Giving birth is fortunately excluded due to gender...phew!
For now. You never know what medical science will come up with next. Maybe in 25 years it'll be normal for men to be getting pregnant (probably not naturally of course) and giving birth. Their wives will probably demand it for the 2nd baby, since she had to go through all the pain and misery for the first one, so it's only fair that he do it for the second. And since natural conception will probably become obsolete by then anyway, in favor of genetically-engineered "designer" babies, this will fit nicely with male pregnancy.
And if you're thinking "luckily I'll be too old by then to worry about this", medical science is already making big strides in figuring out the aging process, so by that time they'll probably have figured out how to make us all permanently look like we're 30 and not age any more, so unless you decide to stay single for the rest of your life (which will last until you're unlucky enough to get killed in an accident, perhaps a malfunctioning roller coaster), you too will feel pressured to get pregnant and give birth.
I hate to tell you this, but there's a big region to the west of India, called "the Middle East". It includes countries like Israel, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and most of Turkey. It has a pretty large population too, and as it is in ASIA, the inhabitants are ASIAN.
However, no one actually calls Middle Easterners "Asians". Especially not in the context of minority groups in American employment statistics. Middle Easterners are their own group, and so are Indians. "Asia", in this context, means "Far East Asia".
I got a magic way for ms to make fifty bucks per user: sell a decent windows for a change.
Why should they bother? They already get $100 (or so I read somewhere) per user by having a shitty Windows pre-loaded on every computer sold. People aren't going to pay more for a non-shitty Windows (assuming such a thing is possible, which I doubt). And MS can make even more money per use by baking adware and spyware into Windows, without affecting the up-front price. It's an excellent sales strategy. And if people don't like shitty Windows, what are they going to do, buy a Mac? hahaha
That's a false equivalence fallacy. Most other automakers have not been proven to intentionally kill people by hiding defects. The only other big example I can think of is Ford with the Pinto in the 70s, and later on a smaller scale with the Crown Vic in the 90s. Basically you're advocating "guilty until proven innocent" type thinking.
There's a huge difference between not designing a car to be as absolutely safe as you can possibly make it (esp. when time and budget/cost constraints are limiting you), and knowing of a real and dangerous defect and choosing to hide it.
It's impossible to "lose" youtube-dl. It's open-source software, and it's not owned by a company. And it's one of many such scripts; it's not that hard to write a script to download YT music (though youtube-dl does a very nice job).
Besides, even if things got to the state where all commercial download sites were shut down, leaving only open-source programs like youtube-dl, that would probably end 99.9% of all downloading from YouTube, because most people can't be bothered to figure out stuff like that. youtube-dl after all is a Python program, so you can't even run it in Windows without installing Python, and it's a command-line tool which means that 99.999% of Windows users will have no earthly idea how to use it. (I find this strange too; when I was a teenager, it was perfectly normal for minimally-trained office secretaries to use PCs with MS-DOS and be perfectly capable of basic command-line work. Times have really changed.)
That's all fine and well, for dealing with companies that offer websites to facilitate downloading from YouTube.
But how do you deal with download scripts? You can't. If I can download a YT video using my browser (because it's impossible to listen to the song without downloading it, after all), then I can do the exact same thing with a script like "youtube-dl".
Of course, if they succeed in shutting down the download websites, that'll probably end most unauthorized copying, since most users appear to be too stupid and/or lazy to use a script like youtube-dl. Just look at how many people keep using Windows 10 after all.
As far as I'm concerned, it IS rent-seeking, because almost any music worth listening to is now over 20 years old, and in my opinion that's the maximum length of time that copyright should hold, as set out by the Founders of the US. Any extensions after that are invalid. So any music recordings over 20 years old should be in the public domain, and I have every right to download them.
As for the labels, they used to discover the best artists and promote them, and do a great job with production. That all ended somewhere in the late 1990s or so. They don't discover anyone any more, they just manufacture teen pop crap, and their production quality is absolutely abysmal now, thanks to the "Loudness Wars" so the music has no dynamic range any more. Recordings from the 70s and 80s are far higher quality than anything made now, because recording engineers back then understood what "dynamic range" is and why it's important.
The car is made of carbon fiber and aluminum, which means it basically has similar construction to something like the McLaren F1 ol Ferrari Enzo. People can't afford $1M cars. CF is extremely labor-intensive material to work with; there's a reason it isn't used on production cars in normal price ranges.
That huge central tunnel means you can't get close to your girlfriend. Who wants to drive like that? Also, it doesn't look like there's much width there for passengers. That might work ok for tall, thin Dutch people, but not fat Americans and Brits.
But seriously, this thing's a proof-of-concept only, and unless they come up with ways of making CF really really cheap to make, it won't fly. Also, I couldn't find anything there about a top speed or cruising speed. If it can't go 80+mph and at least cruise at 70, it won't work. No one's going to buy a car that they can't drive safely on the freeway.
As a first step you could roll back vehicle weights to what they were 40 years ago.
No, you can't. Vehicles 40 years ago were much smaller inside, much noisier, and far less comfortable. (I assume you're talking about European cars; 40 years ago was 1976, and the American cars of the time were gigantic, although there again they weren't that large inside, but had gigantic engine compartments, and were quite heavy.) People now expect larger, more comfortable vehicles which can seat people who are both taller and fatter than 40 years ago.
Depends on streamlining, and on what "useful speed" means (you said highway speed, not me -- the solar challenge vehicles go much faster than bicycles but not highway speeds),
I'm sorry, the general public does not want to travel at 25mph.
That's a good point, but it's going to be a while before we get to that point. A lot of people are going to insist on keeping their non-autonomous cars. But you still have to worry about things like the car sliding off the road due to icy roads, and crash resistance is important there too. Finally, you can't shave *that* much weight off the car even if you stopped worrying about crashworthiness altogether; you can only make a steel box for 4/5 people so light, and still make it ride nicely, not be noisy inside, have comfortable seats, be able to fit people over 6' tall, etc.
As for solar panels, again, no, it's completely impossible. At highway speeds, you need tens of horsepower to overcome air resistance. There's no way you'd get even 10kW out of solar panels on a car's roof and hood, you need a house-size roof for that much. And that's just steady-state cruising, with no acceleration.
US freight rail used to be a lot better. The problem was that back in the 50s, rail was highly regulated, but trucking was then deregulated, so it became cheaper to ship a lot of stuff by truck.
I'm guessing the reason freight rail isn't that great in Europe is because Europe isn't a single country (yet), so getting so many squabbling nations to agree on things and build a continental rail network hasn't been easy. Even worse, the continent was split in two by the Cold War until ~1990, and IIRC, Russia and its buddies used a different rail standard than the western nations which all used the UK standard. We never had either of these problems in the US. Being a single nation, composed of federal states with rather limited power, and occupying a whole continent, has been the biggest factor in our economic success. We tried letting the states have a lot more power back in the late 1700s under the Articles of Confederation and it didn't work out because no one could agree on anything and the central government didn't have the power to overrule them.
Vertical-axis mills should be better for another reason, however: they don't care which direction the wind is traveling. Regular (fan-looking) windmills have to be actively turned into the wind. Also, they should have lower maintenance requirements as they should be mechanically simpler (just a straight vertical shaft, no 90-degree turn at the top).
You can't, unless you're proposing to have vehicles that can't go faster than bicycle speed. The size and weight of modern cars stems directly from crash-safety requirements.
I live not too far from major highway. Noise and pollution from automobiles worry me. The electric revolution cannot come soon enough
Electric cars aren't going to help your noise problems. With modern cars, most of the noise comes from the tires at high speeds. Electric cars use the same tires as gas cars.
And why the hell do these riders intentionally make their bikes so loud?
Two reasons: 1) many of them actually believe (or claim to believe) all the noise makes them more visible to car drivers, even though it doesn't (it's mainly people behind them who hear all the noise; that isn't helpful for safety), and 2) they're obnoxious people who like to make a nuisance of themselves for attention.
As for beating the shit out of them, they only really annoy me if I'm outside my car, such as when they pull into a gas station or parking lot that I'm at. When I'm inside my car, the noise is a little annoying but generally short-lived and not that high in volume; outside, it's deafening.
No, what GM needs to do is license their technology from the Volt to other automakers. The biggest problem with the Volt is that it's made by GM, the same company that made defective ignition switches for years and intentionally hid this and murdered people so they wouldn't have to pay for a recall. They're also known for making cars that don't last long and have crappy interiors that fall apart in a few years, and very ugly exteriors too, not to mention very poor driving dynamics.
If I could get that technology in a car made by Honda or Mazda, I'd buy one.
Solar-powered cars are physically impossible. There isn't enough photonic energy, even in Arizona, striking the surface of a car to power it. Unless you mean battery-powered cars recharged using solar power, which is completely doable, and already done today (ask anyone who has a Tesla and a bunch of solar panels on their roof).
Solar power is completely viable almost anywhere, not just in equatorial regions and deserts. Germany makes a huge amount of power with it, and their climate is not sunny at all (look at their latitude on a globe). You do need more panel surface area in such places to make up for reduced sunlight though, but it's not that bad.
For windmills, you can use vertical axis windmills to avoid slaughtering birds.
For nuclear ships, there was a nuclear-powered cargo ship made back in the 70s I think. It wasn't used very long; it was simply too expensive to operate. It wound up in a museum in Charleston SC, though I think it's been moved from there now. Nuclear power works great for ships if you're the US Navy, but it's costly and requires extremely well-trained personnel. It's too bad someone like GE hasn't figured out how to make it much simpler to operate and thus cheap enough to build into cargo ships, perhaps as easily-replaced modules, to eliminate fossil fueling. The problem here is that fossil fuels for cargo ships are just too cheap, and there's no emissions laws at sea.
The best next thing to tackle is reducing air travel and freight. Air travel should be one of those novelty things that the lucky few can justify, same with having something air freighted, sure its nice to get stuff 2 days, but reality is waiting a week or two isnt a problem. Unless I realllllllly need something fast I choose the slower cheaper shipping, and so what that it took 2 weeks to get something shipped from Florida to Seattle for a home project that can wait.
This is basically wrong, as Amazon has proven.
Of course, if you're buying for a specialty vendor that only has one shipping location that's across the country from you, it's going to take a few days to be shipped over by truck or train.
However, when you buy from a very large retailer like Amazon, they have multiple warehouses. Amazon has one in nearly every state now, last I heard. So when you order from them, depending on what you get, you may very well get it from a warehouse that's not very far from you, so you don't need air freight to get your item quickly. And those warehouses can, of course, be stocked by trucks or trains that take a week to get stuff around.
We really could be using more trains in the US for shipping stuff; it's a lot more efficient than truck, and it's compatible with trucks too, thanks to containerization (meaning you can ship a container from a rail terminal the last few dozen miles to its final destination, instead of driving it across the country with a truck). We've done a really bad job there, considering we used to have a lot more rail shipping.
As for travel, what we need to do is build SkyTran for shorter-distance travel to replace most cars, at least in the suburbs, and for inter-city transport. With pods that can travel at 100-150mph on suspended maglev rails, you'd be able to get around to cities within your region pretty quickly, much faster than by ground car, and probably faster than plane too since there's no TSA. For longer-distance travel, Hyperloop sounds interesting though it hasn't been proven (one problem with it seems to me that the passenger cabin doesn't hold nearly enough people to exploit economies of scale, but if it works out to have lots of pods, like SkyTran, then this might not be a problem). HSR seems to not be that great an idea; the speeds aren't much higher than SkyTran, it costs an absolute fortune to build (as it sits on the ground and has to be site-built rather than factory-built), it isn't suspended like SkyTran, and it isn't anywhere near as fast as Hyperloop.
I remember the antitrust trial of the 90s well. Yes, the judge said they should be broken up. The Bush took office and the whole matter was dropped. Nothing happened to them. Nothing's ever happened to them in the US.
The only place they've had any trouble is over in Europe. That means they can do whatever they want to American customers, they just have to watch themselves in the EU market. It's not at all unusual for companies to have different products for different markets and treat customers in different markets differently.
Say what? For one thing, Microsoft has lost some of the biggest lawsuits and been subject to some of the most severe penalties in the modern corporate tech sector.
Citation needed. This sounds like something out of an alternative universe.
but not everyone is as knowledgeable as you are about their history.
Anyone who works in IT should be roughly as knowledgeable.
it would be refreshing to see more businesses see MS for what they are and do their damnedest to get away from them, but a majority of small businesses either don't care enough, or don't have the resources to make that decision.
But it's not just resource-strapped small businesses, it's medium-size and big businesses too, and governments of all sizes as well. They're all on the MS bandwagon, and showing no sign of changing (except for a few rare cases in Europe, with things like the city of Munich). These organizations have the IT personnel with expertise and knowledge of MS's long-term behavior, and they have the resources to make changes, but they don't, they just stick with Windows and McAfee ("the worst software on the planet" -- John McAfee). And it makes sense why for most of them: they're only focused on the short-term, and short-term it's cheaper to stick with Windows, so they're getting burned in the ass now, and it serves them right. Sure, I might feel some empathy for some little 2-person small business that's just using the tools that are available for their industry, but I don't feel any sympathy for any big company that's having problems with Windows. They should have known better.
But if enough customers and businesses that were impacted made formal complaints to a government body like the FTC, they would have the power to go after MS and hit them in the bank.
After seeing what happened in the infamous anti-trust trial, I seriously doubt it. Maybe in other countries though, but then MS will just do things on a region-specific basis, acting nicer towards EU customers and screwing the American ones.
You're not going to get that competition you talk about by threatening to sue a monopolist and simultaneously refusing to actually try out any other vendors. You can't force a company to meet your standards unless you can get a court verdict against them, and that's already been tried with Microsoft and it failed.
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Oh please, what a pile of crap.
I have an HP printer, and it's excellent. It's a LaserJet 2300d, made in 2003. It's only 13 years old.
Giving birth is fortunately excluded due to gender...phew!
For now. You never know what medical science will come up with next. Maybe in 25 years it'll be normal for men to be getting pregnant (probably not naturally of course) and giving birth. Their wives will probably demand it for the 2nd baby, since she had to go through all the pain and misery for the first one, so it's only fair that he do it for the second. And since natural conception will probably become obsolete by then anyway, in favor of genetically-engineered "designer" babies, this will fit nicely with male pregnancy.
And if you're thinking "luckily I'll be too old by then to worry about this", medical science is already making big strides in figuring out the aging process, so by that time they'll probably have figured out how to make us all permanently look like we're 30 and not age any more, so unless you decide to stay single for the rest of your life (which will last until you're unlucky enough to get killed in an accident, perhaps a malfunctioning roller coaster), you too will feel pressured to get pregnant and give birth.
I hate to tell you this, but there's a big region to the west of India, called "the Middle East". It includes countries like Israel, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and most of Turkey. It has a pretty large population too, and as it is in ASIA, the inhabitants are ASIAN.
However, no one actually calls Middle Easterners "Asians". Especially not in the context of minority groups in American employment statistics. Middle Easterners are their own group, and so are Indians. "Asia", in this context, means "Far East Asia".
I got a magic way for ms to make fifty bucks per user: sell a decent windows for a change.
Why should they bother? They already get $100 (or so I read somewhere) per user by having a shitty Windows pre-loaded on every computer sold. People aren't going to pay more for a non-shitty Windows (assuming such a thing is possible, which I doubt). And MS can make even more money per use by baking adware and spyware into Windows, without affecting the up-front price. It's an excellent sales strategy. And if people don't like shitty Windows, what are they going to do, buy a Mac? hahaha
That's a false equivalence fallacy. Most other automakers have not been proven to intentionally kill people by hiding defects. The only other big example I can think of is Ford with the Pinto in the 70s, and later on a smaller scale with the Crown Vic in the 90s. Basically you're advocating "guilty until proven innocent" type thinking.
There's a huge difference between not designing a car to be as absolutely safe as you can possibly make it (esp. when time and budget/cost constraints are limiting you), and knowing of a real and dangerous defect and choosing to hide it.
It's impossible to "lose" youtube-dl. It's open-source software, and it's not owned by a company. And it's one of many such scripts; it's not that hard to write a script to download YT music (though youtube-dl does a very nice job).
Besides, even if things got to the state where all commercial download sites were shut down, leaving only open-source programs like youtube-dl, that would probably end 99.9% of all downloading from YouTube, because most people can't be bothered to figure out stuff like that. youtube-dl after all is a Python program, so you can't even run it in Windows without installing Python, and it's a command-line tool which means that 99.999% of Windows users will have no earthly idea how to use it. (I find this strange too; when I was a teenager, it was perfectly normal for minimally-trained office secretaries to use PCs with MS-DOS and be perfectly capable of basic command-line work. Times have really changed.)
That's all fine and well, for dealing with companies that offer websites to facilitate downloading from YouTube.
But how do you deal with download scripts? You can't. If I can download a YT video using my browser (because it's impossible to listen to the song without downloading it, after all), then I can do the exact same thing with a script like "youtube-dl".
Of course, if they succeed in shutting down the download websites, that'll probably end most unauthorized copying, since most users appear to be too stupid and/or lazy to use a script like youtube-dl. Just look at how many people keep using Windows 10 after all.
When was the last time one of us was invaded?
Ukraine, 2015-present.
As far as I'm concerned, it IS rent-seeking, because almost any music worth listening to is now over 20 years old, and in my opinion that's the maximum length of time that copyright should hold, as set out by the Founders of the US. Any extensions after that are invalid. So any music recordings over 20 years old should be in the public domain, and I have every right to download them.
As for the labels, they used to discover the best artists and promote them, and do a great job with production. That all ended somewhere in the late 1990s or so. They don't discover anyone any more, they just manufacture teen pop crap, and their production quality is absolutely abysmal now, thanks to the "Loudness Wars" so the music has no dynamic range any more. Recordings from the 70s and 80s are far higher quality than anything made now, because recording engineers back then understood what "dynamic range" is and why it's important.
That's why they invented the docking station.
Impractical and unpopular:
The car is made of carbon fiber and aluminum, which means it basically has similar construction to something like the McLaren F1 ol Ferrari Enzo. People can't afford $1M cars. CF is extremely labor-intensive material to work with; there's a reason it isn't used on production cars in normal price ranges.
That huge central tunnel means you can't get close to your girlfriend. Who wants to drive like that? Also, it doesn't look like there's much width there for passengers. That might work ok for tall, thin Dutch people, but not fat Americans and Brits.
But seriously, this thing's a proof-of-concept only, and unless they come up with ways of making CF really really cheap to make, it won't fly. Also, I couldn't find anything there about a top speed or cruising speed. If it can't go 80+mph and at least cruise at 70, it won't work. No one's going to buy a car that they can't drive safely on the freeway.
As a first step you could roll back vehicle weights to what they were 40 years ago.
No, you can't. Vehicles 40 years ago were much smaller inside, much noisier, and far less comfortable. (I assume you're talking about European cars; 40 years ago was 1976, and the American cars of the time were gigantic, although there again they weren't that large inside, but had gigantic engine compartments, and were quite heavy.) People now expect larger, more comfortable vehicles which can seat people who are both taller and fatter than 40 years ago.
Depends on streamlining, and on what "useful speed" means (you said highway speed, not me -- the solar challenge vehicles go much faster than bicycles but not highway speeds),
I'm sorry, the general public does not want to travel at 25mph.
That's a good point, but it's going to be a while before we get to that point. A lot of people are going to insist on keeping their non-autonomous cars. But you still have to worry about things like the car sliding off the road due to icy roads, and crash resistance is important there too. Finally, you can't shave *that* much weight off the car even if you stopped worrying about crashworthiness altogether; you can only make a steel box for 4/5 people so light, and still make it ride nicely, not be noisy inside, have comfortable seats, be able to fit people over 6' tall, etc.
As for solar panels, again, no, it's completely impossible. At highway speeds, you need tens of horsepower to overcome air resistance. There's no way you'd get even 10kW out of solar panels on a car's roof and hood, you need a house-size roof for that much. And that's just steady-state cruising, with no acceleration.
US freight rail used to be a lot better. The problem was that back in the 50s, rail was highly regulated, but trucking was then deregulated, so it became cheaper to ship a lot of stuff by truck.
I'm guessing the reason freight rail isn't that great in Europe is because Europe isn't a single country (yet), so getting so many squabbling nations to agree on things and build a continental rail network hasn't been easy. Even worse, the continent was split in two by the Cold War until ~1990, and IIRC, Russia and its buddies used a different rail standard than the western nations which all used the UK standard. We never had either of these problems in the US. Being a single nation, composed of federal states with rather limited power, and occupying a whole continent, has been the biggest factor in our economic success. We tried letting the states have a lot more power back in the late 1700s under the Articles of Confederation and it didn't work out because no one could agree on anything and the central government didn't have the power to overrule them.
Vertical-axis mills should be better for another reason, however: they don't care which direction the wind is traveling. Regular (fan-looking) windmills have to be actively turned into the wind. Also, they should have lower maintenance requirements as they should be mechanically simpler (just a straight vertical shaft, no 90-degree turn at the top).
You can't, unless you're proposing to have vehicles that can't go faster than bicycle speed. The size and weight of modern cars stems directly from crash-safety requirements.
I live not too far from major highway. Noise and pollution from automobiles worry me. The electric revolution cannot come soon enough
Electric cars aren't going to help your noise problems. With modern cars, most of the noise comes from the tires at high speeds. Electric cars use the same tires as gas cars.
And why the hell do these riders intentionally make their bikes so loud?
Two reasons: 1) many of them actually believe (or claim to believe) all the noise makes them more visible to car drivers, even though it doesn't (it's mainly people behind them who hear all the noise; that isn't helpful for safety), and 2) they're obnoxious people who like to make a nuisance of themselves for attention.
As for beating the shit out of them, they only really annoy me if I'm outside my car, such as when they pull into a gas station or parking lot that I'm at. When I'm inside my car, the noise is a little annoying but generally short-lived and not that high in volume; outside, it's deafening.
No, what GM needs to do is license their technology from the Volt to other automakers. The biggest problem with the Volt is that it's made by GM, the same company that made defective ignition switches for years and intentionally hid this and murdered people so they wouldn't have to pay for a recall. They're also known for making cars that don't last long and have crappy interiors that fall apart in a few years, and very ugly exteriors too, not to mention very poor driving dynamics.
If I could get that technology in a car made by Honda or Mazda, I'd buy one.
Solar-powered cars are physically impossible. There isn't enough photonic energy, even in Arizona, striking the surface of a car to power it. Unless you mean battery-powered cars recharged using solar power, which is completely doable, and already done today (ask anyone who has a Tesla and a bunch of solar panels on their roof).
Solar power is completely viable almost anywhere, not just in equatorial regions and deserts. Germany makes a huge amount of power with it, and their climate is not sunny at all (look at their latitude on a globe). You do need more panel surface area in such places to make up for reduced sunlight though, but it's not that bad.
For windmills, you can use vertical axis windmills to avoid slaughtering birds.
For nuclear ships, there was a nuclear-powered cargo ship made back in the 70s I think. It wasn't used very long; it was simply too expensive to operate. It wound up in a museum in Charleston SC, though I think it's been moved from there now. Nuclear power works great for ships if you're the US Navy, but it's costly and requires extremely well-trained personnel. It's too bad someone like GE hasn't figured out how to make it much simpler to operate and thus cheap enough to build into cargo ships, perhaps as easily-replaced modules, to eliminate fossil fueling. The problem here is that fossil fuels for cargo ships are just too cheap, and there's no emissions laws at sea.
The best next thing to tackle is reducing air travel and freight. Air travel should be one of those novelty things that the lucky few can justify, same with having something air freighted, sure its nice to get stuff 2 days, but reality is waiting a week or two isnt a problem. Unless I realllllllly need something fast I choose the slower cheaper shipping, and so what that it took 2 weeks to get something shipped from Florida to Seattle for a home project that can wait.
This is basically wrong, as Amazon has proven.
Of course, if you're buying for a specialty vendor that only has one shipping location that's across the country from you, it's going to take a few days to be shipped over by truck or train.
However, when you buy from a very large retailer like Amazon, they have multiple warehouses. Amazon has one in nearly every state now, last I heard. So when you order from them, depending on what you get, you may very well get it from a warehouse that's not very far from you, so you don't need air freight to get your item quickly. And those warehouses can, of course, be stocked by trucks or trains that take a week to get stuff around.
We really could be using more trains in the US for shipping stuff; it's a lot more efficient than truck, and it's compatible with trucks too, thanks to containerization (meaning you can ship a container from a rail terminal the last few dozen miles to its final destination, instead of driving it across the country with a truck). We've done a really bad job there, considering we used to have a lot more rail shipping.
As for travel, what we need to do is build SkyTran for shorter-distance travel to replace most cars, at least in the suburbs, and for inter-city transport. With pods that can travel at 100-150mph on suspended maglev rails, you'd be able to get around to cities within your region pretty quickly, much faster than by ground car, and probably faster than plane too since there's no TSA. For longer-distance travel, Hyperloop sounds interesting though it hasn't been proven (one problem with it seems to me that the passenger cabin doesn't hold nearly enough people to exploit economies of scale, but if it works out to have lots of pods, like SkyTran, then this might not be a problem). HSR seems to not be that great an idea; the speeds aren't much higher than SkyTran, it costs an absolute fortune to build (as it sits on the ground and has to be site-built rather than factory-built), it isn't suspended like SkyTran, and it isn't anywhere near as fast as Hyperloop.
I remember the antitrust trial of the 90s well. Yes, the judge said they should be broken up. The Bush took office and the whole matter was dropped. Nothing happened to them. Nothing's ever happened to them in the US.
The only place they've had any trouble is over in Europe. That means they can do whatever they want to American customers, they just have to watch themselves in the EU market. It's not at all unusual for companies to have different products for different markets and treat customers in different markets differently.
Say what? For one thing, Microsoft has lost some of the biggest lawsuits and been subject to some of the most severe penalties in the modern corporate tech sector.
Citation needed. This sounds like something out of an alternative universe.
Well if Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy asks you out on a date, do you accept?
but not everyone is as knowledgeable as you are about their history.
Anyone who works in IT should be roughly as knowledgeable.
it would be refreshing to see more businesses see MS for what they are and do their damnedest to get away from them, but a majority of small businesses either don't care enough, or don't have the resources to make that decision.
But it's not just resource-strapped small businesses, it's medium-size and big businesses too, and governments of all sizes as well. They're all on the MS bandwagon, and showing no sign of changing (except for a few rare cases in Europe, with things like the city of Munich). These organizations have the IT personnel with expertise and knowledge of MS's long-term behavior, and they have the resources to make changes, but they don't, they just stick with Windows and McAfee ("the worst software on the planet" -- John McAfee). And it makes sense why for most of them: they're only focused on the short-term, and short-term it's cheaper to stick with Windows, so they're getting burned in the ass now, and it serves them right. Sure, I might feel some empathy for some little 2-person small business that's just using the tools that are available for their industry, but I don't feel any sympathy for any big company that's having problems with Windows. They should have known better.
But if enough customers and businesses that were impacted made formal complaints to a government body like the FTC, they would have the power to go after MS and hit them in the bank.
After seeing what happened in the infamous anti-trust trial, I seriously doubt it. Maybe in other countries though, but then MS will just do things on a region-specific basis, acting nicer towards EU customers and screwing the American ones.
You're not going to get that competition you talk about by threatening to sue a monopolist and simultaneously refusing to actually try out any other vendors. You can't force a company to meet your standards unless you can get a court verdict against them, and that's already been tried with Microsoft and it failed.