It is hard to say. The Surface 4 with the Intel M is $900 and the base x2 is $800. X2 includes a keyboard, but in on MS Windows 10 Home, not pro. I don't know why MS is still selling a defective version of windows. Don't they have enough problems?
Like any MS Windows based product, it is really hard to say if it is a better value. It is cheaper, but that is because it has a screen with less resolution, it is heavier, and has a cheaper processor. So no one would expect to pay more for it. Given it's defects, it may be less of a value than a Surface. Unless you are in love with MS Windows, I don't even know if it is a better value than an iPad pro, since the iPad is lighter, run MS Office, has a cell connection so you are always connected, and the top of the line machine is the same price as the top of the line X2, if you add a third party keyboard to the iPad.
I will say that if the tablet market is to really take off, we need more machines like the X2. What makes the MS Windows market function is that there are a lot of different machines at different price points. We will have to see if Ms Windows can take over all price points for tablets, or if MS is going to be relegated to mid price machines, as it largely is for laptops and PCs. I thinarket it already dominated by Android, and I don't see anyone challenging that. Ms is in a pickle because they just $1 billion for surface, and the iPad pro is projected to be twice that.
Not sure when indivuals built CNBC machine. Unlike 3D printers, the milling machine actual can cause. Lot of damage if they break. I also know they have been inexpensive suite case units for at least a decade., say for $2k. They require some skill, so not as popular as the 3D printer.
Genuine People Personality. We know it is a perfect technology with no drawbacks.
I can tell you from the current incarnation of automatic telephone receptionists, this will be the most annoying robot ever.
Survive may have been imprecise.The difficulty, as shown with the Shuttle SRB, is knowing what is going to function well for a 2nd launch. Due the human safety factor, all components of the SRB was replaced after each launch. The challenge in this case will be to predict which components are degraded enough to require replacement, and which do not. Obviously failure is very costly, so these stoichiometrics are going to be what makes or breaks the reusability scenario.
That a library can request a book form anywhere in the world. Sure, it is still technically a limited supply, but a library is not nearly as limited as a college drop out thinks.
They definitely need to work hard to move product. I am not sure how anyone believes the Surface is successful. MS revenue appears to be down, and while Surface sales spike, and increase, as each new Surface is released, sales drop the next quarter or two until a new surface is released.
Their one successful piece of hardware, the Xbox, seems to go up and down. The XBox success is that it is not windows, and MS does not do a lot to use Xbox to push MS Windows. From a consumer point of view, the MS ecosystem does not offer a lot of advantages. They are corporate and enterpise, and Windows !0 offer great tools for that, but unless corporate is going to buy windows phones, which they have not done in the past, and make workers use them, they are going to be sunk.
Smart phones are stupid. they cost privacy and security. They are expensive and you don't get any benefits.
People want free things, so firms are going to produce products for this market. People don't understand the technology or how it impacts security or privacy so they sill just buy the cheap or free products. Look at PCs in the 90's. People were fine having malware on their purchased computers if it meant saving $50. For the most part they would not buy more secure computers because they cost more.
The Joint Strike Force is going cost a vast amount of money, something like $400 Billion. The money spent on this project barely pays for the bonuses that are being withheld because the f-35 does not actually work.. The JSF planes aren't competitive against MIGs in simulations, and the software does not even allow the plane to fly in combat or use the weapons. The money spent on the PTSS was probably basic research stuff, and that research can be used for other things, and some of it likely needed to be done to show that some problems were not able to be solved using current technology.
The real problem is that this project is derived from the Regan fantasy Star Wars program and the Bush fantasy 'hit a bullet with a bullet' program. Neither are reasonable programs, given any level of technology, because they are defensive and we must always assume that our enemies have equal levels of technology. Sure when we invade we can insure we only invade technologically backwards countries, and then cry like babies when they use their wits to defends themselves, but that does not work in the general case.
The thing is about a decade ago actual scientists published an actual plan on how we could actually defend the US against a power that launched a single ICBM with a warhead of multiple payloads. The first was fast detection and verification. This required that we know the launch sites, monitor them, and verify a real launch. This is important because a feasible countermeasure is decoy launches. We can't really deal with more than one launch, yet.
The second challenge is to track and destroy the missile as early as possible in boost phase. This is done not only to not have to deal with decoy weapons, but also to minimize debris impacting friendly populations. The best option for this is an airborne laser. That program was canceled in 2010 after spending $10 billion. Sea based lasers are an option, but a fleet to make them functional would be vast, and require us to expose sailors to dangerous situations.
It is reasonable to destroy an ICBM during mid phase flight assuming that no countermeasures have been deployed. This is what the PTSS might have been trying to do. The problem is the timing and the inability to modify hardware already launched into orbit. What is not reasonable is to try to destroy individual warheads after deployment. Decoys can be made to look like active warheads, and, worse yet, if an enemy agent knows the algorithm used to detect decoys, warheads can be re engineered to look like decoys, and decoys like active warheads.
It looks nice and teaches the modern skills. I had an erector set and it taught the skills that were in place at the time. I certainly used those skills, spatial recognition, using tools, hand eye coordination, structural elements, in high school, college, and throughout my life. Fortunately I had access to computers early enough, some of the Atari machines could be programmed from a keyboard, to get those skills as well.
That said, there are no fundamental differences that when I was a kid. Just like then, kids have access to tools, but most do not know how to use them. How many people who are 40 can build even a dog house, how many can solder, how many can bake a batch of cookies.
The difference is that the number of semi-skilled jobs, or the jobs that pay well and can be learned quickly, are dwindling. Kids who do not learned skills, like those taught in these kits, are going to be at a disadvantage, just like my peers who do not know how to use computers now are unemployed or working menial jobs.
The cost saving will only be determined with practice. One reason the Space Shuttle was a not as successful as hoped was because the SRB likely resulted in no cost savings because most parts did not survive, and the only thing that reused was the shell. Likewise the shuttle itself essentially had to be rebuilt.
This will be same thing. How much of the avionics, pumps, etc, can survive launch and landing. How much more does it cost to produce these items so they can survive. How much does it costs to repair and retrofit. The thing about these systems is that involve domains that we have little experience. We learn by doing, and theory does not always match what we see in the real world. One of incredible thing about the Apollo program is that we had to learn how to manufacture what we wanted, as mostly it had not been done before. The question is has 50 years of aerospace manufacturing given us the ability to produce a reusable rocket. We will see.
I don't know that there is objective reality, but there is a self consistent set of approximations we can use to predict specific outcomes for certain situations, and when those predictions are met we have created a reliable reality in which we can live. For instance our ability to get from point A to point B in a car depends on the prediction of science being accurate.
However, as the parent mentioned, science has to move through many iterations before a reality is exposed. Furthermore, in studies like health 'science' there is no way to reliably establish a domain, and many of the researchers are trained as technicians, not scientists. This leads to the production of overly bread results and a lack of nuance when presenting to the media.
But I don't think that scientist, no matter how ill trained, are really the problem here. It is that most people think that once a 'truth' is known it does represent reality. We can blame religion for that. Most people don't know that a single data point, a single paper, is a guess. That it can take years of research for a paper to prove it has shown a novel concept that reasonably reflects the reality we live. Even a highly cited paper is not necessarily valid.
A second issue is domain. Reporters need to understand that results only reflect the conditions under which the study was made. For example, autism is pretty much only studied in boys. This means that any result only applies to boys, and we really don't know that much about autism in girls. Statements that girls don't have autism, or only present at smaller rates, is completely irresponsible. We don't know. And that is the real difference between a scientist and a researcher. The ability to say we don't know.
Which is the current lifelock business model. Your information will get stolen, but they have the technology and monitoring to insure that any unusual activity will be flagged. Yes, the consumer can do most of this for themselves with little expenditure. Yes, most people over 45 or so don't understand that lifelock is not able to protect data.
OTOH, even some tech people think that logging onto their bank with an iPad is going to put them at more risk than have a bank account one can log onto. So at the end of the day this is just another service the people don't need, but makes them feel better.
I pretty much only use a speed tester to check to see if I have max speed in around my local network. Using it to test speed coming from the provider is a fools errand.
It is always money, as money is the proxy for value. It is naive to think that historical propriety or ethics do not have a value.
Look at Keystone XL pipeline. A major issue was that the Canadian corporation was unwilling to give landowners what the landowners was fair value for the rights on their land. The Canadian corporation, then, went to the US courts and forced the land owners to accept what was considered by the landowners an unfair offer. Sure there were issues of ethics and risks and other stuff, but it was cash. If the landowners had been paid an amount to mitigate those concerns, real, potential, or imagined, then the pipeline would not have been held up in court and may have been approved and completed.
Compared to his other books, the Mars series are plodding. I have hope that JMS is doing this, because he can make plodding interesting. I don't know about Spike TV because I am unsure how you make a Robinson book into NASCAR. Perhaps Spike is once again trying to reimage itself.
It seems to me that when so white kid goes out and kills a bunch of kids or shoots up a movie theater, we look at their online activity and see that they were clearly deranged and should have under surveillance. That and he was from the Carolinas which are a hot bed of radicalizing terrorists.
The problem is that separating those terrorists from the vast majority that are venting is a non trivial problem. Sure, we could require target every white male from North and South Carolina but that would not be a great use of resources, even though we know that it would have saved a large number of innocent lives of the past decade.
In things like disease, things are getting better, as a percentage and absolute numbers. Polio has dropped from hundred of thousands to hundreds of cases in 20 years. Of course cancer and diabetes in the US is up, and HIV did not exist 50 years ago, but many ailments that cursed our civilization for known history have become much less virulent.
I would also say percentages do matter. The black death eliminated half the population of major cities, but the total number of probable dead was only half the population of the current US. Likewise the mortality rate at birth in the US is not that bad in absolute numbers, but as a percentage the US is below the level of developing country.
The serial killer example is very aprospro. It is information, and the inability to scale and rationalize that information, that drives out perception of a dangerous world. If someone were to ride a horse from town to town, and kill a person secretly, no one would like know that such a thing were happening. Most would just think that an accident got them, and no one. This may be one reason why the term serial killer did not appear until the 20th century. The point is it would be hard to compare the murder rate of the 21st century, to anything 100 years ago when we had no idea who simply disappeared and who was murdered. I would say that the fact that we actively count and respond to murders is an indication that the world is a better place.
You're doctor probably does know what is right for you, so when you ask a reasonable doctor will say she is familiar with the drug, but that another drug will fewer side effects or less chance of addiction might be better to try first.
At which point a person who wants the drug will find another doctor, which is what all this is about. The promotion of the drug culture. While the drug dealers and users of the 80's and 90's were on the street being shot down by cops, the drug dealers now are sitting in nice offices and the users are being treated like victims. Local agencies are paying up to $500 to treat people who voluntarily overdose on heroin while there are not enough services to help actual victims.
Austin has always been a crap place to live unless you have a trust fund, are white, and young. It grew for a while because it became a tech hub for the well paid young mostly white people, but that just lead to it becoming more elitist and expensive.
When people complain that Austin is in Texas usually take it to mean that while Texas is like only 40% white non-Hispanic, Austin is closer to 50%, so like, you don't have deal with as many Hispanic people there.
In any case, as is mentioned, Houston is not a bad place to find tech work and live, if you make enough to live in the city. If you need a gentrified neighborhood, it is $500,000K and up for a house just like anywhere else in the US. If you can live with real diverse people then you can live minutes from downtown for $200K, and be against traffic going to work.
Apple users with too much money also have real time incremental backup in terms of time machine, have money to buy space on Dropbox, and have music backed up on Apple and Amazon. It might be worth $100 to some to buy the password and save the few hours it might take to restore a computer, but for many of us we simply will switch to our second or third Mac for use while the ransomed machine is restoring.
I mean if you have a huge project that has to be completed that day and you are going to lose $1000 for every hour it is late, sure pay the ransom. But for most us, wipe the machine, restore, go about out lives, and laugh one again at the PC users that are too dumb to have an integrated backup solution.
A couple actual facts, and yes, to begin, this has nothing to do with the environment. Over the past few years US crude productions has risen sharply and imports have fallen dramatically. This has caused the price of crude to fall to level where exploration cannot be supported. All the oil companies are cutting back on exploration, some are exiting all together selling their leases. Politics, for instance, had nothing to do with shell pulling out of the arctic. It was that the arctic is still very expensive, and at $40 a barrel, no one is making money.
Second, the pipeline is a conservative nightmare on many levels. Primarily it requires the US federal governement to take land from US citizens and give it to a foreign corporations. Many citizen land owners in Texas and other very conservative states have sued for their right to keep their land and not have it annexed to a foreign country, but the conservative courts have said that the landowners do not have the right.
Finally there is the simple matter of production. The US has enough crude to refine. The pipeline made some sense when oil was high as there was going to be money to be made so investing in infrastructure made sense. Now, again, with crude at 40, there is no money to be made. However there is money to be lost. Oil refining has a lot of external costs in terms of health care costs, falling property values around the refinery, and yes, environmental destruction. The Canadians know this which is why they are outsourcing refining to their hick neighbors to the south instead of building infrastructure themselves and reaping the rewards of the alleged profit that comes with it.
I won't buy an AppleTV because I need a device that supports Plex. As a disclaimer, I do have pretty much everything else that Apple makes. Likewise, I don't buy videos from any service because each is locked in to a specific service. Since I am not going to buy Apple video content, that is another reason to buy an Apple TV. Amazon streams video for free, and the Amazon device supports Plex, Hulu, Netflix, et al, so I do have a Amazon Fire TV.
I think the best thing Apple could do is make the AppleTV and iOS device, so that the Apps can run on it.
The point is that if I want a Tesla Model X, I have to pay at least 69,900. There is no way to negotiate, which is called price fixing. The reason the 'fake' sticker price is fake is because price fixing in the US is generally frowned upon, so we have suggested retail prices, offer prices, or the like. The only reason buying a car is such a hassle in the US is because we have decided that the most efficient way to buy, and in the US we are buyers of any piece of junk(just look at TV infomercials), not shoppers, is to have locally fixed prices for most items.
Also, if one have to drive all around town to buy a car, one must live in a pretty desolate area. I generally go to one place and see Honda, Toyota, Kia, etc. Then I go to another place and see Mercedes, Volvo, Lotus.
Honestly, if we were all willing to payer the suggested retail price for cars, as Tesla wants us to, then dealers would not be necessary. But as the art of the deal for the automobile is ingrained in the current US culture, we have dealers.
This was typical several years ago. Maybe 40 or 50 hot swappable servers with a load balancer in front. I remember when the load balancers became very good and affordable. Two different high bandwidth internet connections. Even a liquid fuel generator that would in principle keep everything up for as long as there was fuel. I built a simpler version of this back in the late 90's.
The problem was this is expensive. In particular you generally have one or more very expensive persons who main duty it is to keep up the computers, which was not normally a full time job, except if computers started failing in bulk, when there was enough people to get it fixed quickly.
Back then there was no standard solution. I recall when the first compaq adaptive load balancer was installed. It seemed a competitive advantage could be gained with the right combination of hardware and custom software. Now there does not appear to be any advantage at small scales. These types of servers are routine and we know what works and doesn't. There is no reason to run hardware when software or sales is the business. Even, for the most part, people used canned software unless their business is software.
Yes, the baby is going to accidentally open the poison, accidentally lift it to the table, accidentally pour it into his grandmother coffee, and accidentally put the poison back so that no one will notice.
This is a desperate argument from someone who does not understand logic. Look up fallacy.
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Like any MS Windows based product, it is really hard to say if it is a better value. It is cheaper, but that is because it has a screen with less resolution, it is heavier, and has a cheaper processor. So no one would expect to pay more for it. Given it's defects, it may be less of a value than a Surface. Unless you are in love with MS Windows, I don't even know if it is a better value than an iPad pro, since the iPad is lighter, run MS Office, has a cell connection so you are always connected, and the top of the line machine is the same price as the top of the line X2, if you add a third party keyboard to the iPad.
I will say that if the tablet market is to really take off, we need more machines like the X2. What makes the MS Windows market function is that there are a lot of different machines at different price points. We will have to see if Ms Windows can take over all price points for tablets, or if MS is going to be relegated to mid price machines, as it largely is for laptops and PCs. I thinarket it already dominated by Android, and I don't see anyone challenging that. Ms is in a pickle because they just $1 billion for surface, and the iPad pro is projected to be twice that.
Not sure when indivuals built CNBC machine. Unlike 3D printers, the milling machine actual can cause. Lot of damage if they break. I also know they have been inexpensive suite case units for at least a decade., say for $2k. They require some skill, so not as popular as the 3D printer.
Genuine People Personality. We know it is a perfect technology with no drawbacks. I can tell you from the current incarnation of automatic telephone receptionists, this will be the most annoying robot ever.
Survive may have been imprecise.The difficulty, as shown with the Shuttle SRB, is knowing what is going to function well for a 2nd launch. Due the human safety factor, all components of the SRB was replaced after each launch. The challenge in this case will be to predict which components are degraded enough to require replacement, and which do not. Obviously failure is very costly, so these stoichiometrics are going to be what makes or breaks the reusability scenario.
That a library can request a book form anywhere in the world. Sure, it is still technically a limited supply, but a library is not nearly as limited as a college drop out thinks.
Their one successful piece of hardware, the Xbox, seems to go up and down. The XBox success is that it is not windows, and MS does not do a lot to use Xbox to push MS Windows. From a consumer point of view, the MS ecosystem does not offer a lot of advantages. They are corporate and enterpise, and Windows !0 offer great tools for that, but unless corporate is going to buy windows phones, which they have not done in the past, and make workers use them, they are going to be sunk.
People want free things, so firms are going to produce products for this market. People don't understand the technology or how it impacts security or privacy so they sill just buy the cheap or free products. Look at PCs in the 90's. People were fine having malware on their purchased computers if it meant saving $50. For the most part they would not buy more secure computers because they cost more.
The real problem is that this project is derived from the Regan fantasy Star Wars program and the Bush fantasy 'hit a bullet with a bullet' program. Neither are reasonable programs, given any level of technology, because they are defensive and we must always assume that our enemies have equal levels of technology. Sure when we invade we can insure we only invade technologically backwards countries, and then cry like babies when they use their wits to defends themselves, but that does not work in the general case.
The thing is about a decade ago actual scientists published an actual plan on how we could actually defend the US against a power that launched a single ICBM with a warhead of multiple payloads. The first was fast detection and verification. This required that we know the launch sites, monitor them, and verify a real launch. This is important because a feasible countermeasure is decoy launches. We can't really deal with more than one launch, yet.
The second challenge is to track and destroy the missile as early as possible in boost phase. This is done not only to not have to deal with decoy weapons, but also to minimize debris impacting friendly populations. The best option for this is an airborne laser. That program was canceled in 2010 after spending $10 billion. Sea based lasers are an option, but a fleet to make them functional would be vast, and require us to expose sailors to dangerous situations.
It is reasonable to destroy an ICBM during mid phase flight assuming that no countermeasures have been deployed. This is what the PTSS might have been trying to do. The problem is the timing and the inability to modify hardware already launched into orbit. What is not reasonable is to try to destroy individual warheads after deployment. Decoys can be made to look like active warheads, and, worse yet, if an enemy agent knows the algorithm used to detect decoys, warheads can be re engineered to look like decoys, and decoys like active warheads.
That said, there are no fundamental differences that when I was a kid. Just like then, kids have access to tools, but most do not know how to use them. How many people who are 40 can build even a dog house, how many can solder, how many can bake a batch of cookies.
The difference is that the number of semi-skilled jobs, or the jobs that pay well and can be learned quickly, are dwindling. Kids who do not learned skills, like those taught in these kits, are going to be at a disadvantage, just like my peers who do not know how to use computers now are unemployed or working menial jobs.
This will be same thing. How much of the avionics, pumps, etc, can survive launch and landing. How much more does it cost to produce these items so they can survive. How much does it costs to repair and retrofit. The thing about these systems is that involve domains that we have little experience. We learn by doing, and theory does not always match what we see in the real world. One of incredible thing about the Apollo program is that we had to learn how to manufacture what we wanted, as mostly it had not been done before. The question is has 50 years of aerospace manufacturing given us the ability to produce a reusable rocket. We will see.
However, as the parent mentioned, science has to move through many iterations before a reality is exposed. Furthermore, in studies like health 'science' there is no way to reliably establish a domain, and many of the researchers are trained as technicians, not scientists. This leads to the production of overly bread results and a lack of nuance when presenting to the media.
But I don't think that scientist, no matter how ill trained, are really the problem here. It is that most people think that once a 'truth' is known it does represent reality. We can blame religion for that. Most people don't know that a single data point, a single paper, is a guess. That it can take years of research for a paper to prove it has shown a novel concept that reasonably reflects the reality we live. Even a highly cited paper is not necessarily valid.
A second issue is domain. Reporters need to understand that results only reflect the conditions under which the study was made. For example, autism is pretty much only studied in boys. This means that any result only applies to boys, and we really don't know that much about autism in girls. Statements that girls don't have autism, or only present at smaller rates, is completely irresponsible. We don't know. And that is the real difference between a scientist and a researcher. The ability to say we don't know.
Which is the current lifelock business model. Your information will get stolen, but they have the technology and monitoring to insure that any unusual activity will be flagged. Yes, the consumer can do most of this for themselves with little expenditure. Yes, most people over 45 or so don't understand that lifelock is not able to protect data. OTOH, even some tech people think that logging onto their bank with an iPad is going to put them at more risk than have a bank account one can log onto. So at the end of the day this is just another service the people don't need, but makes them feel better.
I pretty much only use a speed tester to check to see if I have max speed in around my local network. Using it to test speed coming from the provider is a fools errand.
It is always money, as money is the proxy for value. It is naive to think that historical propriety or ethics do not have a value. Look at Keystone XL pipeline. A major issue was that the Canadian corporation was unwilling to give landowners what the landowners was fair value for the rights on their land. The Canadian corporation, then, went to the US courts and forced the land owners to accept what was considered by the landowners an unfair offer. Sure there were issues of ethics and risks and other stuff, but it was cash. If the landowners had been paid an amount to mitigate those concerns, real, potential, or imagined, then the pipeline would not have been held up in court and may have been approved and completed.
Compared to his other books, the Mars series are plodding. I have hope that JMS is doing this, because he can make plodding interesting. I don't know about Spike TV because I am unsure how you make a Robinson book into NASCAR. Perhaps Spike is once again trying to reimage itself.
It seems to me that when so white kid goes out and kills a bunch of kids or shoots up a movie theater, we look at their online activity and see that they were clearly deranged and should have under surveillance. That and he was from the Carolinas which are a hot bed of radicalizing terrorists. The problem is that separating those terrorists from the vast majority that are venting is a non trivial problem. Sure, we could require target every white male from North and South Carolina but that would not be a great use of resources, even though we know that it would have saved a large number of innocent lives of the past decade.
In things like disease, things are getting better, as a percentage and absolute numbers. Polio has dropped from hundred of thousands to hundreds of cases in 20 years. Of course cancer and diabetes in the US is up, and HIV did not exist 50 years ago, but many ailments that cursed our civilization for known history have become much less virulent. I would also say percentages do matter. The black death eliminated half the population of major cities, but the total number of probable dead was only half the population of the current US. Likewise the mortality rate at birth in the US is not that bad in absolute numbers, but as a percentage the US is below the level of developing country. The serial killer example is very aprospro. It is information, and the inability to scale and rationalize that information, that drives out perception of a dangerous world. If someone were to ride a horse from town to town, and kill a person secretly, no one would like know that such a thing were happening. Most would just think that an accident got them, and no one. This may be one reason why the term serial killer did not appear until the 20th century. The point is it would be hard to compare the murder rate of the 21st century, to anything 100 years ago when we had no idea who simply disappeared and who was murdered. I would say that the fact that we actively count and respond to murders is an indication that the world is a better place.
You're doctor probably does know what is right for you, so when you ask a reasonable doctor will say she is familiar with the drug, but that another drug will fewer side effects or less chance of addiction might be better to try first. At which point a person who wants the drug will find another doctor, which is what all this is about. The promotion of the drug culture. While the drug dealers and users of the 80's and 90's were on the street being shot down by cops, the drug dealers now are sitting in nice offices and the users are being treated like victims. Local agencies are paying up to $500 to treat people who voluntarily overdose on heroin while there are not enough services to help actual victims.
Austin has always been a crap place to live unless you have a trust fund, are white, and young. It grew for a while because it became a tech hub for the well paid young mostly white people, but that just lead to it becoming more elitist and expensive. When people complain that Austin is in Texas usually take it to mean that while Texas is like only 40% white non-Hispanic, Austin is closer to 50%, so like, you don't have deal with as many Hispanic people there. In any case, as is mentioned, Houston is not a bad place to find tech work and live, if you make enough to live in the city. If you need a gentrified neighborhood, it is $500,000K and up for a house just like anywhere else in the US. If you can live with real diverse people then you can live minutes from downtown for $200K, and be against traffic going to work.
Apple users with too much money also have real time incremental backup in terms of time machine, have money to buy space on Dropbox, and have music backed up on Apple and Amazon. It might be worth $100 to some to buy the password and save the few hours it might take to restore a computer, but for many of us we simply will switch to our second or third Mac for use while the ransomed machine is restoring. I mean if you have a huge project that has to be completed that day and you are going to lose $1000 for every hour it is late, sure pay the ransom. But for most us, wipe the machine, restore, go about out lives, and laugh one again at the PC users that are too dumb to have an integrated backup solution.
A couple actual facts, and yes, to begin, this has nothing to do with the environment. Over the past few years US crude productions has risen sharply and imports have fallen dramatically. This has caused the price of crude to fall to level where exploration cannot be supported. All the oil companies are cutting back on exploration, some are exiting all together selling their leases. Politics, for instance, had nothing to do with shell pulling out of the arctic. It was that the arctic is still very expensive, and at $40 a barrel, no one is making money. Second, the pipeline is a conservative nightmare on many levels. Primarily it requires the US federal governement to take land from US citizens and give it to a foreign corporations. Many citizen land owners in Texas and other very conservative states have sued for their right to keep their land and not have it annexed to a foreign country, but the conservative courts have said that the landowners do not have the right. Finally there is the simple matter of production. The US has enough crude to refine. The pipeline made some sense when oil was high as there was going to be money to be made so investing in infrastructure made sense. Now, again, with crude at 40, there is no money to be made. However there is money to be lost. Oil refining has a lot of external costs in terms of health care costs, falling property values around the refinery, and yes, environmental destruction. The Canadians know this which is why they are outsourcing refining to their hick neighbors to the south instead of building infrastructure themselves and reaping the rewards of the alleged profit that comes with it.
I won't buy an AppleTV because I need a device that supports Plex. As a disclaimer, I do have pretty much everything else that Apple makes. Likewise, I don't buy videos from any service because each is locked in to a specific service. Since I am not going to buy Apple video content, that is another reason to buy an Apple TV. Amazon streams video for free, and the Amazon device supports Plex, Hulu, Netflix, et al, so I do have a Amazon Fire TV. I think the best thing Apple could do is make the AppleTV and iOS device, so that the Apps can run on it.
Also, if one have to drive all around town to buy a car, one must live in a pretty desolate area. I generally go to one place and see Honda, Toyota, Kia, etc. Then I go to another place and see Mercedes, Volvo, Lotus.
Honestly, if we were all willing to payer the suggested retail price for cars, as Tesla wants us to, then dealers would not be necessary. But as the art of the deal for the automobile is ingrained in the current US culture, we have dealers.
The problem was this is expensive. In particular you generally have one or more very expensive persons who main duty it is to keep up the computers, which was not normally a full time job, except if computers started failing in bulk, when there was enough people to get it fixed quickly.
Back then there was no standard solution. I recall when the first compaq adaptive load balancer was installed. It seemed a competitive advantage could be gained with the right combination of hardware and custom software. Now there does not appear to be any advantage at small scales. These types of servers are routine and we know what works and doesn't. There is no reason to run hardware when software or sales is the business. Even, for the most part, people used canned software unless their business is software.
This is a desperate argument from someone who does not understand logic. Look up fallacy.