bug and doesn't work with the receiver.
I leave the HDMI communication on because turning off the TV turns off the receiver, but it's almost not worth it.
Germany was badly bankrupted by the Allies after WW I and experienced hyperinflation that is pretty much the textbook example of what hyperinflation looks like. It's not hard to find images of people buying bread with wheelbarrows full of currency.
And then there's the merry-go-round of governments that took place in the 20s into the 1930s that allowed a failed artist from Austria to seize power.
To describe post-WW I Germany as a "powerful country" is grossly inaccurate.
Germany has largely been anti-war not because of the holocaust but because of the high price paid in Germany over two wars. The US largely imposed a famine on the German population through 1946-1947 through restrictions on food imports and food aid.
Let's assume you can get He3 from the moon and produce electricity with it on Earth so that anyone who wants it can use as much as they want for a hundreth of a cent per kilowatt hour. That's a lot of assumptions about the ability to use it for power AND a transmission facility.
In my mind what this enables is a HUGE demand for stuff that runs on electricity. Even assuming no improvement in efficiency, everyone would want an electric car. Air conditioning. Those two things alone would involve major resource extraction for batteries, components like copper tubing, etc.
And that's just the start -- other things that are too energy intensive to do now could suddenly be seen as viable, whether it's mining or other things, even if they can't directly use free electricity as carbon fuels would become much cheaper as industry and consumers switch to electricity instead.
The idea that we would have too much energy is absurd, but the second and third order effects of free energy might actually accelerate a lot of environmental issues that are slowed now not because someone cares about excessive resource extraction but because it takes a great deal of energy to do them.
IMHO, the gold standard is an automatic natural gas generator capable of running the whole house, including central air conditioning (we generally lose power when it's super hot out).
But these things are like $10k installed, and that's awfully hard to justify when the power goes out twice a year for about 12 hours at a time.
The LP gas kind seems like the next best choice -- $800 for a Generac 5500 watt model. We usually have at least 20 pounds of propane around the house for the grill and gas firepit, sometimes more, and propane doesn't go bad or leave a goopy carb that keeps the generator from starting.
Since it has a 220 outlet, I'd be inclined to connect a transfer switch and just connect it into the house circuit so lights and the fridge work without a maze of extension cords.
Eliminate "as-is" stakes & stakeholders
on
Break Microsoft Up
·
· Score: 1
It's not the business structure, it's the stakeholders that hold Microsoft back. There are too many people holding too much stock and not wanting to rock the boat so they can unload it or keep getting it.
What I would pursue first is spending some of that cash hoard to eliminate the existing employee stakeholders by cashing out their stakes. Make it lucrative enough that you'd have to be daft to want to keep the stock.
Go further by restructuring bonus plans and other incentives so that there is less incentive to block innovation or another division undermining your cash cow. Allow for some incentives for Office division people even if Office sales slow but more heavily incent Office sales/use on 'other' platforms.
Essentially the company has to remove disincentives to innovation and prevent people living off the fat of the land (Office, Windows) from blocking innovation brought forth that might challenge their stakes.
I would also put $5 billion into an OS skunkworks (off-site, own facility, full source code, etc) to reinvent the "Windows" OS totally. I would make lack of binary compatibility with Windows and OS-wide integration of virtualization mandatory. I think they could make something interesting.
"I suggest you read the article. It talks about a specific subset of trades that were affected due to a problem resulting from an upgrade. It further discusses the impact in a company which prides itself on lobbying, cronyism and legalistic obfuscation."
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about that -- this article which ran recently in the NY Times would seem to back the notion that Germany's energy policy is complicated and is making electricity expensive enough that it is beginning to have
unintended consequences.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/19/world/europe/germanys-effort-at-clean-energy-proves-complex.html?pagewanted=all
I don't know if it's a "real" phrase, but you might call it energy poverty -- when electricity is so expensive it becomes a driver of poverty. The guy in the article basically lives off a 5w lightbulb.
While electricity costs in the third world are high, energy scarcity is driven by poverty instead of driving poverty, and offset in a lot of ways by climate and ways of life which are more rural and traditional.
I think the language advantage the US-centric internet has is that English is a lingua franca, and Portuguese isn't.
I almost never mod stories when I have mod points. Why? Because the stories that I have enough interest in to read through I want to post in and you can't mod in stories you post in. Stories I don't post in I usually don't have any interest in.
This leads to a paradox where things you have knowledge of you can't mod, and things you don't know about you can mod.
I think you should be able to apply mod points into stories you post in, but make the limitations more specific -- ie, you can't mod the parent you replied to and you can't mod the replies to your post. This would prevent the self-promotion and group think because you wouldn't be able to promote favorable responses, either.
That will work well for a lot of personal care products.
"Here's me with my hemorrhoid cream. Notice how easy it is to apply."
People who are inclined to be whistleblowers are probably people who are independent minded and who reject groupthink and default acceptance of mainstream opinions and attitudes.
It would not be surprising if this carried over into other areas of life, including sexuality. In the case of marginalized persons (ie, homosexuals), the fact that their starting point is outside the mainstream may actually contribute to a rejection of local authority and a desire to be a whistleblower. It's not their sexuality per se but the fact that they aren't socially part of the "mainstream".
Of course when caught, it's turned around -- they are deviant persons BECAUSE of their sexuality and the whistleblowing is just another deviate behavior.
I have a friend who is a police officer and when I asked him why a neighboring suburb (Edina, MN) was so aggressive about traffic tickets. He lives there (but is an officer in Minneapolis) and said that only a couple of locations are they actually interested in the "safety" component of traffic citations.
He says the rest are just about opportunities to "interview" drivers to fish for other charges -- drugs, drunk driving, etc. He says that some of the speed traps around Southdale shopping mall area nab shoplifters occasionally -- he says they find 10 of the same clothing item in a car and if the guy can't provide a receipt they confiscate the stuff, book the driver on suspicion of shoplifting and impound the car.
It's basically just another kind of "papiere, bitte" situation.
Pricing is one issue, but the larger issue IMHO is the lack of carrier-independent radio standards. Sure, it's mostly solvable by handset makers including radios that handle all possible standards, but they often don't do that for various engineering reasons. I'm not enough of a geek to know if the eventual shift to LTE by all carriers will result in a more shared standard (it won't help in terms of radio bands).
I think the issue of pricing would be helped greatly in a world where there isn't massive duplication of effort -- theoretically we could eliminate half the towers and provide the same service in aggregate, plus we could have double the bandwidth to the towers.
Along the lines of your idea, another idea might be forcing the carriers to spin off their tower/backhaul business separate from their voice/retail business and require them to provide unified radio support & handset association to all voice/retail carriers on their towers at the same cost per kb/minute to all carriers.
Novell's problem was less about licensing than the fact that Netware was a "feature phone" OS that did file sharing very well and general applications very poorly. This was fine until the rise of the internet when people needed a general application platform for servers, and NT did that AND file sharing.
Novell's NDS is STILL a superior directory service, but AD was good enough and with the ability to run server apps, directory services and file sharing over IP networks, NT was a pretty easy choice.
Had Novell ported NDS and file sharing as services to Linux they may have had a fighting chance.
Sure, the risk is that it turns into an oligopoly with fake competition, no carrier independence for devices with high prices and an impossible barrier to entry for competition.
Just like now.
....need to be a single, highly regulated monopoly, or at least a mandatory cellular radio spec that provides universal compatibility with all handsets.
It is absolutely nuts that we have *four* major competing carriers in the US (and probably more regional ones I don't know about) all building towers, installing radios, building backhaul networks, and implementing basically the same technology with wide geographical overlap.
Instead we should have a SINGLE highly regulated entity running the towers and providing the cellular radio service and running a nationwide tower-tower backhaul to IP data networks and switched voice (aka landline) networks. What we call cell carriers would then provide the voicemail and value-add services that span beyond voice connections and data connectivity.
The regulated network entity would get a legislated maximum profit margin of N% and have network expansion and modernization as mandatory percentages of profits. Whatever profit left would be avaialable for executive compensation and other employee incentives. No jets, no company supplied Mercedes.
Network Access would be sold wholesale at operating cost to anyone wanting to be a cellular carrier.
This would provide us a single nationwide cellular standard and eliminate executive gluttony at the expense of network modernization. Universal device portability to any "carrier". It would enable startup carriers to get access to a nationwide network to offer more unique, niche products that existing carriers won't sell now or charge a bundle for.
I'd be more than willing to buy a cellular enabled modem with hard-capped data rate and data volume I could use for, say, a remote camera that send a JPG every 60 seconds. Doing this now requires "a plan" and overpriced network access at speeds I don't need or want and its impossible for me to buy more limited access because it doesn't fit into the big-company spreadsheet.
I don't know how other transponders work, but my Minnesota EZ-Pass turns off when I remove it from the windshield-mounted holder -- there's a pin in the holder that hits a recessed switch.
I remove it when I am using an HOV lane as an actual carpool so I don't pay the toll for using it.
I would assume that this would keep it "off" for all other uses of it, unless the apparent off setting is only valid for HOV lane readers, same with the "beep" it generates when the HOV readers scan it.
There's lots of different flavors of adjuncts.
I had plenty of PhD candidates who taught my 1xxx and 3xxx level undergrad classes. The more senior PhD candidates are probably as knowledgeable as tenured profs because they are actively involved in learning and have more recently read and absorbed a lot of the material within the field.
Some tenured profs who are research heavy may even do worse than this because they are focused on specific research areas and may not even be reasonably current on certain areas within their fields.
Other adjuncts may be just failed PhDs who can't get tenure, and the quality there can vary from people hoping to get tenure track positions and working hard to stay current to people just looking to make rent.
+1 on this.
A $100 spent on a decent (eg, Samsung) SSD takes a low-end Core2 system and makes it really usable again.
I have salvaged nearly a dozen client systems with SSD upgrades -- 3-4 year old Core2 systems that went from intolerable to downright speedy with a drive swap.
99% of the time RAM isn't enough -- you can't stuff enough RAM into the box, and even if you do, Windows RAM caching just isn't sufficient for the virtual memory and DLL thrashing you get with a dozen app windows and web pages open. Video card upgrades do nothing for generic desktop users. Gigabit NICs have been built-in forever, so that isn't an option nor would it do anything for most users anyway.
The smarter move for them is to clone your device onto their hardware and give it back to you. No matter what you do, you're still owned, since presumably whatever they give you back has extra stuff (memory/software/hardware) to make sure they have access to your information and possibly remote access to the device.
This wouldn't be something trivial they would do for random people getting the standard cavity search, but for select targets it wouldn't be impossible. Surely the NSA has the leverage with Apple, Samsung and other makers to either make this easy for the NSA or the raw horsepower in terms of resources to do this themselves.
The thing I find oddly comforting about the whole NSA scandal is that I no longer "worry" about monitoring. I just assume that NOTHING is secure from the NSA and everything is cracked, exploitable and compromised. There just isn't anything you can call "private" anymore.
I figure anybody that far up the corporate ladder at age 35 must be at least pretty.
I'm fairly convinced that the emerging brouhaha over e-cigs has really nothing to do with health risks.
I think the motivation by the FDA is over turf and a possibly legitimate desire to manage what is a drug delivery system. From what I've seen the chemistry of e-cigs isn't terribly complicated, but in the gold-rush kind of mentality associated with a product like this, it's not hard to see a new player trying to make up some margin with poor fluid.
Outside of that, I think the motivations are far more dubious and have more to do with the American gut instinct to ban something because somebody might be enjoying it. There's also the quesiton of money, government at many levels gets a ton of money from cigarette taxes and ongoing tobacco settlement taxes. A long-term switch away from tobacco by smokers will have a lot of states wondering where to make up the difference.
Prosecutors didn't fail to pursue charges, they knew they could not charge him with a crime, so they didn't. Not every event that occurs needs a grand jury investigation.
The eventual prosecution failed miserably because there was no case to try. It was entirely a politically motivated hatchet job pushed by Holder's DOJ in pursuit of the Obama Administration's gun control agenda and to mollify the Democratic party's black constituency.
A lot of people want to believe in some fantasy narrative where Zimmerman is hunting black kids as part of some racist agenda despite the fact there is zero evidence to support this, only because it fits in with an ideology of gun control, white racism and oppression of minorities, despite there being zero evidence of any of that in this case.
I would think it would be cheap and easy to put together a bunch of ground-based IR emitters, possibly with the ability to be solid or blink or all of the above in random increments. A related idea would be an object that emits light in the same manner as the reflected laser targeting system.
I could see where having a lot of these in a concentrated space might make it harder for targeting and laser guidance, and they should be cheap to build and operate.
> Supposedly this is better in HDMI 2.0, but we will see how the actual implementation compares.
And probably largely moot. I doubt support for HDMI 2.0 will make it into any of my existing gear (even if it could, my understanding is that this is a protocol update not a hardware update but I assume that support for some features requires hardware..)
When I replaced my TV with an HDMI-capable model I moved all my components that supported HDMI to HDMI, and have HDMI links between my TV (Sharp), Tivo, Receiver (Pioneer) and BluRay player (Panasonic) and AppleTV.
If I leave on the HDMI communication option on my components, turning on the TV is supposed to turn on the receiver. In theory without a smart remote, I turn on my TV and I'm watching TV with audio through my stereo.
But it doesn't work like this. Invariably when the TV comes fully on, it switches the input on my receiver to a dormant device (usually the Apple TV but sometimes it's the BluRay player). Never the Tivo input, although my Series 3 HD Tivo has some kind of HDMI bug and doesn't work with the receiver.
I leave the HDMI communication on because turning off the TV turns off the receiver, but it's almost not worth it.
Germany was badly bankrupted by the Allies after WW I and experienced hyperinflation that is pretty much the textbook example of what hyperinflation looks like. It's not hard to find images of people buying bread with wheelbarrows full of currency.
And then there's the merry-go-round of governments that took place in the 20s into the 1930s that allowed a failed artist from Austria to seize power.
To describe post-WW I Germany as a "powerful country" is grossly inaccurate.
Germany has largely been anti-war not because of the holocaust but because of the high price paid in Germany over two wars. The US largely imposed a famine on the German population through 1946-1947 through restrictions on food imports and food aid.
Let's assume you can get He3 from the moon and produce electricity with it on Earth so that anyone who wants it can use as much as they want for a hundreth of a cent per kilowatt hour. That's a lot of assumptions about the ability to use it for power AND a transmission facility.
In my mind what this enables is a HUGE demand for stuff that runs on electricity. Even assuming no improvement in efficiency, everyone would want an electric car. Air conditioning. Those two things alone would involve major resource extraction for batteries, components like copper tubing, etc.
And that's just the start -- other things that are too energy intensive to do now could suddenly be seen as viable, whether it's mining or other things, even if they can't directly use free electricity as carbon fuels would become much cheaper as industry and consumers switch to electricity instead.
The idea that we would have too much energy is absurd, but the second and third order effects of free energy might actually accelerate a lot of environmental issues that are slowed now not because someone cares about excessive resource extraction but because it takes a great deal of energy to do them.
IMHO, the gold standard is an automatic natural gas generator capable of running the whole house, including central air conditioning (we generally lose power when it's super hot out).
But these things are like $10k installed, and that's awfully hard to justify when the power goes out twice a year for about 12 hours at a time.
The LP gas kind seems like the next best choice -- $800 for a Generac 5500 watt model. We usually have at least 20 pounds of propane around the house for the grill and gas firepit, sometimes more, and propane doesn't go bad or leave a goopy carb that keeps the generator from starting.
Since it has a 220 outlet, I'd be inclined to connect a transfer switch and just connect it into the house circuit so lights and the fridge work without a maze of extension cords.
It's not the business structure, it's the stakeholders that hold Microsoft back. There are too many people holding too much stock and not wanting to rock the boat so they can unload it or keep getting it.
What I would pursue first is spending some of that cash hoard to eliminate the existing employee stakeholders by cashing out their stakes. Make it lucrative enough that you'd have to be daft to want to keep the stock.
Go further by restructuring bonus plans and other incentives so that there is less incentive to block innovation or another division undermining your cash cow. Allow for some incentives for Office division people even if Office sales slow but more heavily incent Office sales/use on 'other' platforms.
Essentially the company has to remove disincentives to innovation and prevent people living off the fat of the land (Office, Windows) from blocking innovation brought forth that might challenge their stakes.
I would also put $5 billion into an OS skunkworks (off-site, own facility, full source code, etc) to reinvent the "Windows" OS totally. I would make lack of binary compatibility with Windows and OS-wide integration of virtualization mandatory. I think they could make something interesting.
"I suggest you read the article. It talks about a specific subset of trades that were affected due to a problem resulting from an upgrade. It further discusses the impact in a company which prides itself on lobbying, cronyism and legalistic obfuscation."
There, I fixed the spelling error you had..