Well of course; that's always been MS's end goal in everything. My point is just that, as the previous poster said about shooting themselves in the foot, their actions aren't going to drive people to their own overpriced and crappy offerings, but rather to their competitors.
It's kinda like GM eliminating their low-end cars, thinking everyone will just buy a Cadillac or Corvette, but instead they switch to the competition.
Let's see what I can think of... 1) Engine control systems 2) Hybrid technology 3) Somewhat practical all-electric technology 4) Tighter tolerances in bodywork including more complex shapes 5) LED headlights 6) Sophisticated in-car entertainment systems 7) Suspension and handling control systems, in same cases actually enabling the car to perform better than it could with a driver alone 8) Extensive use of carbon fiber and other composites 9) Airless tires
1) These have been around since the 80s, they're nothing new. 2) These have been around since the early 2000s, they're nothing new. In fact, the older ones are better; the original Honda Insight gets the best fuel economy of any hybrid car. 3) I'll grant you this one. But there aren't a lot of Leafs driving around yet. 4) Sorry, I don't see it. Cars look the same to me now as they did 10 years ago. You have to go back to the early 90s to see real cosmetic differences in cars. 5) Haven't seen many of those. I'll grant you HID headlights though; those were around 10 years ago, but were much more rare then. 6) They've had DVD players in cars for over 10 years now. 7) Sorry, haven't seen this one. Every car I've driven in has worse handling than my 18-year-old Acura. They all have way too much body roll. I will admit that American cars handle a lot better than they did 15-20 years ago, but they're only starting to catch up to what Japanese and German cars achieved 15-20 years ago. 8) The McLaren F1 had all this 10+ years ago, and regular cars still don't have it. 9) Haven't seen this one either. They've had run-flat tires for 15+ years however.
I have to use Outlook Web Access for work, and it's a total piece of shit. Hotmail sucks too, and no one uses it any more (Slashdot had an article about this not long ago).
Sure, their intention is to get people to move to their other offerings like $$$Exchange$$$, but what's really going to happen is they'll move to Google's services (like the other poster here said he did at his job), and then Ballmer will throw more chairs around.
I'm sure that's what they're telling themselves, but they're also probably telling themselves that Hotmail is great, when everyone but spammers have abandoned it.
It's going to make a close pass in 2029, and there's a possibility that encounter will alter its trajectory so that it collides with Earth in 2036. The possibility is said to be low, but still I don't think we can really claim to be quite that accurate with our predictions, because I think it's hard to say exactly how Earth's gravity will affect it on that 2029 fly-by. If it does set up the asteroid for an impact in 2036, that's only 7 years to prepare and find a way to deflect it; with asteroids, and with our propulsion technology, it's probably not enough. To actually deflect something, we'd need years to design and build some kind of engine, launch it up there, then have it push the asteroid a small amount so that over the course of years, its trajectory is altered enough to be considered safe.
(Stupid Slashdot won't let me edit a comment like Reddit does; no wonder everyone's going there now.)
I forgot to add; my whole point is, take a look around you right now, and compare to what your life was like 10 years ago. What's changed? What's improved? The only thing I see that's substantially better than what I had 10 years ago is my mobile phone; back then I think I had just gotten a cellphone (lots of people had been holding out until the costs came down, but by that time, it got to be so it started making sense to dump the landline and just have a cellphone), and it was a simple one with number buttons. Now I have an Android phone with 4G, turn-by-turn navigation (a giant help when traveling to unfamiliar cities), video calling, web browing, etc. But everything else is the same, except for some very very minor improvements (24" LCD panels on my computer instead of a 19" CRT for instance, a laser mouse instead of a ball mouse, CPUs aren't such power hogs like in the P4 days though that was largely because of stupidity on Intel's part, etc.).
Sorry, I've never seen a self-driving car. See my prior comment about things that haven't made it out of the lab yet. There's been lots of things over the last 50+ years that people were sure were right around the corner, yet they never happened, sometimes just because of economics rather than technology (i.e., they were too expensive to achieve any popularity). True, self-driving cars do look like they have a bit more promise than some other things I've seen articles about (e.g., various "breakthrough" new automotive engine designs that never end up seeing the light of day), but until they're actually driving around in real numbers, rather than a prototype here and there, it doesn't really count. Your assertion about it here is a lot like saying "robots like those depicted in 'Runaway' are coming" just because of Honda's Asimo robot which has been around for at least a decade now, yet all this time later we still don't see any humanoid robots walking around and cleaning our houses.
And the other poster is right: NASA never stifled spaceflight; they don't control aerospace worldwide, and there was nothing stopping anyone in other countries from getting into spaceflight. They sure didn't stop the Chinese and Russians from building spacecraft.
The small business computing trends are moving in the direction of cloud computing for applications and services such as email, online back-up and line-of-business tools.
Interesting: so Microsoft is actually officially telling customers they should switch to Google Mail and Google Docs? After all, no one uses their crappy Hotmail service for business use (and not much for personal use any more either).
Examples? I sure don't see any progress. I'll name a few fields:
1) Automotive. Cars don't look any different now than they did 10 years ago, and technologically they're pretty much the same. The fuel economy is slightly improved with some brands, mostly thanks to gasoline direct injection, though there's some concerns about how these engines do over long terms. 2) Aviation. The only advances I see are a couple of space startups (SpaceX etc.) launching rockets and creating some prototype spacecraft. That's nice, but it's not really an advance since we've been doing that for decades, they're just figuring out now how to privatize it and do it a little cheaper. We have yet to see if any of the more radical ideas actually pan out or not; so far all they've succeeded in doing is launching satellites using newer, private designs rather than reused ICBMs. 3) Computers (meaning desktops, servers, etc.). Nothing new here at all, in fact a lot of giant steps backwards (GNOME3, Windows 8 Metro coming soon). For most computer users, they finally got an overdue upgrade to XP in the form of Win7, but there's no real advances there, just some updates. The CPUs have gotten better now that Intel's abandoned Netburst (P4), but clock speeds are stuck, they're just adding cores to try to make new ones look better, and the power efficiency has gotten slightly better. 4) Mobile computing. This is where all the real advancement is these days, as mentioned before.
So please, tell me where all these alleged advances in other fields are. I sure don't see any. Also, things which haven't made it out of the lab, and quite possibly are nothing more than a scam to get investor money before disappearing, don't count. I can't tell you how many articles about some new "revolutionary" automotive engine I've seen over the past 20 years, and nothing ever comes of it, probably because it's all BS.
Contrary to the opinions on the matter of many ACs here, the intent behind the desire is not simply to cause chaos for the sake of chaos, but to cause that chaos to spur positive innovation and better decison making on the part of mankind.
Yep, unfortunately, most of the time people don't bother to improve things until they're forced to, otherwise they become lazy and complacent. We made a ridiculous amount of progress in a small time in the fields of aviation and space travel back in the 40s-60s, going from very slow piston-driven airplanes to planes that could fly at Mach 3 at 100,000 feet, launching rockets out of the atmosphere and sending men to the Moon, all because they felt compelled to by international tensions, but after that eased up, all progress came to a screeching halt and since then it's just been slow incremental improvements (like slightly more fuel-efficient jet engines, and lately winglets, whoopee).
The only field that seems like it's really improving at a good rate these days is mobile computing devices; everything else is pretty stagnant.
I actually agree with him to a certain extent, but instead of a CME, I'd rather see an asteroid hit the earth. I don't actually want anyone to die; I'd like it to hit an uninhabited area such as Antarctica or Siberia (like the Tunguska Event). The reason is simple: I think we humans need a good kick in the pants to work on our space program, so we can deal with problems like this (and also so we can achieve other things, like extracting resources offworld), but it doesn't look like it's going to happen until people get a good wake-up call. We've had a bunch of near-misses, including one a few weeks ago IIRC, but we haven't had a good asteroid strike since Tunguska in the early 1900s. Maybe if another Tunguska-sized event happened, people would finally get a clue, realize that there's much bigger ones out there (such as Apophis, which really is on a collision course with us) and get serious about dedicating resources to space programs. The old saying is "necessity is the mother of invention", but the corollary to that is that humans don't usually bother preparing for anything unless they've learned the hard way that they need to.
That's funny, it was actually my experience that Win95 crashed faster than the Enterprise on the Genesis planet, whereas Win3.1 was fairly stable. I even refused to upgrade to Win95 or Win98 until I decided to switch to Linux because I got so annoyed about my Win95/98 computer at work crashing several times a day.
Two receptacles? Obviously you haven't seen the Japanese toilets that include a bidet function right on the toilet seat. It's not for sex, it's for hygiene.
Only on Slashdot will you see someone arguing that washing your ass with water somehow isn't hygienic. Do you never clean yourself there in the shower?
I realize you're being sarcastic, but that situation seems very different to me. As you noted, the people from Northern Africa are on an entirely different continent than the Europeans, and while the US may have some military operations in Iraq, that's pretty far from Tunisia, Morocco, etc. Why Muslims from that part of the world are all migrating in droves to Europe (and also the US, just not in such large numbers), I'm really not sure, other than the obvious answer, which is economics. What's puzzling is that, as a culture, north African and middle eastern Muslims are extremely intolerant and not very amenable to blending into the local population; they migrate to Western countries, and then get angry when, for instance, their kids become "too westernized" and murder them. As a group, they're entirely different from, for example, Hindu Indians, who have also migrated in large numbers to western nations, yet are excellent at learning the local language, getting along with the locals, adopting many of their ways while also maintaining parts of their previous culture, yet not trying to force their ways on anyone else.
You have your opinions, but most Star Trek fans don't share them, as evidenced by reviews and box-office figures. ST1 didn't do that well. ST6 and 8 both did well. ST4 got great reviews and is easily the most popular of all the ST movies.
BTW, there's nothing about watching endless footage of the Enterprise slowly going into a giant cloud, with some wacky 70s sound effects, that "requires you to think". It's just boring.
Outlook is mainly used in the enterprise, so having a mail client at least on the level of Thunderbird would not be stealing sales.
Outlook is used by tons of companies, big and small, and they pay handsomely for the privilege. If they included a free client on the level of Thunderbird, I think it's entirely reasonable to think this would negatively affect the sales of Outlook to many small-to-midsize firms. Of course, however, by not including a free Thunderbird-like client, they may also be losing marketshare to Gmail, as many smaller firms are moving to that.
with gmail being the single largest mail service in the world,... nobody wants to put a lot of energy into legacy mail applications any more.
Yes, but we're not talking about just anybody, we're talking about Microsoft here. If anyone wanted to pour enormous amounts of money into projects just to hurt Google, it'd be them. I'm surprised they aren't trying harder on this thing. Sure, you might point to their own competing online mail service, Hotmail, but that thing is doing horribly these days. You'd think they'd want to pour resources into anything that competes with Gmail.
It's about the movies, not the series. Please turn in your geek card.
It's not entirely accurate, at least IMO, but it's pretty close: 1) ST:TMP - boring, boring crap 2) Wrath of Khan - probably best ST movie ever, though the bit about a nebula being a short distance from a planet at sublight speed irks me. 3) Search for Spock - underrated IMO, not as good as II and IV but not horrible. 4) Voyage Home - great 5) so horrible that many fans disclaim its existence; William Shatner directed this abomination, but never again directed a major motion picture 6) Undiscovered Country - excellent 7) Generations - big disappointment, though not nearly as bad as ST5 8) First Contact - excellent, great triumph for director Jonathan Frakes (Riker) 9) Insurrection - pretty disappointing, esp. since it was also directed by Frakes and didn't measure up at all to First Contact 10) Nemesis - this is where the trend totally breaks down, because it's even-numbered but it sucked. It had some great visuals and effects (I liked the part about Picard piloting the small Reman ship), but otherwise it was pretty lame. This movie was also a big flop and ended the whole Star Trek movie franchise for a while until it was rebooted with entirely new actors in JJ Abram's movie (and upcoming sequel).
Well my point was really that if the woman has "settled" for a rich guy because all the previous assholes she dated were, well, assholes, and also didn't have money, then having the husband be faithful and attentive shouldn't be concerns for her any more.
However, I can tell you one reason divorce might be high with women and rich guys: support. If a woman snags a rich guy, and then divorces him after a while (esp. if she's had a kid or three with him), then she's usually entitled to hefty child support payments and/or alimony. So if she gets really sick of the guy, and he doesn't have an iron-clad prenuptial, it can be to her benefit to walk away; she'll get to keep the money and lifestyle and not put up with him any more. Then she can shack up with the pool guy while spending the doctor's money from his alimony payments.
Asking a woman to reply on Slashdot is a little silly IMO; we do have them, but the women who frequent this place aren't really like the general population.
I don't know about you, but I've seen very, very few supermarkets that were national chains. Most of them are either local or regional; every time I go to a different city in America, I see a lot of the exact same national chain stores: Walmart, Target, Sears, various mall stores (Macy's, etc.), however the grocery stores are completely different in every state. Here in Arizona there's Basha's, Albertson's, and Fry's. In New Jersey there was ShopRite. In Ohio there was Cub's. In Virginia there was Ukrops. There are a few national chains for the high-end stores, like Whole Foods and Trader Joe's, and Food City and Safeway seem to be national, but that's about all I can think of.
The OP is missing part of the story, because that sentence you quoted tells everything from the perspective of the woman in question. The way she sees it, she's dated asshole after asshole, so she's decided she can't have someone who's "intelligent, kind, humorous, and compassionate", so she'll settle for someone who's rich. This doesn't mean that a man with those qualities doesn't exist, it's just that she doesn't see them; when she comes across one, he's not exciting to her, she's not sexually aroused by him, so he's not even on her radar. It's kinda like you meeting a single (/widowed/divorced) woman who's old enough to be your grandmother; you wouldn't even consider her in your mind as a dating prospect.
Huh? From what I've seen in life, this isn't true. Women's looks are a huge part of their asset package that men evaluate; a beautiful woman with no personality and no money can easily pick up a guy who has money, but the opposite isn't true. Women don't care that much about how men look, unless maybe they're obese. After all, look at Julia Roberts and Lyle Lovett.
For men, there's two big factors: money and personality. Women (esp. the younger ones, who haven't learned the hard way why their biological urges should be ignored) are drawn to "alpha male", extroverted men, who are frequently (but not always) assholes. But they also want a man with money. It's mostly their looks that determines what kind of man they'll get: a rich asshole, a rich but boring man, a poor asshole, etc. Men can make up for lack of money pretty well with just personality; why do you think so many women bang the pool guy?
Guys with little confidence and who are introverted are probably the most screwed in the dating game, along with women who are highly unattractive. Women who are introverted don't have such problems; if they're attractive, guys will just come up to them and ask them out. This doesn't happen to introverted men, no matter how attractive they are.
Who cares if the rich guy is banging some other chick? If he's rich, he can easily afford a nanny to help the wife with the children. If the wife is settling for a rich guy just because he has money, faithfulness and spending quality time with her and the kids should be low priorities.
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Well of course; that's always been MS's end goal in everything. My point is just that, as the previous poster said about shooting themselves in the foot, their actions aren't going to drive people to their own overpriced and crappy offerings, but rather to their competitors.
It's kinda like GM eliminating their low-end cars, thinking everyone will just buy a Cadillac or Corvette, but instead they switch to the competition.
Let's see what I can think of...
1) Engine control systems
2) Hybrid technology
3) Somewhat practical all-electric technology
4) Tighter tolerances in bodywork including more complex shapes
5) LED headlights
6) Sophisticated in-car entertainment systems
7) Suspension and handling control systems, in same cases actually enabling the car to perform better than it could with a driver alone
8) Extensive use of carbon fiber and other composites
9) Airless tires
1) These have been around since the 80s, they're nothing new.
2) These have been around since the early 2000s, they're nothing new. In fact, the older ones are better; the original Honda Insight gets the best fuel economy of any hybrid car.
3) I'll grant you this one. But there aren't a lot of Leafs driving around yet.
4) Sorry, I don't see it. Cars look the same to me now as they did 10 years ago. You have to go back to the early 90s to see real cosmetic differences in cars.
5) Haven't seen many of those. I'll grant you HID headlights though; those were around 10 years ago, but were much more rare then.
6) They've had DVD players in cars for over 10 years now.
7) Sorry, haven't seen this one. Every car I've driven in has worse handling than my 18-year-old Acura. They all have way too much body roll. I will admit that American cars handle a lot better than they did 15-20 years ago, but they're only starting to catch up to what Japanese and German cars achieved 15-20 years ago.
8) The McLaren F1 had all this 10+ years ago, and regular cars still don't have it.
9) Haven't seen this one either. They've had run-flat tires for 15+ years however.
I have to use Outlook Web Access for work, and it's a total piece of shit. Hotmail sucks too, and no one uses it any more (Slashdot had an article about this not long ago).
Sure, their intention is to get people to move to their other offerings like $$$Exchange$$$, but what's really going to happen is they'll move to Google's services (like the other poster here said he did at his job), and then Ballmer will throw more chairs around.
I'm sure that's what they're telling themselves, but they're also probably telling themselves that Hotmail is great, when everyone but spammers have abandoned it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/99942_Apophis
It's going to make a close pass in 2029, and there's a possibility that encounter will alter its trajectory so that it collides with Earth in 2036. The possibility is said to be low, but still I don't think we can really claim to be quite that accurate with our predictions, because I think it's hard to say exactly how Earth's gravity will affect it on that 2029 fly-by. If it does set up the asteroid for an impact in 2036, that's only 7 years to prepare and find a way to deflect it; with asteroids, and with our propulsion technology, it's probably not enough. To actually deflect something, we'd need years to design and build some kind of engine, launch it up there, then have it push the asteroid a small amount so that over the course of years, its trajectory is altered enough to be considered safe.
No, but if more people move to Gmail, that makes Google money, and that make Ballmer throw more chairs around.
(Stupid Slashdot won't let me edit a comment like Reddit does; no wonder everyone's going there now.)
I forgot to add; my whole point is, take a look around you right now, and compare to what your life was like 10 years ago. What's changed? What's improved? The only thing I see that's substantially better than what I had 10 years ago is my mobile phone; back then I think I had just gotten a cellphone (lots of people had been holding out until the costs came down, but by that time, it got to be so it started making sense to dump the landline and just have a cellphone), and it was a simple one with number buttons. Now I have an Android phone with 4G, turn-by-turn navigation (a giant help when traveling to unfamiliar cities), video calling, web browing, etc. But everything else is the same, except for some very very minor improvements (24" LCD panels on my computer instead of a 19" CRT for instance, a laser mouse instead of a ball mouse, CPUs aren't such power hogs like in the P4 days though that was largely because of stupidity on Intel's part, etc.).
Sorry, I've never seen a self-driving car. See my prior comment about things that haven't made it out of the lab yet. There's been lots of things over the last 50+ years that people were sure were right around the corner, yet they never happened, sometimes just because of economics rather than technology (i.e., they were too expensive to achieve any popularity). True, self-driving cars do look like they have a bit more promise than some other things I've seen articles about (e.g., various "breakthrough" new automotive engine designs that never end up seeing the light of day), but until they're actually driving around in real numbers, rather than a prototype here and there, it doesn't really count. Your assertion about it here is a lot like saying "robots like those depicted in 'Runaway' are coming" just because of Honda's Asimo robot which has been around for at least a decade now, yet all this time later we still don't see any humanoid robots walking around and cleaning our houses.
And the other poster is right: NASA never stifled spaceflight; they don't control aerospace worldwide, and there was nothing stopping anyone in other countries from getting into spaceflight. They sure didn't stop the Chinese and Russians from building spacecraft.
The small business computing trends are moving in the direction of cloud computing for applications and services such as email, online back-up and line-of-business tools.
Interesting: so Microsoft is actually officially telling customers they should switch to Google Mail and Google Docs? After all, no one uses their crappy Hotmail service for business use (and not much for personal use any more either).
Examples? I sure don't see any progress. I'll name a few fields:
1) Automotive. Cars don't look any different now than they did 10 years ago, and technologically they're pretty much the same. The fuel economy is slightly improved with some brands, mostly thanks to gasoline direct injection, though there's some concerns about how these engines do over long terms.
2) Aviation. The only advances I see are a couple of space startups (SpaceX etc.) launching rockets and creating some prototype spacecraft. That's nice, but it's not really an advance since we've been doing that for decades, they're just figuring out now how to privatize it and do it a little cheaper. We have yet to see if any of the more radical ideas actually pan out or not; so far all they've succeeded in doing is launching satellites using newer, private designs rather than reused ICBMs.
3) Computers (meaning desktops, servers, etc.). Nothing new here at all, in fact a lot of giant steps backwards (GNOME3, Windows 8 Metro coming soon). For most computer users, they finally got an overdue upgrade to XP in the form of Win7, but there's no real advances there, just some updates. The CPUs have gotten better now that Intel's abandoned Netburst (P4), but clock speeds are stuck, they're just adding cores to try to make new ones look better, and the power efficiency has gotten slightly better.
4) Mobile computing. This is where all the real advancement is these days, as mentioned before.
So please, tell me where all these alleged advances in other fields are. I sure don't see any. Also, things which haven't made it out of the lab, and quite possibly are nothing more than a scam to get investor money before disappearing, don't count. I can't tell you how many articles about some new "revolutionary" automotive engine I've seen over the past 20 years, and nothing ever comes of it, probably because it's all BS.
Contrary to the opinions on the matter of many ACs here, the intent behind the desire is not simply to cause chaos for the sake of chaos, but to cause that chaos to spur positive innovation and better decison making on the part of mankind.
Yep, unfortunately, most of the time people don't bother to improve things until they're forced to, otherwise they become lazy and complacent. We made a ridiculous amount of progress in a small time in the fields of aviation and space travel back in the 40s-60s, going from very slow piston-driven airplanes to planes that could fly at Mach 3 at 100,000 feet, launching rockets out of the atmosphere and sending men to the Moon, all because they felt compelled to by international tensions, but after that eased up, all progress came to a screeching halt and since then it's just been slow incremental improvements (like slightly more fuel-efficient jet engines, and lately winglets, whoopee).
The only field that seems like it's really improving at a good rate these days is mobile computing devices; everything else is pretty stagnant.
I actually agree with him to a certain extent, but instead of a CME, I'd rather see an asteroid hit the earth. I don't actually want anyone to die; I'd like it to hit an uninhabited area such as Antarctica or Siberia (like the Tunguska Event). The reason is simple: I think we humans need a good kick in the pants to work on our space program, so we can deal with problems like this (and also so we can achieve other things, like extracting resources offworld), but it doesn't look like it's going to happen until people get a good wake-up call. We've had a bunch of near-misses, including one a few weeks ago IIRC, but we haven't had a good asteroid strike since Tunguska in the early 1900s. Maybe if another Tunguska-sized event happened, people would finally get a clue, realize that there's much bigger ones out there (such as Apophis, which really is on a collision course with us) and get serious about dedicating resources to space programs. The old saying is "necessity is the mother of invention", but the corollary to that is that humans don't usually bother preparing for anything unless they've learned the hard way that they need to.
That's funny, it was actually my experience that Win95 crashed faster than the Enterprise on the Genesis planet, whereas Win3.1 was fairly stable. I even refused to upgrade to Win95 or Win98 until I decided to switch to Linux because I got so annoyed about my Win95/98 computer at work crashing several times a day.
Two receptacles? Obviously you haven't seen the Japanese toilets that include a bidet function right on the toilet seat. It's not for sex, it's for hygiene.
Only on Slashdot will you see someone arguing that washing your ass with water somehow isn't hygienic. Do you never clean yourself there in the shower?
I realize you're being sarcastic, but that situation seems very different to me. As you noted, the people from Northern Africa are on an entirely different continent than the Europeans, and while the US may have some military operations in Iraq, that's pretty far from Tunisia, Morocco, etc. Why Muslims from that part of the world are all migrating in droves to Europe (and also the US, just not in such large numbers), I'm really not sure, other than the obvious answer, which is economics. What's puzzling is that, as a culture, north African and middle eastern Muslims are extremely intolerant and not very amenable to blending into the local population; they migrate to Western countries, and then get angry when, for instance, their kids become "too westernized" and murder them. As a group, they're entirely different from, for example, Hindu Indians, who have also migrated in large numbers to western nations, yet are excellent at learning the local language, getting along with the locals, adopting many of their ways while also maintaining parts of their previous culture, yet not trying to force their ways on anyone else.
You have your opinions, but most Star Trek fans don't share them, as evidenced by reviews and box-office figures. ST1 didn't do that well. ST6 and 8 both did well. ST4 got great reviews and is easily the most popular of all the ST movies.
BTW, there's nothing about watching endless footage of the Enterprise slowly going into a giant cloud, with some wacky 70s sound effects, that "requires you to think". It's just boring.
Outlook is mainly used in the enterprise, so having a mail client at least on the level of Thunderbird would not be stealing sales.
Outlook is used by tons of companies, big and small, and they pay handsomely for the privilege. If they included a free client on the level of Thunderbird, I think it's entirely reasonable to think this would negatively affect the sales of Outlook to many small-to-midsize firms. Of course, however, by not including a free Thunderbird-like client, they may also be losing marketshare to Gmail, as many smaller firms are moving to that.
with gmail being the single largest mail service in the world,... nobody wants to put a lot of energy into legacy mail applications any more.
Yes, but we're not talking about just anybody, we're talking about Microsoft here. If anyone wanted to pour enormous amounts of money into projects just to hurt Google, it'd be them. I'm surprised they aren't trying harder on this thing. Sure, you might point to their own competing online mail service, Hotmail, but that thing is doing horribly these days. You'd think they'd want to pour resources into anything that competes with Gmail.
It's about the movies, not the series. Please turn in your geek card.
It's not entirely accurate, at least IMO, but it's pretty close:
1) ST:TMP - boring, boring crap
2) Wrath of Khan - probably best ST movie ever, though the bit about a nebula being a short distance from a planet at sublight speed irks me.
3) Search for Spock - underrated IMO, not as good as II and IV but not horrible.
4) Voyage Home - great
5) so horrible that many fans disclaim its existence; William Shatner directed this abomination, but never again directed a major motion picture
6) Undiscovered Country - excellent
7) Generations - big disappointment, though not nearly as bad as ST5
8) First Contact - excellent, great triumph for director Jonathan Frakes (Riker)
9) Insurrection - pretty disappointing, esp. since it was also directed by Frakes and didn't measure up at all to First Contact
10) Nemesis - this is where the trend totally breaks down, because it's even-numbered but it sucked. It had some great visuals and effects (I liked the part about Picard piloting the small Reman ship), but otherwise it was pretty lame. This movie was also a big flop and ended the whole Star Trek movie franchise for a while until it was rebooted with entirely new actors in JJ Abram's movie (and upcoming sequel).
Well my point was really that if the woman has "settled" for a rich guy because all the previous assholes she dated were, well, assholes, and also didn't have money, then having the husband be faithful and attentive shouldn't be concerns for her any more.
However, I can tell you one reason divorce might be high with women and rich guys: support. If a woman snags a rich guy, and then divorces him after a while (esp. if she's had a kid or three with him), then she's usually entitled to hefty child support payments and/or alimony. So if she gets really sick of the guy, and he doesn't have an iron-clad prenuptial, it can be to her benefit to walk away; she'll get to keep the money and lifestyle and not put up with him any more. Then she can shack up with the pool guy while spending the doctor's money from his alimony payments.
Asking a woman to reply on Slashdot is a little silly IMO; we do have them, but the women who frequent this place aren't really like the general population.
I don't know about you, but I've seen very, very few supermarkets that were national chains. Most of them are either local or regional; every time I go to a different city in America, I see a lot of the exact same national chain stores: Walmart, Target, Sears, various mall stores (Macy's, etc.), however the grocery stores are completely different in every state. Here in Arizona there's Basha's, Albertson's, and Fry's. In New Jersey there was ShopRite. In Ohio there was Cub's. In Virginia there was Ukrops. There are a few national chains for the high-end stores, like Whole Foods and Trader Joe's, and Food City and Safeway seem to be national, but that's about all I can think of.
The OP is missing part of the story, because that sentence you quoted tells everything from the perspective of the woman in question. The way she sees it, she's dated asshole after asshole, so she's decided she can't have someone who's "intelligent, kind, humorous, and compassionate", so she'll settle for someone who's rich. This doesn't mean that a man with those qualities doesn't exist, it's just that she doesn't see them; when she comes across one, he's not exciting to her, she's not sexually aroused by him, so he's not even on her radar. It's kinda like you meeting a single (/widowed/divorced) woman who's old enough to be your grandmother; you wouldn't even consider her in your mind as a dating prospect.
Men with money don't necessarily have "higher drive and accomplishment". A lot of them inherited their money.
Huh? From what I've seen in life, this isn't true. Women's looks are a huge part of their asset package that men evaluate; a beautiful woman with no personality and no money can easily pick up a guy who has money, but the opposite isn't true. Women don't care that much about how men look, unless maybe they're obese. After all, look at Julia Roberts and Lyle Lovett.
For men, there's two big factors: money and personality. Women (esp. the younger ones, who haven't learned the hard way why their biological urges should be ignored) are drawn to "alpha male", extroverted men, who are frequently (but not always) assholes. But they also want a man with money. It's mostly their looks that determines what kind of man they'll get: a rich asshole, a rich but boring man, a poor asshole, etc. Men can make up for lack of money pretty well with just personality; why do you think so many women bang the pool guy?
Guys with little confidence and who are introverted are probably the most screwed in the dating game, along with women who are highly unattractive. Women who are introverted don't have such problems; if they're attractive, guys will just come up to them and ask them out. This doesn't happen to introverted men, no matter how attractive they are.
Who cares if the rich guy is banging some other chick? If he's rich, he can easily afford a nanny to help the wife with the children. If the wife is settling for a rich guy just because he has money, faithfulness and spending quality time with her and the kids should be low priorities.