Before Online Privacy was even a concept, Radio Shack happily demanded to know my phone number, home address, blood type, maternal grandmother's maiden name, the dog's last vet checkup results, an affidavit from my first girlfriend as to how often she caught me staring at her chest...
...Okay, maybe not all of that, but damn - I go to buy some small amount of items (say, a couple 5% tolerance 300k resistors and a roll of solder) and all the sudden it was like playing 20 Questions just to pay for the stuff. I haven't been back in well over a decade or so, but I do remember that even then, it was way the hell more comfortable to just buy stuff from Mouser and wait for shipping.
The sad part? One of the absolute best presents I ever had as a little kid was that 120-in-one electronics lab kit they used to sell (even the then-brand-new Atari VCS I got for Christmas came in 2nd place... but mostly because I had to share that with the younger siblings).
if you punished them for 30 billion dollars then you would have the 30 billion dollars for the cleanup and if it was too much the remaining tankers and oil refineries sold to highest bidder so I don't really see the downside there..
...which would last only as long as it takes for prices at the gas pump to skyrocket, at which point the public would take up pitchforks and torches and demand that the company's assets be put back to work again immediately.
There really aren't that many oil companies out there, and taking one out would put a pretty big dent in the global logistics. Petroleum, like Spice, must flow.
Then again, no one on the board knew of the captain's little toke habit, and I doubt that they knew anything about the efficacy of their cleanup plan beforehand, at least outside of having some ostensibly smart consultants say "oh, this will work perfectly!"
Plausible deniability works in both directions too...
What if they just sell off their assets and move on with life?
Who would buy them if there is a standing order to clean up a mess before they can turn a full profit again?
You assume they'd sell the whole thing in one go. Most folks who run a corporation are smart enough to start spinning off new companies, each taking a substantial chunk of the assets until all you have left of the old one is the name, an office somewhere, and maybe a desk and chair in it. If you're lucky there may be a working telephone on the desk.
The problem lies in the definition of "just" - the term is too subjective.
Also, let's think more than two steps ahead here: sure, you could seize the assets of every board member - that would get you approximately what, a few hundred million? Maybe a couple of billion at first blush? Well, probably not: consider that most of their easily-seizable assets are tied up in the company's stock, and that such a simple announcement of seizure would cause that stock value to evaporate almost overnight. Hell, I doubt that you'd get even 1/10th of what the company was fined. Further consider that most folks at that level are smart enough to set up shell companies, trusts, and other instruments that would effectively shield the majority of their money from even the most zealous judge.
I'm certain that seizure of company board members' personal assets would make folks feel better, but these guys aren't stupid; therefore, your best (and most just) bet is to milk the company hard enough to get the point across (and to pay for cleanup), but not so hard as to gut the thing entirely. Another option is to convert the existing board members' stock into non-voting shares, have the stockholders elect a new board, and *then* go after the individual members in civil court for further seizures and sale of their stock holdings.
Of course they voted it down, their energy policy is good marketing for their target audience. The bottom line is still the reason for the policy.
Actually, as someone who tends towards the conservative side of things, I'm 100% happy to see that Cook said what he did. ROI is not the end-all, be-all of running a company, and worshipping it to the exclusion of all other considerations is a bad thing for any company to do. I also like the sustainability movement they're taking... it's not a "surrender" to "government intrusion" as the NCPPR is claiming. The government has no hand in how a company decides to get its electricity, and a sustainable solution does make good long-term sense.
Stereotypes aside, he "target audience" is not as homogeneous as you think. I strongly suspect that my ideological leanings clash very hard against those held by the "target audience" you're thinking of, but I mostly prefer Apple's products because they're quite solid, and in my experience last far longer than anything I've ever bought from its competitors. There are exceptions of course (I prefer having an Android phone so I can tinker with it), but overall the "target audience" doesn't buy an iPhone or MacBook Pro because the company is somehow approved by The Right People(tm). I posit that they buy the products either because of the reputation of solid products with excellent customer service, or they buy 'em because of some fashionable cachet.
Consider a parallel: Linux' old-school maintainers included everything from flaming ideologues for the 'progressive' side (Alan Cox IIRC was among this number), and flaming ideologues for the 'conservative' side (Eric Raymond stands out here, very strongly.) Yet everyone agreed on a few politically-neutral philosophies centered around Open Source, and a strong disdain for the slipshod-but-monopolistic coding practices of a certain dominant competitor.
Long story short, Apple made their business decisions not out of some stupid political ploy, but have laid out strong and logically sound philosophical reasons for doing what they do. Folks may not agree with them, but at least there they are, and they're not hidden behind some mealy-mouthed corporate-PR-speak.
The crazy part is... a kid with three parents may well have a hard time fitting into a legal system that assumes only two. For instance, how would the divorce issues work out (custody, support, etc)?
Also, a few others: at what point does the result stop being a lab experiment and start being a human being with the same rights as everyone else - for instance, is the kid 'patented' and therefore owned by a corporation or other entity?
This is not 2004. IE 11 is fine, as a browser, with the main problem being that adblock isn't free.
1) well that sucks for an ad-blocking solution - ABP and DoNotTrackMe are, well completely cost-free for the browsers that I use the most (FF, Chrome, and occasionally Safari).
2) Chrome is a consistent user experience on my MacBook Pro (both in OSX 10.9 and on the Linux VM sitting on it), my Windows 7 desktop at work, my Android phone and tablet... no matter what device I use in my possession. I can also sync bookmarks between the MBP and phone, allowing for more than just a little portability. IE can't give me that without being forced to drink the koolaid with a mono-platform solution, and I doubt that the bookmarks automatically sync. (besides, IE doesn't exist for either OSX 10.9 or Android)
Err, why wait for the IDE to warm up, the compiler to finish, and etc? Just telnet to port 80 or 443 on the destination server, and send your GET and POST commands manually.
Okay, just kidding... but my question is this: How do you see the FSF remaining relevant 10 years hence - in other words, what is the FSF doing to keep from being obviated by the evolution of technology at large?
7) Company culture. If you can't stand working at CompanyX, or it looks like CompanyX will make your life miserable, then it won't be worth any of the other potentials.
If you try to push through it anyway, thinking "oh, I'll only be here a year or two then I can move on", you still may wind up damaging your career/health/sanity/marriage/etc far more than you would gain by trying to gut through a couple of years in a toxic (to you) corporate culture. Not fitting in means you could get fired, demoted, passed-over by some new hire that would otherwise ostensibly report to you (and you wind up reporting to him/her), etc. Or, you could literally find that you just woke up in a hospital cardiac unit, still thinking that a couple of minutes ago you were in some heated argument during a scrum meeting. Or, you could end up internalizing all that resentment and anger, take it home with you, and do it often enough to find divorce papers waiting for you on the kitchen table.
Mind you, 15 years ago I wouldn't have thought a whit about corporate culture, but honestly, looking back I find that it makes a HUGE difference as to how hard I want to work, how I felt when I got home at night, and overall satisfaction.
You're stuck with spending at least 1/3 of your prime adult years at work - you may as well actually like being there. Shit - I'd rather drop a level or two and be a happy mid-level sysadmin than to jump up a level and become some miserable-as-fuck Director or CIO.
All is good and all that, except for the energy input required to produce the solar cells.
Assuming we produce the solar cells here, at the bottom of the gravity well, and transport them to the moon - even if we do not include the energy required to transport that much solar cells to the moon - the energy requirement in the production of the solar cells itself would further deplete the fosiil fuels that are left on Planet Earth.
GGP talked about the possibility of coating the entire surface of the moon
Most of the energy would be spent towards keeping the furnaces lit for the crystallization process - the rest is fairly straightforward manufacturing, and each cell by itself weighs about as much as two sheets of paper cut to the equivalent size (and is only about as thick as one sheet of paper). Brittle as hell, though...
Overall, you could launch enough (and facilities) to the Moon to get things started, then manufacture the hell out of them up there. The Moon has more than enough silicon and other needed materials to make high-grade polysilicon, and the lower gravity would make the CZ and wafering processes a *lot* more consistent.
Consider that a typical top-end solar panel can get 255 Wp (Wp = Watts at Peak) for a panel. The referenced panel holds 60 156x156mm monocrystalline polysilicon cells, totaling about 1.4602m^2 , or roughly 174.6Wp/m^2
1,100,000 km^2 (from above) comes to 192 terawatts of electricity under ideal lab conditions.
Now, that's before we cut it in half (because half the moon will be in darkness), lop off 20% for losses and partially-shady cells (due to angle, not obstacles), and we get ~77.8 terawatts. Oh, and there's one more trick: heat. Heat causes inefficiencies in a solar cell, though a design with radiators on the shady side of the panel can alleviate that fairly well (they do this in space-bound solar panels all the time).
But yeah, overall under *ideal* industrial conditions, we can probably expect a WAG of about 50-60 terawatts (assuming busted cells, maintenance periods, imperfect QA during manufacture, whatever.)
Personally, I'm kind of curious as to where a functioning C-123 could still be found these days... I'm former Air Force, worked on active flightlines in numerous places globally, and the only C-123s I've seen were either in museums or were operated by the South Koreans (and the latter was way over 20 years ago).
Not sure where the big alarm is, now that I think about it. I mean, unless some curator leaves one of his exhibits open for public walkthrough, and some kid literally licks the cargo compartment walls...
Judging by the price hikes for enterprise lixensing, it seems.Redmond plans on making up the difference by picking their busines customers' pockets.
True, but how much longer will that last? Sure, enterprises are stuck in some aspects (e.g. Oracle costs way more than SQL Server), but not in others, especially as those price hikes have customers exploring alternatives (e.g. PostgreSQL), and trimming way the hell back on the rest of the EA, or even delaying renewal altogether in some cases.
After all, I'm seeing an EA renewal coming up, and here's what I'm thinking: * I don't have to upgrade existing SQL 2k8 boxes if they still run just fine, and can likely skip the next 3-year stint on them, excepting the one that backs the Sharepoint site, and even then only for support reasons. * I got Exchange 2010 already; I can cut way the hell back by eliminating that from the next round, waiting to see what version 2017 has before bothering to upgrade it. * Server 2012? No need or desire for it, and testing shows that it breaks a large chunk of our shit anyway. That bumps at least 600 servers off the licensing-go-round. * So what's left, desktops? Not seeing any upgrade from Windows 7, so at most I can cut that back to whatever growth estimates I have. * MSDN licenses... yeah, we can cut that way back to just the folks who actually write code for Windows, and cut back on accounts for the SEs and other ancillary folks, maybe restricting that to just the senior guys.
Mind you, there's a lot more to making such a decision than this, but if I'm forced to make hard choices in budgeting? That budget can damned sure be trimmed.
Too many more price hikes and I'll take the pain of moving to Samba. I've already decided Exchange 2010 is the last Exchange server I will put in my organisation, and now that I've become a partner I finally have the clout to make it stick.
I can't see moving from Windows workstations but I can gut the backend.
They do require that you have an existing Intel Mac to put it in and a free App Store account to download it with, but I paid $0.00 to upgrade my MBP with it.
Hell, I can even download the source code for almost all of it in one spot.
The difference is just 35$. That is going to kill the middle tier devices? Being a windows box is going to be a bigger disadvantage than 35$ for that 500$ device.
Most hardware OEMs have margins thin enough that 7% ($35) will easily make a difference between a profitable device and a money-loser on a $500 product. A sub-$300 device is even worse, with that $35 making up at least 11.5% of the total at $300, and growing as the overall price goes down.
Seriously - the only lap/desktop/tablet OEM that has decent margins is Apple, and they obviously don't ship Windows with their products.
On the one hand we have patent trolls, and on the other we have a large fleet of drones armed with hellfire missiles. Seems like somewhere in the middle should be a solution!
I'm kind of hoping that a certain courthouse in East Texas is located in that middle ground... and that the missles are nuclear-tipped.
You are stupid, and you are just looking fore excuses. The fact that nearly every thing people complain about him is false tells me he must be doing something right.
1) How the frig did this ever get modded "Insightful"?
2) define "nearly every thing".
-- His administration botched the healthcare.gov rollout - big-time.
-- The ACA itself is unwieldy and unworkable, as attested to by his own delays of the enforced mandate on businesses, the demands by its political supporters for exemptions from it, and the demonstrable *increase* in medical/insurance costs for the vast majority of people in the middle class who are forced to use it.
-- He completely mis-handled the whole Benghazi attacks - first withholding nearby military help, then blaming a YouTube video(!?) as the cause after quite a few unnecessary deaths.
-- Loudly threatening to attack Syria when the rest of the US was screaming at him to shut the hell up, costing the nation a lot of prestige as Vladimir Putin had to come in and put a stop to the threats.
-- His strident partisan rhetoric and unwillingness to even think of working with the opposition is bald-faced and public. The opposition aren't angels either, but damn - at least Clinton, Bush Sr, Reagan, Carter... all of them worked with Congress to get things done. Why can't Obama? It's not as if Congress was some sort of angelic, tame creature in previous administrations...
-- We have yet to see a proposed annual budget from this administration, period.
-- Preaching about income equality while his wife wears a dress that costs more than the average annual wage at poverty level? Really? I know this isn't a policy complaint, but damn that's just crass.
There's many more, but seriously, put the koolaid down. The man isn't a demon, but he certainly isn't a messiah.
Slashdot Mirror
It ain't just that...
Before Online Privacy was even a concept, Radio Shack happily demanded to know my phone number, home address, blood type, maternal grandmother's maiden name, the dog's last vet checkup results, an affidavit from my first girlfriend as to how often she caught me staring at her chest...
The sad part? One of the absolute best presents I ever had as a little kid was that 120-in-one electronics lab kit they used to sell (even the then-brand-new Atari VCS I got for Christmas came in 2nd place... but mostly because I had to share that with the younger siblings).
if you punished them for 30 billion dollars then you would have the 30 billion dollars for the cleanup and if it was too much the remaining tankers and oil refineries sold to highest bidder so I don't really see the downside there..
...which would last only as long as it takes for prices at the gas pump to skyrocket, at which point the public would take up pitchforks and torches and demand that the company's assets be put back to work again immediately.
There really aren't that many oil companies out there, and taking one out would put a pretty big dent in the global logistics. Petroleum, like Spice, must flow.
Then again, no one on the board knew of the captain's little toke habit, and I doubt that they knew anything about the efficacy of their cleanup plan beforehand, at least outside of having some ostensibly smart consultants say "oh, this will work perfectly!"
Plausible deniability works in both directions too...
What if they just sell off their assets and move on with life?
Who would buy them if there is a standing order to clean up a mess before they can turn a full profit again?
You assume they'd sell the whole thing in one go. Most folks who run a corporation are smart enough to start spinning off new companies, each taking a substantial chunk of the assets until all you have left of the old one is the name, an office somewhere, and maybe a desk and chair in it. If you're lucky there may be a working telephone on the desk.
The problem lies in the definition of "just" - the term is too subjective.
Also, let's think more than two steps ahead here: sure, you could seize the assets of every board member - that would get you approximately what, a few hundred million? Maybe a couple of billion at first blush? Well, probably not: consider that most of their easily-seizable assets are tied up in the company's stock, and that such a simple announcement of seizure would cause that stock value to evaporate almost overnight. Hell, I doubt that you'd get even 1/10th of what the company was fined. Further consider that most folks at that level are smart enough to set up shell companies, trusts, and other instruments that would effectively shield the majority of their money from even the most zealous judge.
I'm certain that seizure of company board members' personal assets would make folks feel better, but these guys aren't stupid; therefore, your best (and most just) bet is to milk the company hard enough to get the point across (and to pay for cleanup), but not so hard as to gut the thing entirely. Another option is to convert the existing board members' stock into non-voting shares, have the stockholders elect a new board, and *then* go after the individual members in civil court for further seizures and sale of their stock holdings.
I agree, with one caveat: As long as the company doesn't go broke pushing for it (or for any other ideological goal).
Mind you, Apple is certainly in no danger of that, so putting some of their dosh towards renewables is an excellent move for them, so yeah.
Of course they voted it down, their energy policy is good marketing for their target audience. The bottom line is still the reason for the policy.
Actually, as someone who tends towards the conservative side of things, I'm 100% happy to see that Cook said what he did. ROI is not the end-all, be-all of running a company, and worshipping it to the exclusion of all other considerations is a bad thing for any company to do. I also like the sustainability movement they're taking... it's not a "surrender" to "government intrusion" as the NCPPR is claiming. The government has no hand in how a company decides to get its electricity, and a sustainable solution does make good long-term sense.
Stereotypes aside, he "target audience" is not as homogeneous as you think. I strongly suspect that my ideological leanings clash very hard against those held by the "target audience" you're thinking of, but I mostly prefer Apple's products because they're quite solid, and in my experience last far longer than anything I've ever bought from its competitors. There are exceptions of course (I prefer having an Android phone so I can tinker with it), but overall the "target audience" doesn't buy an iPhone or MacBook Pro because the company is somehow approved by The Right People(tm). I posit that they buy the products either because of the reputation of solid products with excellent customer service, or they buy 'em because of some fashionable cachet.
Consider a parallel: Linux' old-school maintainers included everything from flaming ideologues for the 'progressive' side (Alan Cox IIRC was among this number), and flaming ideologues for the 'conservative' side (Eric Raymond stands out here, very strongly.) Yet everyone agreed on a few politically-neutral philosophies centered around Open Source, and a strong disdain for the slipshod-but-monopolistic coding practices of a certain dominant competitor.
Long story short, Apple made their business decisions not out of some stupid political ploy, but have laid out strong and logically sound philosophical reasons for doing what they do. Folks may not agree with them, but at least there they are, and they're not hidden behind some mealy-mouthed corporate-PR-speak.
The crazy part is... a kid with three parents may well have a hard time fitting into a legal system that assumes only two. For instance, how would the divorce issues work out (custody, support, etc)?
Also, a few others: at what point does the result stop being a lab experiment and start being a human being with the same rights as everyone else - for instance, is the kid 'patented' and therefore owned by a corporation or other entity?
Lots of sticky issues on that one...
This is not 2004. IE 11 is fine, as a browser, with the main problem being that adblock isn't free.
1) well that sucks for an ad-blocking solution - ABP and DoNotTrackMe are, well completely cost-free for the browsers that I use the most (FF, Chrome, and occasionally Safari).
2) Chrome is a consistent user experience on my MacBook Pro (both in OSX 10.9 and on the Linux VM sitting on it), my Windows 7 desktop at work, my Android phone and tablet... no matter what device I use in my possession. I can also sync bookmarks between the MBP and phone, allowing for more than just a little portability. IE can't give me that without being forced to drink the koolaid with a mono-platform solution, and I doubt that the bookmarks automatically sync. (besides, IE doesn't exist for either OSX 10.9 or Android)
Err, why wait for the IDE to warm up, the compiler to finish, and etc? Just telnet to port 80 or 443 on the destination server, and send your GET and POST commands manually.
So has anyone check to see what the takedown message says in German?
Basically what I'm getting at is this: We know what it says in English, but maybe the translation came out to be something not-so-nice.
Maybe-- I'm immune to that horrible apple SSL bug because I didn't update to maverick
Pfft, children, children... I'm immune because I use wget and curl to do all of my browsing!
Why is there a banking login on a Japanese dating site? Perhaps we should start by addressing that.
Hell, why is anyone still using IE to browse anything on the public Internet (let alone anything to do with banking)? May want to address that first.
Okay, just kidding... but my question is this: How do you see the FSF remaining relevant 10 years hence - in other words, what is the FSF doing to keep from being obviated by the evolution of technology at large?
7) Company culture. If you can't stand working at CompanyX, or it looks like CompanyX will make your life miserable, then it won't be worth any of the other potentials.
If you try to push through it anyway, thinking "oh, I'll only be here a year or two then I can move on", you still may wind up damaging your career/health/sanity/marriage/etc far more than you would gain by trying to gut through a couple of years in a toxic (to you) corporate culture. Not fitting in means you could get fired, demoted, passed-over by some new hire that would otherwise ostensibly report to you (and you wind up reporting to him/her), etc. Or, you could literally find that you just woke up in a hospital cardiac unit, still thinking that a couple of minutes ago you were in some heated argument during a scrum meeting. Or, you could end up internalizing all that resentment and anger, take it home with you, and do it often enough to find divorce papers waiting for you on the kitchen table.
Mind you, 15 years ago I wouldn't have thought a whit about corporate culture, but honestly, looking back I find that it makes a HUGE difference as to how hard I want to work, how I felt when I got home at night, and overall satisfaction.
You're stuck with spending at least 1/3 of your prime adult years at work - you may as well actually like being there. Shit - I'd rather drop a level or two and be a happy mid-level sysadmin than to jump up a level and become some miserable-as-fuck Director or CIO.
All is good and all that, except for the energy input required to produce the solar cells.
Assuming we produce the solar cells here, at the bottom of the gravity well, and transport them to the moon - even if we do not include the energy required to transport that much solar cells to the moon - the energy requirement in the production of the solar cells itself would further deplete the fosiil fuels that are left on Planet Earth.
GGP talked about the possibility of coating the entire surface of the moon
Most of the energy would be spent towards keeping the furnaces lit for the crystallization process - the rest is fairly straightforward manufacturing, and each cell by itself weighs about as much as two sheets of paper cut to the equivalent size (and is only about as thick as one sheet of paper). Brittle as hell, though...
Overall, you could launch enough (and facilities) to the Moon to get things started, then manufacture the hell out of them up there. The Moon has more than enough silicon and other needed materials to make high-grade polysilicon, and the lower gravity would make the CZ and wafering processes a *lot* more consistent.
PS: I totally forgot to figure down the outage during a lunar eclipse...
Consider that a typical top-end solar panel can get 255 Wp (Wp = Watts at Peak) for a panel. The referenced panel holds 60 156x156mm monocrystalline polysilicon cells, totaling about 1.4602m^2 , or roughly 174.6Wp/m^2
1,100,000 km^2 (from above) comes to 192 terawatts of electricity under ideal lab conditions.
Now, that's before we cut it in half (because half the moon will be in darkness), lop off 20% for losses and partially-shady cells (due to angle, not obstacles), and we get ~77.8 terawatts. Oh, and there's one more trick: heat. Heat causes inefficiencies in a solar cell, though a design with radiators on the shady side of the panel can alleviate that fairly well (they do this in space-bound solar panels all the time).
But yeah, overall under *ideal* industrial conditions, we can probably expect a WAG of about 50-60 terawatts (assuming busted cells, maintenance periods, imperfect QA during manufacture, whatever.)
Personally, I'm kind of curious as to where a functioning C-123 could still be found these days... I'm former Air Force, worked on active flightlines in numerous places globally, and the only C-123s I've seen were either in museums or were operated by the South Koreans (and the latter was way over 20 years ago).
Not sure where the big alarm is, now that I think about it. I mean, unless some curator leaves one of his exhibits open for public walkthrough, and some kid literally licks the cargo compartment walls...
As in Beer or Speech?
Judging by the price hikes for enterprise lixensing, it seems.Redmond plans on making up the difference by picking their busines customers' pockets.
True, but how much longer will that last? Sure, enterprises are stuck in some aspects (e.g. Oracle costs way more than SQL Server), but not in others, especially as those price hikes have customers exploring alternatives (e.g. PostgreSQL), and trimming way the hell back on the rest of the EA, or even delaying renewal altogether in some cases.
After all, I'm seeing an EA renewal coming up, and here's what I'm thinking:
* I don't have to upgrade existing SQL 2k8 boxes if they still run just fine, and can likely skip the next 3-year stint on them, excepting the one that backs the Sharepoint site, and even then only for support reasons.
* I got Exchange 2010 already; I can cut way the hell back by eliminating that from the next round, waiting to see what version 2017 has before bothering to upgrade it.
* Server 2012? No need or desire for it, and testing shows that it breaks a large chunk of our shit anyway. That bumps at least 600 servers off the licensing-go-round.
* So what's left, desktops? Not seeing any upgrade from Windows 7, so at most I can cut that back to whatever growth estimates I have.
* MSDN licenses... yeah, we can cut that way back to just the folks who actually write code for Windows, and cut back on accounts for the SEs and other ancillary folks, maybe restricting that to just the senior guys.
Mind you, there's a lot more to making such a decision than this, but if I'm forced to make hard choices in budgeting? That budget can damned sure be trimmed.
Too many more price hikes and I'll take the pain of moving to Samba. I've already decided Exchange 2010 is the last Exchange server I will put in my organisation, and now that I've become a partner I finally have the clout to make it stick.
I can't see moving from Windows workstations but I can gut the backend.
Exactly :)
Where can I download my free copy of OSX?
right here.
They do require that you have an existing Intel Mac to put it in and a free App Store account to download it with, but I paid $0.00 to upgrade my MBP with it.
Hell, I can even download the source code for almost all of it in one spot.
The difference is just 35$. That is going to kill the middle tier devices? Being a windows box is going to be a bigger disadvantage than 35$ for that 500$ device.
Most hardware OEMs have margins thin enough that 7% ($35) will easily make a difference between a profitable device and a money-loser on a $500 product.
A sub-$300 device is even worse, with that $35 making up at least 11.5% of the total at $300, and growing as the overall price goes down.
Seriously - the only lap/desktop/tablet OEM that has decent margins is Apple, and they obviously don't ship Windows with their products.
On the one hand we have patent trolls, and on the other we have a large fleet of drones armed with hellfire missiles. Seems like somewhere in the middle should be a solution!
I'm kind of hoping that a certain courthouse in East Texas is located in that middle ground... and that the missles are nuclear-tipped.
You are stupid, and you are just looking fore excuses.
The fact that nearly every thing people complain about him is false tells me he must be doing something right.
1) How the frig did this ever get modded "Insightful"?
2) define "nearly every thing".
There's many more, but seriously, put the koolaid down. The man isn't a demon, but he certainly isn't a messiah.