What about the JFK game where you are Oswald? That was big when it came out. .
Because it offered cash rewards?
On February 22, 2005, Stephane Krupa, a user living in France, named "Major_Koenig" (named after Erwin König, a famous sniper) won the competition prize of $10,712 with a score of 782 out of 1000. Second and third place went to the users "Flux" (779) and "ArrogantB" (777) respectivelyJFK: Reloaded
Video games are art. It is long settled. No one of consequence is disputing this. .
That I very much doubt.
The London stage was considered popular entertainment is Shakespeare's day.
If you wanted recognition as a writer you wrote and published poetry - or perhaps a book of essays, like Sir Francis Bacon.
It is a long way from the tintypes of 1860 to the landscape photography of Ansel Adams.
MoMa didn't begin collecting photographs until 1930, motion pictures until 1935. That is forty years of the American film - Porter's The Life of an American Fireman to Little Caesar and King Kong.
If it is compatible with the firefox 2 browser, then they have already spent the money on supporting a fringe OS. .
Let's get real here.
Firefox gained visibility and market share after being ported to Windows and not before.
I would not be in the least surprised if its Linux origins have been more or less forgotten - if the majority of Windows users were ever conciously aware of them at all.
There is something of the Taliban in the Geek: neither understanding or respect for other literary. cultural, or religious traditions - and a piss-poor sense of history.
Think of what we could have included: the music that influenced generations, films that invoke anger, sadness, joy, books that literally changed the way that the world thought -- and not one bit of it can be reproduced .
The non-profit Library of America publishes handsome archival editions of H.P. Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, A.J. Leibling, James Thurber, Robert Frost, Thornton Wilder...
The geek could learn to ask...not take.
The interesting thing is that most of the authors represented in the LOA are working writers from the extended copyright regimes of the mid nineteenth century and after.
It is a record of an elementally democratic and capitalist art.
these speeds only apply if you use them for services the telco wants you to use them on. .
The telco is selling residential service to a mass consumer market. The geek who sucks up bandwidth like free beer from the keg doesn't help their bottom line.
We have Fiber in utah that gives you 50 Mbps UP and down for $80/mo. .
The question is - where in Utah and who can afford it? If it is available only along the narrow high tech corridor of the Silicon Slopes that leaves a lot of people out of the picture.
Verizon seems to be putting FiOS into the suburbs surrounding major cities faster than into the major cities themselves. .
You need to remember as well that an eastern city can have an underground infrastructure that dates back to 1845 - or earlier. You never know what you are going to find when you start digging. It is always going to be a slower, more complex, and more dangerous job then trenching a cable in the suburbs.
Now that multitouch is available from M$, we hear that it's cool, that's quite a turnaround but only from the M$ dominated technical press. Sure, there was a lot of hype about a very late to the party M$ table with second rate multitouch .
Microsoft Surface doesn't need a touchscreen - it doesn't need to be touched - it only needs a rear (or front?) projection screen.
That can be scaled easily and cheaply to any size.
It means that the replacement screen may be nothing more than the tempered glass tabletop or acrylic panel you could order custom-cut from Home Depot.
Surface can read coded objects like game pieces. It can communicate with devices like digital cameras - set the camera on the table and the photos stream out in front of you.
Consider the (first) Half-Life.
10 minutes went by before you could even exit the monorail. You were drooling at the attention to detail and immersion. And that was before you saw the spider walker construction equipment moving around.
And it was another 20 after that before you shot your first shot. It was already one of the greatest games ever made before you did much more than look around and "go to work" that day.
.
You do understand that what you have just described is pure storytelling?
There's a huge difference between tangible property and intellectual property. .
Not as much as you would like to think.
The deed to your property - and the chain of title recorded at your county courthouse - is nothing more than a piece of paper, an entry in a ledger.
It has meaning only so far as the law and the courts give it meaning.
I learned this lesson as the executor of my grandmother's estate. The third mortgage held by a cemetary association whose elderly treasuer drifted off into lah-lah land.
The do-it-yourself lawyering that tried to reassemble the pieces after her mother-in-law split the title to her house and lot three ways in her will.
Three people ten and twenty years dead when I had to find a better solution.
I would argue that another reason hardware makers shy away from Linux is that a typical Linux system can remain functional and operating on a single computer far longer than a Windows system .
Is this a plus for Linux or simply another way of saying - or not saying - that the more interesting - and demanding - apps are being published for Windows?
The base price for Vista running on a single core AMD CPU with 2 GB RAM is $329 at Walmart.com.
The base price for 64 bit Vista Premium running on a quad core CPU with NVIDIA 9600 series graphics, 4 GB RAM and 1 TB of storage is $1000 at Walmart.com.
Is that six year old CentOS PC performing at the level of either of these systems - and are you being honest about the apps it can and cannot run?
Somewhat. I mean to imply that Linux doesn't benefit from the "look, software you don't have to pay for!" effect .
Part of the problem is that the Geek tends to scream out retail list for software that everyone knows is easily - and legitimately - available at very substantial discounts.
MS Office Ultimate 2007 will be available to any U.S. student with ID for $60 come September.
90% off retail list for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, Access, Outlook, Groove, OneNote, and InfoPath.
If your employer has a volume licensing agreement with Microsoft, then MS Office for home use may only cost you the price of the media plus S&H. Home Use Program.
In the late 1990s, I attended a future scenario-planning workshop with a bunch of newspaper folks. We all broke up into groups to brainstorm products. One of the other groups -- not MY group! -- came up with a great idea: We'll deliver fax newspapers, over the Internet. It was 1939, all over again. .
It was 1989 all over again as well:
In two small Illinois towns, a one-page fax newspaper called Fax Today has challenged the local daily with some success, prompting predictions that similar fax papers could spread like a virus across the country and pose a threat to newspapers.
What makes Fax Today different is that it is free to subscribers and supported by advertising. It was started in 1989 in Effingham, Ill., by Jack M. Schultz, an entrepreneur with no newspaper experience. He expanded the service to Bloomington in 1990. The enterprise is profitable, Mr. Schultz said, and he sees significant potential for growth.
The last two years have seen a flurry of experiments in delivering news by fax. For instance, The Chicago Tribune, The Knoxville News-Sentinel in Tennessee and The Minneapolis Star Tribune abandoned fax papers that charged a subscription fee for a one-page afternoon update of business news.
The Los Angeles Times provides a free summary of news via fax to government officials and diplomats in Moscow as a promotional vehicle.
The New York Times has three fax news products aimed at areas where the newspaper is not readily available: a six-page fax newspaper for hotels in Japan, which emphasizes Japanese news; a six-page international edition for Australia and other foreign countries, and an eight-page edition for cruise ships.Small Fax Newspaper Shakes Up Its Press Rivals [August 12, 1991]
The RCA Radio Fax receiver is fascinating and provocative.
In 1939 for small print runs you cut a stencil for a mimeograph machine - the tech from hell - or you bought a letterpress out of the back pages of Popular Science.
The dry paper home fax machine that can deliver legible 7 pt. text and halftoned photographs is pure science fiction.
You might not want be able to justify a $260 radio fax machine for your home - but it's not hard to see what it brings to the Chris-Craft cabin cruiser or the branch office.
30 miles at 30 MHz. 100 watts. Perhaps ten times that range at lower frequencies and higher power.
The thing ran off a clock. There were no external controls whatever.
That alone had to be an eye-opener for the shortwave hobbyist.
Newspapers were very much afraid that their markets would be eroded by the immediacy and emotional impact of the nesreel, radio and television. Edward R. Murrow broadcasting from London. William L. Shirer from Berlin. .
In March of 1939 The St. Louis Post Dispatch began experimental public broadcasts of a nine page facsimile newspaper to the home using technology developed by RCA.
"So far as the transmitting equipment is concerned, it is the standard scanner manufactured by RCA, the output of which is fed into a 100-watt transmitter operating on 31,600 kc. We selected the ultra-high frequency band because it offered the opportunity of broadcasting facsimile during the day time--in fact any time we desire.
We have not experienced nearly as much trouble with interference on the ultra-high frequency band as was expected. The characteristics of the recorders are such that far more interference can be tolerated than is the case in the reception of sound broadcasting an these frequencies."
Within the next month RCA expects to be able to supply receivers at a cost of about $260. Several will be placed in public places for demonstration. The range of Station W9XZY is from 20 to 30 miles.
"On the first page of this "radio newspaper," now being received in every home in the St. Louis service area of W9XZY equipped with a facsimile receiver, are the leading news articles of the day. Then following sports news, several pages of pictures, Fitzpatrick's editorial cartoon, a summary of radio programs and radio gossip, and a page of financial news and stock market quotations."
The antenna of the receiver set in the home picks up these waves. The receiver, a closed cabinet with no dials to be operated or adjustments to be made by the owner, contains continuously-feeding rolls of paper and carbon paper which pass over a revolving metal cylinder from which a small stylus projects.
Pressure, varying with the intensity of the radio waves, is exerted on a metal bar, parallel to the axis of the cylinder, beneath which the paper and carbon is fed. Thus the black and white of the original copy scanned by the "electric eye" is duplicated on the paper passing over the cylinder of the receiving set which is synchronized with that of the sending mechanism.
It is unnecessary for the reader to be on hand when a broadcast begin since a clock, set for the scheduled time, will automatically start the receiving set and stop it at conclusion of broadcasting. It requires 15 minutes to transmit one page.
So on one hand you have in the US bitching about the fact their internet sucks, and then you have them bitching when companies build the infrastructure to give them faster internet...? .
Is this an internal contradiction or two warring camps?
The geek may be bitching about access to fiber. His dad may have been the guy who pissed off his neighbors when he installed a 16 foot BUD in the eighties.
You can grow weary and wary of the way tech defines and transforms a landscape.
The high tension lines that bisects an old-growth forest.
It isn't success if you're primarily gaining usershare through hardware failure. .
It isn't hardware failure that drives the home and SOHO user to upgrade.
It is the chance to massively upgrade hardware and software at the OEM price. The HP Quad Core 64 Bit Vista Premium PC with 4 GB RAM and NVIDIA 9600 graphics and 1 TB of storage is $1000 at Walmart.com.
The Duo Core 32 Bit Vista Premium PC with 2 GB RAM starts at $329 at Walmart.com.
A.8% loss isn't horrible, but Macs grew 1.12% and Linux grew 33%
If Vista is growing(in gross numbers, as opposed to percentages), Linux and Mac are growing faster in relative terms according to your chart.
Take a look at the numbers again and you will see OSX hitting a wall - a 5% share for the MacIntel that hasn't changed significantly in months.
As for Linux, it seems to be settling back into a barely visible 0.02% growth each month, a pity, since it looked as if this might be the year when the mass market OEM Linux PC broke into the single digit
Relative growth simply isn't very impressive when you begin from so small a base.
In other words: "I never look at alternatives because I'm going to be running the same OS for the rest of eternity". .
How difficult would it be the young woman who entered office work as a typist in 1888 to adapt to the office of 2008?
The young man in accounting?
Local museums have ledgers, correspondence and promotional material - paper ephemerals - from local businesses active in the 1850s ---and it is all quite familiar.
You can turn the clock back another century to the fur-trading posts of the 1750s --- and still find nothing strange from a purely commercial point-of-view.
MS Office is what it is because it is shaped by the requirements and traditions of clerical work that go back hundreds of years.
That is why it is so very, very hard for projects like OpenOffice.org to come up with anything truly innovative - no matter how much money Big Daddy Sun pours into the bin.
This brilliant insight also explains why Vista has failed on the marketplace. .
Vista hasn't failed in the home and SOHO markets: Top Operating System Share Trend In these - global - webstats Vista is the only OS showing any significant growth at all.
See, a kid using Windows XP in high school will encounter Windows XP applications in ten or fifteen years.
He will most likely be using apps that will be recognizable descendants of those first published for the Mac OS in 1984 and Win 3.1 in 1992 and Win 95 in 1995.
Microsoft Office Word 2007, Microsoft Office Excel 2007, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007, Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, Microsoft Office Access 2007, Microsoft Office Publisher 2007, Office OneNote 2007, Office Groove 2007 and Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007
The apps might in the cloud.
But I'll take the odds that the office of 2019 or 2025 isn't going to look all that different from the office of 2008.
______
Net Applications isn't tracking licenses - it is tracking users:
160 million hits to its clients's websites each moth
Additional estimates about the website population:
76% participate in pay per click programs to drive traffic to their sites
# 43% are commerce sites
# 18% are corporate sites
# 10% are content sites
# 29% classify themselves as other (includes gov, org, search engine marketers etc..)About Our Market Share Statistics
I had a student once tell me she doesn't want to go to the US because, as you know, there are hundreds of nutcase students with guns who kill classmates at random.
Kidnapping is the Mexican version of the same thing. It happens, at most, extremely rarely. You are far more likely to get hit by a car, between 2002 and 2006, the Mexican government was able to...dismantle a lot of kidnapping rings .
There is nothing random about extortion --- the victim's family will be extraordinarily wealthy by Mexican standards --- a very small sub-set of the general population.
You would have to go very far back in U.S.history to find anything resembling an extortion "kidnapping ring." The response to the Lindbergh kidnapping in 1034 made this a very dangerous business to enter. The Lindbergh Kidnapping
They aren't patent applications, they're trademark applications. Check the source .
The Slashdot editor publishes whatever falls into his hands.
The quick-on-the-jump Slashdot poster responds instantly to the hot buttons pressed in the summary --- and can't hold back his fire even when a story has been exposed as utter nonsense.
At no time did anybody involved in my family business lose focus on what was important, either in the business, in the family life, or in terms of the separation between the two. .
I have some doubts.
The family business tends to be patriarchal.
Nothing is final until the old man signs off on the deal. There is never an easy or graceful solution to the problem of succession.
...stating you are not responsible for lost/stolen/damaged equipment. .
But get thee to a lawyer first - and let him tell you how to word the form. Sixty high-end gaming rigs takes you up well above $150 grand in hardware alone.
Slashdot Mirror
.
Trying to comprehend an event like 9/11 does not imply using a Wii controller to slit the throat of a stewardess in a video game.
.
Because it offered cash rewards?
On February 22, 2005, Stephane Krupa, a user living in France, named "Major_Koenig" (named after Erwin König, a famous sniper) won the competition prize of $10,712 with a score of 782 out of 1000. Second and third place went to the users "Flux" (779) and "ArrogantB" (777) respectively JFK: Reloaded
.
That I very much doubt.
The London stage was considered popular entertainment is Shakespeare's day.
If you wanted recognition as a writer you wrote and published poetry - or perhaps a book of essays, like Sir Francis Bacon.
It is a long way from the tintypes of 1860 to the landscape photography of Ansel Adams.
MoMa didn't begin collecting photographs until 1930, motion pictures until 1935. That is forty years of the American film - Porter's The Life of an American Fireman to Little Caesar and King Kong.
.
Let's get real here.
Firefox gained visibility and market share after being ported to Windows and not before.
I would not be in the least surprised if its Linux origins have been more or less forgotten - if the majority of Windows users were ever conciously aware of them at all.
.
There is something of the Taliban in the Geek: neither understanding or respect for other literary. cultural, or religious traditions - and a piss-poor sense of history.
.
The non-profit Library of America publishes handsome archival editions of H.P. Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, A.J. Leibling, James Thurber, Robert Frost, Thornton Wilder...
The geek could learn to ask...not take.
The interesting thing is that most of the authors represented in the LOA are working writers from the extended copyright regimes of the mid nineteenth century and after.
It is a record of an elementally democratic and capitalist art.
.
The telco is selling residential service to a mass consumer market. The geek who sucks up bandwidth like free beer from the keg doesn't help their bottom line.
.
The question is - where in Utah and who can afford it?
If it is available only along the narrow high tech corridor of the Silicon Slopes that leaves a lot of people out of the picture.
.
You need to remember as well that an eastern city can have an underground infrastructure that dates back to 1845 - or earlier. You never know what you are going to find when you start digging. It is always going to be a slower, more complex, and more dangerous job then trenching a cable in the suburbs.
.
Microsoft Surface doesn't need a touchscreen - it doesn't need to be touched - it only needs a rear (or front?) projection screen.
That can be scaled easily and cheaply to any size.
It means that the replacement screen may be nothing more than the tempered glass tabletop or acrylic panel you could order custom-cut from Home Depot.
Surface can read coded objects like game pieces. It can communicate with devices like digital cameras - set the camera on the table and the photos stream out in front of you.
10 minutes went by before you could even exit the monorail. You were drooling at the attention to detail and immersion. And that was before you saw the spider walker construction equipment moving around.
And it was another 20 after that before you shot your first shot. It was already one of the greatest games ever made before you did much more than look around and "go to work" that day.
.
You do understand that what you have just described is pure storytelling?
.
Not as much as you would like to think.
The deed to your property - and the chain of title recorded at your county courthouse - is nothing more than a piece of paper, an entry in a ledger.
It has meaning only so far as the law and the courts give it meaning.
I learned this lesson as the executor of my grandmother's estate. The third mortgage held by a cemetary association whose elderly treasuer drifted off into lah-lah land.
The do-it-yourself lawyering that tried to reassemble the pieces after her mother-in-law split the title to her house and lot three ways in her will.
Three people ten and twenty years dead when I had to find a better solution.
.
Is this a plus for Linux or simply another way of saying - or not saying - that the more interesting - and demanding - apps are being published for Windows?
The base price for Vista running on a single core AMD CPU with 2 GB RAM is $329 at Walmart.com .
The base price for 64 bit Vista Premium running on a quad core CPU with NVIDIA 9600 series graphics, 4 GB RAM and 1 TB of storage is $1000 at Walmart.com.
Is that six year old CentOS PC performing at the level of either of these systems - and are you being honest about the apps it can and cannot run?
.
Part of the problem is that the Geek tends to scream out retail list for software that everyone knows is easily - and legitimately - available at very substantial discounts.
MS Office Ultimate 2007 will be available to any U.S. student with ID for $60 come September.
90% off retail list for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, Access, Outlook, Groove, OneNote, and InfoPath.
If your employer has a volume licensing agreement with Microsoft, then MS Office for home use may only cost you the price of the media plus S&H. Home Use Program.
.
It was 1989 all over again as well:
In two small Illinois towns, a one-page fax newspaper called Fax Today has challenged the local daily with some success, prompting predictions that similar fax papers could spread like a virus across the country and pose a threat to newspapers.
What makes Fax Today different is that it is free to subscribers and supported by advertising. It was started in 1989 in Effingham, Ill., by Jack M. Schultz, an entrepreneur with no newspaper experience. He expanded the service to Bloomington in 1990. The enterprise is profitable, Mr. Schultz said, and he sees significant potential for growth.
The last two years have seen a flurry of experiments in delivering news by fax. For instance, The Chicago Tribune, The Knoxville News-Sentinel in Tennessee and The Minneapolis Star Tribune abandoned fax papers that charged a subscription fee for a one-page afternoon update of business news.
The Los Angeles Times provides a free summary of news via fax to government officials and diplomats in Moscow as a promotional vehicle.
The New York Times has three fax news products aimed at areas where the newspaper is not readily available: a six-page fax newspaper for hotels in Japan, which emphasizes Japanese news; a six-page international edition for Australia and other foreign countries, and an eight-page edition for cruise ships. Small Fax Newspaper Shakes Up Its Press Rivals [August 12, 1991]
The RCA Radio Fax receiver is fascinating and provocative.
In 1939 for small print runs you cut a stencil for a mimeograph machine - the tech from hell - or you bought a letterpress out of the back pages of Popular Science.
The dry paper home fax machine that can deliver legible 7 pt. text and halftoned photographs is pure science fiction.
You might not want be able to justify a $260 radio fax machine for your home - but it's not hard to see what it brings to the Chris-Craft cabin cruiser or the branch office.
30 miles at 30 MHz. 100 watts. Perhaps ten times that range at lower frequencies and higher power. The thing ran off a clock. There were no external controls whatever.
That alone had to be an eye-opener for the shortwave hobbyist.
.
In March of 1939 The St. Louis Post Dispatch began experimental public broadcasts of a nine page facsimile newspaper to the home using technology developed by RCA.
"So far as the transmitting equipment is concerned, it is the standard scanner manufactured by RCA, the output of which is fed into a 100-watt transmitter operating on 31,600 kc. We selected the ultra-high frequency band because it offered the opportunity of broadcasting facsimile during the day time--in fact any time we desire.
We have not experienced nearly as much trouble with interference on the ultra-high frequency band as was expected. The characteristics of the recorders are such that far more interference can be tolerated than is the case in the reception of sound broadcasting an these frequencies."
Within the next month RCA expects to be able to supply receivers at a cost of about $260. Several will be placed in public places for demonstration. The range of Station W9XZY is from 20 to 30 miles.
"On the first page of this "radio newspaper," now being received in every home in the St. Louis service area of W9XZY equipped with a facsimile receiver, are the leading news articles of the day. Then following sports news, several pages of pictures, Fitzpatrick's editorial cartoon, a summary of radio programs and radio gossip, and a page of financial news and stock market quotations."
The antenna of the receiver set in the home picks up these waves. The receiver, a closed cabinet with no dials to be operated or adjustments to be made by the owner, contains continuously-feeding rolls of paper and carbon paper which pass over a revolving metal cylinder from which a small stylus projects.
Pressure, varying with the intensity of the radio waves, is exerted on a metal bar, parallel to the axis of the cylinder, beneath which the paper and carbon is fed. Thus the black and white of the original copy scanned by the "electric eye" is duplicated on the paper passing over the cylinder of the receiving set which is synchronized with that of the sending mechanism.
It is unnecessary for the reader to be on hand when a broadcast begin since a clock, set for the scheduled time, will automatically start the receiving set and stop it at conclusion of broadcasting. It requires 15 minutes to transmit one page.
First Daily Newspaper by RADIO FACSIMILE
[as published in Radio-Craft, March 1939]
.
Perhaps.
It might even be useful for the geek to be reminded now and again that no one stays twenty-something forever.
.
Is this an internal contradiction or two warring camps?
The geek may be bitching about access to fiber. His dad may have been the guy who pissed off his neighbors when he installed a 16 foot BUD in the eighties.
You can grow weary and wary of the way tech defines and transforms a landscape.
The high tension lines that bisects an old-growth forest.
.
It isn't hardware failure that drives the home and SOHO user to upgrade.
It is the chance to massively upgrade hardware and software at the OEM price. The HP Quad Core 64 Bit Vista Premium PC with 4 GB RAM and NVIDIA 9600 graphics and 1 TB of storage is $1000 at Walmart.com.
The Duo Core 32 Bit Vista Premium PC with 2 GB RAM starts at $329 at Walmart.com.
A .8% loss isn't horrible, but Macs grew 1.12% and Linux grew 33%
If Vista is growing(in gross numbers, as opposed to percentages), Linux and Mac are growing faster in relative terms according to your chart.
Take a look at the numbers again and you will see OSX hitting a wall - a 5% share for the MacIntel that hasn't changed significantly in months.
As for Linux, it seems to be settling back into a barely visible 0.02% growth each month, a pity, since it looked as if this might be the year when the mass market OEM Linux PC broke into the single digit
Relative growth simply isn't very impressive when you begin from so small a base.
.
How difficult would it be the young woman who entered office work as a typist in 1888 to adapt to the office of 2008?
The young man in accounting?
Local museums have ledgers, correspondence and promotional material - paper ephemerals - from local businesses active in the 1850s ---and it is all quite familiar.
You can turn the clock back another century to the fur-trading posts of the 1750s --- and still find nothing strange from a purely commercial point-of-view.
MS Office is what it is because it is shaped by the requirements and traditions of clerical work that go back hundreds of years.
That is why it is so very, very hard for projects like OpenOffice.org to come up with anything truly innovative - no matter how much money Big Daddy Sun pours into the bin.
.
Vista hasn't failed in the home and SOHO markets: Top Operating System Share Trend In these - global - webstats Vista is the only OS showing any significant growth at all.
See, a kid using Windows XP in high school will encounter Windows XP applications in ten or fifteen years.
He will most likely be using apps that will be recognizable descendants of those first published for the Mac OS in 1984 and Win 3.1 in 1992 and Win 95 in 1995.
Microsoft Office Ultimate for full-time students in the U.S. is $60:
Microsoft Office Word 2007, Microsoft Office Excel 2007, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007, Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, Microsoft Office Access 2007, Microsoft Office Publisher 2007, Office OneNote 2007, Office Groove 2007 and Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007
The apps might in the cloud.
But I'll take the odds that the office of 2019 or 2025 isn't going to look all that different from the office of 2008.
______
Net Applications isn't tracking licenses - it is tracking users:
160 million hits to its clients's websites each moth
Additional estimates about the website population:
76% participate in pay per click programs to drive traffic to their sites
# 43% are commerce sites
# 18% are corporate sites
# 10% are content sites
# 29% classify themselves as other (includes gov, org, search engine marketers etc..) About Our Market Share Statistics
Kidnapping is the Mexican version of the same thing. It happens, at most, extremely rarely. You are far more likely to get hit by a car,
between 2002 and 2006, the Mexican government was able to...dismantle a lot of kidnapping rings
.
There is nothing random about extortion --- the victim's family will be extraordinarily wealthy by Mexican standards --- a very small sub-set of the general population.
You would have to go very far back in U.S.history to find anything resembling an extortion "kidnapping ring." The response to the Lindbergh kidnapping in 1034 made this a very dangerous business to enter. The Lindbergh Kidnapping
.
The Slashdot editor publishes whatever falls into his hands.
The quick-on-the-jump Slashdot poster responds instantly to the hot buttons pressed in the summary --- and can't hold back his fire even when a story has been exposed as utter nonsense.
Pavlov's dogs couldn't be better trained.
.
I have some doubts.
The family business tends to be patriarchal.
Nothing is final until the old man signs off on the deal. There is never an easy or graceful solution to the problem of succession.
.
But get thee to a lawyer first - and let him tell you how to word the form. Sixty high-end gaming rigs takes you up well above $150 grand in hardware alone.