You might actually have to walk! Going to the shops just a 10 minute walk away, my American host wanted to take the car... in beautiful dry sunny weather. WHY!!! (32 degrees celcius, in Holland when we get that maybe once a decade, the humidity is 80%) GO OUTSIDE AND ENJOY THE FUCKING NICE WEATHER AND LOOSE SOME TONS!
To be fair, the ~90-degree (F) weather you describe is pretty rare there; usually it's well over 100F, which is absolutely miserable to walk around in, and is certainly not "beautiful", so your friend is probably just used to taking the car by default. Even 90F is a little warm for a walk. There's a good reason no one wants to walk outside in Phoenix, except during the wintertime (when it's actually really nice outside, with temps in the 60s-70s, but it only lasts a couple of months at best). It's getting hotter too, so it's going to get worse.
That's probably about the only city in the US that applied such common-sense thinking to their rail system. I don't know of any others that have. Last time I was there, Atlanta's MARTA system didn't go to the airport at all. They don't in NYC either: LGA has no rail/subway terminal at all, only a bus terminal. JFK has something called "AirTrain", which isn't the same system as the MTA (which means you probably have to pay a separate fare for it). EWC (Newark) is on the NJ Transit train line, which goes to Penn Station on 34th, but again you have to pay a separate (and hefty) fare for it. You'd think if a big city was going to have a subway system, the first thing they'd do is connect it directly to the airport, but I guess that makes too much sense for America.
Actually, I just did a quick check and it looks like the folks in Washington DC actually figured this out: you can fly into Reagan airport and take a subway directly to The Mall in 22 minutes. But not with Dulles, where you need to take a bus most of the way.
It looks like the Canadians aren't any smarter either: even though Toronto has a subway system, it doesn't go to the Toronto Pearson International airport, only buses.
Yep, I remember. They're probably going to suck. But at any rate, it seems that Peter Jackson mainly does movies based on novels, at least based on his Tolkein works.
Heck, the California Teachers Association threaten state congress members that tried to make sexual assault against children a mandatory firing event.
I'm not so sure that's a California problem; I think it's really a USA problem. This whole country has a giant problem with teacher's unions making it hard to fire shitty teachers, and as a result, public education is horrible nationwide, not just in California or Texas (neither of which is known to have a good education system). I can't think of a single state that's known to have a great education system.
I'm guessing it's like the stupid light rail they built in Phoenix/Tempe/Mesa, AZ: it doesn't really go places where that many people need to go. It's mainly useful for ASU students who need to travel between the Tempe and downtown Phoenix campuses, and a bunch of poor people (who probably don't bother buying tickets) who travel between crappy west Mesa and downtown Phoenix for work.
The biggest oversight of the system was that it doesn't go to the airport. WTF? That's probably one of the easiest ways to make a rail system useful: make it go to the airport, and to downtown areas where hotels are; that way, travelers can fly in, jump on the train and go straight to their hotel. Even NYC has mostly bungled this. Plus, people who live not too far from a rail terminal can take the light-rail to the airport, so they don't have to use a cab or pay ridiculous airport parking fees. Instead, Phoenix's light-rail bypasses the airport. After several years, they have started work on a second rail system which will have a stop on the light-rail route, specifically to take people to/from the airport, but it was many years after the initial system was constructed.
You mean like that other ultra-liberal city, Phoenix, that also spent billions of dollars on a light-rail system that has high usage fees, and tons of people who don't pay it and just hop on board for free? Phoenix is anything but liberal, but they jumped on the light-rail bandwagon too, and for good reason: the Federal Government was handing out free money, called a "stimulus", so of course the conservatives were happy to take it.
Funny how the conservatives never practice what they preach.
I don't think a 50mm machine gun even exists. There are 20mm Gatling-type guns, but they're used on large aircraft and on ships IIRC. I think there's also 30mm Gatling-type guns (maybe those are the shipboard ones). A 50mm machine gun would be ridiculously large and not really practical for anything; after all, if a 30mm machine gun can shoot airplanes and Exocet anti-ship missiles out of the sky from tens of miles away, what the heck do you need 50mm shells for? Out-of-control giant transforming robots from the planet Cybertron?
I'm guessing it's because the really excellent directors, like Christopher Nolan, Clint Eastwood, James Cameron, Jon Favreau, or Bryan Singer, are either not interested in sci-fi at all (Eastwood), not interested in Star Wars specifically, not interested in picking up someone else's series and running with it, or perhaps not interested in working with George Lucas even if he restricts himself to effects and visuals. Or perhaps it's because the previous Star Wars movies (mainly the prequels) have been such horrors of filmmaking that no "true expert of film" would want to touch that turkey. Honestly, they're lucky they got someone as good as Abrams to take this thing over, after the mess that Lucas has made of it. And I'm truly shocked actually that Lucas is even letting someone else take over. He's had nothing good to say about ESB, it being the SW movie he had the least to do with. The man is an egomaniac, and I'm wondering how they managed to wrestle control away from him.
The Ewoks were tolerable, but Jar Jar was way, way over the line.
Here's a though experiment: imagine how Episodes 6, 1, 2, and 3 would have been if they had been done by the same writer and director who did Empire Strikes Back.
That was lifted straight out of the book "The Hobbit". Peter Jackson is pretty good at being very authentic to the source material in a novel. So a Star Wars movie from him would probably mean him taking Timothy Zahn's trilogy and turning them into movies, which would actually probably be really cool, if only I could blot the Prequels out of my mind.
There's nothing all that wrong with the Linksys hardware, in fact much of it has been excellent for the price point. The firmware, under Cisco, has been another story, but that's what DD-WRT is for.
Don't be ridiculous. There's plenty of great routers out there. My Cisco E1000 is working flawlessly, now that it's loaded with DD-WRT.
Now, if you're looking for a consumer-grade router that has both great hardware and firmware out of the box, you can forget about it, but I'm not sure such a beast has ever existed. But there's lots of decent hardware out there that can be reflashed with an alternative firmware like DD-WRT. The enterprise-grade stuff is crap too BTW: I used to have a couple of Aironet access points and those things were a total PITA to set up because of Cisco's wacky IOS system. The hardware was really nice, I'll admit (all-metal chassis, kinda looks like something out of a UFO, could be dropped off the Empire State Building and suffer only slight damage), but the software and web interface were ridiculously bad unless you want to spend a lot of time becoming an expert in IOS. By contrast, DD-WRT does pretty much everything IOS could do (including RADIUS authentication) and it, despite being Free, has a perfectly usable web interface that anyone competent with computers and networking can look at once and figure out.
Maybe it goes back to the contention that many Android users just use their phones as glorified feature phones: perhaps many Android users (since the phones can frequently be had for free) don't even bother getting data plans, unlike iPhone users who are already paying a buttload of money for their phones and the data plan might not be seen as a big expense to them. With Android phones, it should be pretty easy to forgo the mobile data plan (saving $30/month or so, per phone), and just use a WiFi network when you're in range if you want to surf the web when you're at home or in a hotspot zone.
You sound like one of these morons that thinks everything is black and white. Ever heard the phrase "pick your battles"? As I said before, it's easier to not use Apple products than others, because of the nature of their business models. And, Apple's offenses have been much worse IMO than the others, so I'll happily choose to boycott them first. They've done far worse things than just hold down salaries; that's only one thing on a long list of evil deeds of theirs. Same goes for MS. Intel and Google have done some bad things too, but not as bad as those two.
Since you claim to not be a hypocrite, why don't you tell us what kind of CPU you're using here, and what kind of phone you have?
And how do you propose to get around using Google and Intel products? It's not impossible, but it's much easier than not using Apple products, and if you refuse to admit that, then you're either a liar, a shill, or a moron.
It's impossible to use a PC now without an Intel or AMD processor, and AMD has a much smaller share than Intel. So it is possible, but it cuts your choices pretty drastically. And was AMD another of the companies that participated in this scheme?
Not using Google isn't so easy either; there aren't exactly that many decent search engines out there. You could switch to Bing, but Microsoft was another of those companies listed, so you haven't avoided the evil gang that way. I guess you could use DuckDuckGo; that's the only other one I even know of that isn't some dying carcass from the 90s. You can use non-Google maps, but we've had plenty of articles here lately about how horrible Apple Maps is, but there's still Bing maps, but at least you could switch to Mapquest to avoid the evil gang. Finally, with smartphones, you simply don't have a choice: it's either Apple, Google (Android), or Microsoft. All three are in the gang, so take your pick.
Ironically, Google gets far more money from iPhone users than they get from Android users still. So buy an iPhone, Apple+Google benefit immensely.
Not that I'm doubting you, but how does that work? With iPhone, if you use Google Maps and the Google search engine, Google will profit, while Apple gets the lion's share of profits from the initial purchase of the phone, plus any apps you purchase. With Android, it shouldn't be any different if you use Google Maps and the Google search engine, but if you buy any apps, Google gets a cut of that too, plus they probably have additional advertising revenues from ad-supported apps. I don't see how Google is profiting less from Android than from iPhone.
The thing that really sucks about Android is that when you buy an Android phone, both Apple and Microsoft profit because of their bullshit patents.
most Android users probably aren't using them as anything more than glorified featurephones
And there's nothing wrong with that. The technology has made the hardware ultra-cheap, and smartphones are much easier to use than the old featurephones in many ways: for instance, listening to voicemail used to be a giant pain in the ass until smartphones came along and made it visual. You had to call some stupid number, then very very slowly step through every message on there, using some cryptic commands (since you only had 0-9 # * buttons to work with; 7 to delete, 3 for next message, or somesuch). With smartphones, suddenly it became very easy: you get to see a list of your messages and who they came from, you can select any one of them to listen to, you can skip back and forth in the message easily if some dumbass left you a really long message, it's easy to delete a message without worrying that you got the wrong message, and it's easy to store a message for long-term storage if you need to, and then easily pick it out of a list when you want to hear it again. Smartphones are also much better for doing many other things that featurephones could do, simply because of the touchscreen and the far higher screen size and resolution: featurephones had games, for instance, but they always sucked because of the tiny low-res screens and CPU power.
So you're willing to go without technology altogether? Then what are you doing here? You're a hypocrite.
I'm willing to boycott products where it's easy for me to not use them. But (since my career is in the tech field) I'm not going to go live under a bridge just because all the big Silicon Valley companies were complicit in this.
There's a matter of practicality here: some company's products are easier to avoid than others.
With Apple, it's easy: they're extremely vertically integrated, but you can sidestep them altogether by just using PCs, Android/Windows phones, etc. It's not hard at all to avoid using Apple products, and avoid giving them any profits.
Same goes for Facebook: just don't use it. You don't really need social networking.
Oracle's even easier: don't use their databases. You can still use Java if you want (if you don't use OpenJDK instead), but that won't give them any profit since you don't pay for it (and it doesn't contain advertising).
Google's obviously much harder: their search engine is basically the gold standard, and they also have a big hand in Android phones, and using their products gives them advertising revenue (even if you don't click on any ads or buy anything from them). You could switch to Bing and Windows phones, but MS is evil too, arguably more so, so that's not much help. There are some other search engines, though, like DuckDuckGo. But if you need a smartphone, Android is probably the best way to go, because Google gets far, far less profit from your Android phone than Apple gets from you buying an iPhone. Also, if you buy an Android phone, a lot of the profit is going to other companies entirely (like Samsung or HTC), so it's getting spread around more than if you buy an iPhone, where most of the profit goes to Apple.
With Intel, it's similar: first, you could switch to AMD CPUs, or maybe build an ARM Linux box. But even if you use Intel, with an Intel PC much of the profit is going to the system builder (Acer, Lenovo, HP, Dell, your corner computer shop that custom-built the system for you, etc.), unlike with Apple where they take most of the profit for themselves due to their vertical integration.
Windows is dying, office is dead, quit trying to force them! Zune is dead, and windows phone is in the ICU, Microsoft's only somewhat healthy division with a possible future is entertainment, why in the hell would they sell it?
You seem to be applying logic and good business sense to the situation. The problem is that Steve Ballmer doesn't have any. That's why MS is likely to sell their only healthy division.
The US may have a secular government but it has a religious populace that just won't keep religion out of it. To be honest we're not that far from Turkey.
There's a little more to it than that: the USA is not homogeneous. The ones in what we call the "red states" are the worst in this regard, constantly pushing their brand of fundamentalist Christianity; here in the urban areas of the "blue states", we don't have too much of that kind of thinking.
We'd be a lot better off if we broke the country up, so that the blue states could advance into world-leading countries, while the red states (especially the whole southeast) turn into third-world cesspools.
Actually, there's a little more to it than that: yes, fundamentalist Christian sects have been growing a lot in subsaharan Africa, but it's not completely the Africans' fault, it's the fundies from the USA who have been sending missionaries over there to convert Africans to their brand of Christianity. The new "kill the gays" law in Uganda was pushed by USA Christians.
Scuttling abandoned vessels, barges, whatever seems to be accepted practice as opposed to letting them drift around.
It is? I thought it was more normal to keep these things, and recycle them for scrap metal. There's a LOT of steel in a ship or barge. The exception seems to be military vessels, where standard practice seems to be to either put them in a ship graveyard ("mothballs"), like the one in the San Francisco bay, sell them to someone else, or for something where perhaps they don't want any secrets getting out (like old aircraft carriers), they'll use them as target practice and turn them into artificial reefs.
And scuttling a spaceship with a nuclear bomb doesn't seem like a very good idea to me anyway: instead of having one derelict vessel floating around, now you've got a big debris field floating around that could be a navigational hazard, and not nearly as easy to see and avoid as a single vessel. Crashing a vessel into a nearby planet or moon would make more sense, though with the vastness of space (except in certain orbital regions, where "space junk" really is a big problem), the whole idea really seems pretty silly.
Huh? Ok, it's been a few years since I've seen that movie, but I don't remember insufficient sunlight being a problem there; otherwise, why would they put the things way out in Saturn orbit anyway? (I always wondered why they thought that was a good idea, or if it was just so they could reuse the video sequence of going through Saturn's rings that they had shot for 2001 but never used.) I thought the whole problem was that the leaders on Earth didn't want to spend any more money maintaining these forest-ships as they didn't see a need for them, so they decided to shut them all down (and for some odd reason, they couldn't just leave them derelict, they had to blow them up with h-bombs for good measure, which for some weird reason they were carrying with them just for this purpose).
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You might actually have to walk! Going to the shops just a 10 minute walk away, my American host wanted to take the car... in beautiful dry sunny weather. WHY!!! (32 degrees celcius, in Holland when we get that maybe once a decade, the humidity is 80%) GO OUTSIDE AND ENJOY THE FUCKING NICE WEATHER AND LOOSE SOME TONS!
To be fair, the ~90-degree (F) weather you describe is pretty rare there; usually it's well over 100F, which is absolutely miserable to walk around in, and is certainly not "beautiful", so your friend is probably just used to taking the car by default. Even 90F is a little warm for a walk. There's a good reason no one wants to walk outside in Phoenix, except during the wintertime (when it's actually really nice outside, with temps in the 60s-70s, but it only lasts a couple of months at best). It's getting hotter too, so it's going to get worse.
That's probably about the only city in the US that applied such common-sense thinking to their rail system. I don't know of any others that have. Last time I was there, Atlanta's MARTA system didn't go to the airport at all. They don't in NYC either: LGA has no rail/subway terminal at all, only a bus terminal. JFK has something called "AirTrain", which isn't the same system as the MTA (which means you probably have to pay a separate fare for it). EWC (Newark) is on the NJ Transit train line, which goes to Penn Station on 34th, but again you have to pay a separate (and hefty) fare for it. You'd think if a big city was going to have a subway system, the first thing they'd do is connect it directly to the airport, but I guess that makes too much sense for America.
Actually, I just did a quick check and it looks like the folks in Washington DC actually figured this out: you can fly into Reagan airport and take a subway directly to The Mall in 22 minutes. But not with Dulles, where you need to take a bus most of the way.
It looks like the Canadians aren't any smarter either: even though Toronto has a subway system, it doesn't go to the Toronto Pearson International airport, only buses.
Yep, I remember. They're probably going to suck. But at any rate, it seems that Peter Jackson mainly does movies based on novels, at least based on his Tolkein works.
Heck, the California Teachers Association threaten state congress members that tried to make sexual assault against children a mandatory firing event.
I'm not so sure that's a California problem; I think it's really a USA problem. This whole country has a giant problem with teacher's unions making it hard to fire shitty teachers, and as a result, public education is horrible nationwide, not just in California or Texas (neither of which is known to have a good education system). I can't think of a single state that's known to have a great education system.
I'm guessing it's like the stupid light rail they built in Phoenix/Tempe/Mesa, AZ: it doesn't really go places where that many people need to go. It's mainly useful for ASU students who need to travel between the Tempe and downtown Phoenix campuses, and a bunch of poor people (who probably don't bother buying tickets) who travel between crappy west Mesa and downtown Phoenix for work.
The biggest oversight of the system was that it doesn't go to the airport. WTF? That's probably one of the easiest ways to make a rail system useful: make it go to the airport, and to downtown areas where hotels are; that way, travelers can fly in, jump on the train and go straight to their hotel. Even NYC has mostly bungled this. Plus, people who live not too far from a rail terminal can take the light-rail to the airport, so they don't have to use a cab or pay ridiculous airport parking fees. Instead, Phoenix's light-rail bypasses the airport. After several years, they have started work on a second rail system which will have a stop on the light-rail route, specifically to take people to/from the airport, but it was many years after the initial system was constructed.
You mean like that other ultra-liberal city, Phoenix, that also spent billions of dollars on a light-rail system that has high usage fees, and tons of people who don't pay it and just hop on board for free? Phoenix is anything but liberal, but they jumped on the light-rail bandwagon too, and for good reason: the Federal Government was handing out free money, called a "stimulus", so of course the conservatives were happy to take it.
Funny how the conservatives never practice what they preach.
I don't think a 50mm machine gun even exists. There are 20mm Gatling-type guns, but they're used on large aircraft and on ships IIRC. I think there's also 30mm Gatling-type guns (maybe those are the shipboard ones). A 50mm machine gun would be ridiculously large and not really practical for anything; after all, if a 30mm machine gun can shoot airplanes and Exocet anti-ship missiles out of the sky from tens of miles away, what the heck do you need 50mm shells for? Out-of-control giant transforming robots from the planet Cybertron?
I'm guessing it's because the really excellent directors, like Christopher Nolan, Clint Eastwood, James Cameron, Jon Favreau, or Bryan Singer, are either not interested in sci-fi at all (Eastwood), not interested in Star Wars specifically, not interested in picking up someone else's series and running with it, or perhaps not interested in working with George Lucas even if he restricts himself to effects and visuals. Or perhaps it's because the previous Star Wars movies (mainly the prequels) have been such horrors of filmmaking that no "true expert of film" would want to touch that turkey. Honestly, they're lucky they got someone as good as Abrams to take this thing over, after the mess that Lucas has made of it. And I'm truly shocked actually that Lucas is even letting someone else take over. He's had nothing good to say about ESB, it being the SW movie he had the least to do with. The man is an egomaniac, and I'm wondering how they managed to wrestle control away from him.
The Ewoks were tolerable, but Jar Jar was way, way over the line.
Here's a though experiment: imagine how Episodes 6, 1, 2, and 3 would have been if they had been done by the same writer and director who did Empire Strikes Back.
That was lifted straight out of the book "The Hobbit". Peter Jackson is pretty good at being very authentic to the source material in a novel. So a Star Wars movie from him would probably mean him taking Timothy Zahn's trilogy and turning them into movies, which would actually probably be really cool, if only I could blot the Prequels out of my mind.
You forgot about Starman (which I think qualifies as a "franchise" since it had one movie, and then a spinoff TV series).
There's nothing all that wrong with the Linksys hardware, in fact much of it has been excellent for the price point. The firmware, under Cisco, has been another story, but that's what DD-WRT is for.
Don't be ridiculous. There's plenty of great routers out there. My Cisco E1000 is working flawlessly, now that it's loaded with DD-WRT.
Now, if you're looking for a consumer-grade router that has both great hardware and firmware out of the box, you can forget about it, but I'm not sure such a beast has ever existed. But there's lots of decent hardware out there that can be reflashed with an alternative firmware like DD-WRT. The enterprise-grade stuff is crap too BTW: I used to have a couple of Aironet access points and those things were a total PITA to set up because of Cisco's wacky IOS system. The hardware was really nice, I'll admit (all-metal chassis, kinda looks like something out of a UFO, could be dropped off the Empire State Building and suffer only slight damage), but the software and web interface were ridiculously bad unless you want to spend a lot of time becoming an expert in IOS. By contrast, DD-WRT does pretty much everything IOS could do (including RADIUS authentication) and it, despite being Free, has a perfectly usable web interface that anyone competent with computers and networking can look at once and figure out.
Maybe it goes back to the contention that many Android users just use their phones as glorified feature phones: perhaps many Android users (since the phones can frequently be had for free) don't even bother getting data plans, unlike iPhone users who are already paying a buttload of money for their phones and the data plan might not be seen as a big expense to them. With Android phones, it should be pretty easy to forgo the mobile data plan (saving $30/month or so, per phone), and just use a WiFi network when you're in range if you want to surf the web when you're at home or in a hotspot zone.
You sound like one of these morons that thinks everything is black and white. Ever heard the phrase "pick your battles"? As I said before, it's easier to not use Apple products than others, because of the nature of their business models. And, Apple's offenses have been much worse IMO than the others, so I'll happily choose to boycott them first. They've done far worse things than just hold down salaries; that's only one thing on a long list of evil deeds of theirs. Same goes for MS. Intel and Google have done some bad things too, but not as bad as those two.
Since you claim to not be a hypocrite, why don't you tell us what kind of CPU you're using here, and what kind of phone you have?
And how do you propose to get around using Google and Intel products? It's not impossible, but it's much easier than not using Apple products, and if you refuse to admit that, then you're either a liar, a shill, or a moron.
It's impossible to use a PC now without an Intel or AMD processor, and AMD has a much smaller share than Intel. So it is possible, but it cuts your choices pretty drastically. And was AMD another of the companies that participated in this scheme?
Not using Google isn't so easy either; there aren't exactly that many decent search engines out there. You could switch to Bing, but Microsoft was another of those companies listed, so you haven't avoided the evil gang that way. I guess you could use DuckDuckGo; that's the only other one I even know of that isn't some dying carcass from the 90s. You can use non-Google maps, but we've had plenty of articles here lately about how horrible Apple Maps is, but there's still Bing maps, but at least you could switch to Mapquest to avoid the evil gang. Finally, with smartphones, you simply don't have a choice: it's either Apple, Google (Android), or Microsoft. All three are in the gang, so take your pick.
Ironically, Google gets far more money from iPhone users than they get from Android users still. So buy an iPhone, Apple+Google benefit immensely.
Not that I'm doubting you, but how does that work? With iPhone, if you use Google Maps and the Google search engine, Google will profit, while Apple gets the lion's share of profits from the initial purchase of the phone, plus any apps you purchase. With Android, it shouldn't be any different if you use Google Maps and the Google search engine, but if you buy any apps, Google gets a cut of that too, plus they probably have additional advertising revenues from ad-supported apps. I don't see how Google is profiting less from Android than from iPhone.
The thing that really sucks about Android is that when you buy an Android phone, both Apple and Microsoft profit because of their bullshit patents.
most Android users probably aren't using them as anything more than glorified featurephones
And there's nothing wrong with that. The technology has made the hardware ultra-cheap, and smartphones are much easier to use than the old featurephones in many ways: for instance, listening to voicemail used to be a giant pain in the ass until smartphones came along and made it visual. You had to call some stupid number, then very very slowly step through every message on there, using some cryptic commands (since you only had 0-9 # * buttons to work with; 7 to delete, 3 for next message, or somesuch). With smartphones, suddenly it became very easy: you get to see a list of your messages and who they came from, you can select any one of them to listen to, you can skip back and forth in the message easily if some dumbass left you a really long message, it's easy to delete a message without worrying that you got the wrong message, and it's easy to store a message for long-term storage if you need to, and then easily pick it out of a list when you want to hear it again. Smartphones are also much better for doing many other things that featurephones could do, simply because of the touchscreen and the far higher screen size and resolution: featurephones had games, for instance, but they always sucked because of the tiny low-res screens and CPU power.
So you're willing to go without technology altogether? Then what are you doing here? You're a hypocrite.
I'm willing to boycott products where it's easy for me to not use them. But (since my career is in the tech field) I'm not going to go live under a bridge just because all the big Silicon Valley companies were complicit in this.
There's a matter of practicality here: some company's products are easier to avoid than others.
With Apple, it's easy: they're extremely vertically integrated, but you can sidestep them altogether by just using PCs, Android/Windows phones, etc. It's not hard at all to avoid using Apple products, and avoid giving them any profits.
Same goes for Facebook: just don't use it. You don't really need social networking.
Oracle's even easier: don't use their databases. You can still use Java if you want (if you don't use OpenJDK instead), but that won't give them any profit since you don't pay for it (and it doesn't contain advertising).
Google's obviously much harder: their search engine is basically the gold standard, and they also have a big hand in Android phones, and using their products gives them advertising revenue (even if you don't click on any ads or buy anything from them). You could switch to Bing and Windows phones, but MS is evil too, arguably more so, so that's not much help. There are some other search engines, though, like DuckDuckGo. But if you need a smartphone, Android is probably the best way to go, because Google gets far, far less profit from your Android phone than Apple gets from you buying an iPhone. Also, if you buy an Android phone, a lot of the profit is going to other companies entirely (like Samsung or HTC), so it's getting spread around more than if you buy an iPhone, where most of the profit goes to Apple.
With Intel, it's similar: first, you could switch to AMD CPUs, or maybe build an ARM Linux box. But even if you use Intel, with an Intel PC much of the profit is going to the system builder (Acer, Lenovo, HP, Dell, your corner computer shop that custom-built the system for you, etc.), unlike with Apple where they take most of the profit for themselves due to their vertical integration.
Windows is dying, office is dead, quit trying to force them! Zune is dead, and windows phone is in the ICU, Microsoft's only somewhat healthy division with a possible future is entertainment, why in the hell would they sell it?
You seem to be applying logic and good business sense to the situation. The problem is that Steve Ballmer doesn't have any. That's why MS is likely to sell their only healthy division.
The US may have a secular government but it has a religious populace that just won't keep religion out of it. To be honest we're not that far from Turkey.
There's a little more to it than that: the USA is not homogeneous. The ones in what we call the "red states" are the worst in this regard, constantly pushing their brand of fundamentalist Christianity; here in the urban areas of the "blue states", we don't have too much of that kind of thinking.
We'd be a lot better off if we broke the country up, so that the blue states could advance into world-leading countries, while the red states (especially the whole southeast) turn into third-world cesspools.
Actually, there's a little more to it than that: yes, fundamentalist Christian sects have been growing a lot in subsaharan Africa, but it's not completely the Africans' fault, it's the fundies from the USA who have been sending missionaries over there to convert Africans to their brand of Christianity. The new "kill the gays" law in Uganda was pushed by USA Christians.
The Sun disagrees with your statement.
Scuttling abandoned vessels, barges, whatever seems to be accepted practice as opposed to letting them drift around.
It is? I thought it was more normal to keep these things, and recycle them for scrap metal. There's a LOT of steel in a ship or barge. The exception seems to be military vessels, where standard practice seems to be to either put them in a ship graveyard ("mothballs"), like the one in the San Francisco bay, sell them to someone else, or for something where perhaps they don't want any secrets getting out (like old aircraft carriers), they'll use them as target practice and turn them into artificial reefs.
And scuttling a spaceship with a nuclear bomb doesn't seem like a very good idea to me anyway: instead of having one derelict vessel floating around, now you've got a big debris field floating around that could be a navigational hazard, and not nearly as easy to see and avoid as a single vessel. Crashing a vessel into a nearby planet or moon would make more sense, though with the vastness of space (except in certain orbital regions, where "space junk" really is a big problem), the whole idea really seems pretty silly.
Huh? Ok, it's been a few years since I've seen that movie, but I don't remember insufficient sunlight being a problem there; otherwise, why would they put the things way out in Saturn orbit anyway? (I always wondered why they thought that was a good idea, or if it was just so they could reuse the video sequence of going through Saturn's rings that they had shot for 2001 but never used.) I thought the whole problem was that the leaders on Earth didn't want to spend any more money maintaining these forest-ships as they didn't see a need for them, so they decided to shut them all down (and for some odd reason, they couldn't just leave them derelict, they had to blow them up with h-bombs for good measure, which for some weird reason they were carrying with them just for this purpose).