I remember reading a lot of criticism (including here) about these efforts, where the telecom industry took the money, but failed to deliver. And that's actually a general concern for social program spending: does it actually provide the promised benefits?

In the case of universal (or at least nationwide :-) ) internet access, success is pretty easy to measure. If Congress were functional (a big if, I know), they would be examining the results of the previous investments and seeing how to better invest the money to get the result.

By the way, I've participated in a couple of studies about what it would take to replace Microsoft on both desktops and back office situations. There's a lot of costs, even if you use low cost/free Open Source products. Those include conversion from the MS product to the replacement, qualification/testing to make sure the replacement isn't worse than what you're replacing, engineering costs for designing and implementing the solution including the transition, retraining for both end users, security infrastructure/cyber staffs, systems administrators, etc.

The starting point is to replace Active Directory. It can be done, but it's Not Easy.

Gates is long gone from Microsoft. He set the corporate culture of "let the users debug our software", but the current security problems at Microsoft can't be blamed on Gates (or Ballmer.)

Me, I blame Congress for not passing legislation to make -all software vendors- legally liable for flaws in their products, including security holes. If you want secure software, you'll have to pay for it, and make the companies pay for the consequences of their failures.

No mod points for me today. Someone please mod parent up as (VERY) Insightful.

How many printers are bought by end users, versus those bought by IT departments or 'managed service providers', for whom the cost of toner is not an issue because THEY are not paying for it?

Just like when Microsoft realized their real customer was corporate IT and reworked Windows to provide corporate IT with maximum control, HP realized who they need to keep happy. And it's not you or me (unless you're a CIO/owner of an IT service company.)

I've tried to trace down these kinds of bugs, and they're very nasty. But I wouldn't necessarily jump to blame Intel, sometimes it's the software is making an invalid assumption about the state of the hardware. Compiler bugs can be very hard to find.

Arguably these days, that's a low bar to reach.

I have an OWC TBolt hub, and I've never had a crash on my M1 Max Macbook Pro. Seems to be a problem with your hub. Now I would agree that a hub should not crash the laptop, even if it's driving video from the laptop.

And I've never had a crash from iMessage. So my mileage definitely varies...

I'm going by the blurb here, since I can't read the paywalled article. If this is an industry-wide problem, why is it (only) Amazon's job to fix? What role should the merchants who use Amazon as the marketing and delivery platform have here? What about other companies that sell on-line, independent of Amazon? Do they have the same problems?

Now I'm sure Amazon has responsibilities to merchants where they act as the delivery agent (in both directions). Of course, when something costs the merchants (including Amazon itself), those costs get passed onto consumers. But that's "cost of doing business," but if some small number of customers are disproportionately responsible for (fraudulent) returns, maybe that's where the actions should focus. I dunno, but the summary of the article raises many more questions than it answers.

(And after listening to Yet Another "investigative reporting" piece that blames an industry in Corporate America for a whole bunch of problems, some of which are definitely caused by industry practices, while others are ramifications of the business or of -public- policy, I'm getting pretty sick of the trope "corporate America is to blame, no matter what the problem." This piece was about probably bad practices in food processing, but are we ready to shut down "Big Agriculture" and pretend we have an alternative way to feed millions, if not billions of people?)

Apple iPhones and iPads have a relatively strong market for used devices, either through trade-ins with Apple, or through sales to 3rd parties.

Even the old Apple networking hardware can fetch a pretty good price in used-good condition. (I checked the price for a used Airport Express a couple months ago.)

Well, darn. My moderator points ran out. Someone mod parent up. '

That being said, moving founders out (with their proceeds from going public) is often the best thing for a newly public company. People good at startups are not necessarily good at operating (public) companies over the long run. I observed that in the small company I was in. The problem was that the venture capital people who had the plan to cash out (either going public or through a sale) were assholes, and a majority of the employee shareholders along with the founder said "we're better off with the existing management."

What bothers me a bit about this story is the idea "she didn't want her image to be used any more." So let's think through this idea a bit to other things. Should technical paper authors have the 'moral authority' to revoke their copyright assignments? Would this then require papers that cite the 'withdrawn' paper to then be withdrawn? We know there are many instances where authors have withdrawn papers (particularly including "This paper was flat out wrong."), but what should be the downstream impact of this? And what are the 'rights' of the co-authors?

I'm inclined to think this is a slippery slope.

Oh, and here's a picture I took (at Machu Picchu) for Rosco P. Coltrane http://davebert.photos/Peru09/... Raise your hand if you're offended by this image.

I sure hope not! They'd immediately lose me as a customer.

I'm curious: What acquisitions has Apple done that you would subject to this review, in a way that would prevent Apple from arriving at the situation it's at now? Seems to me most of what Apple has done has been through in-house R&D and small-scale acquisitions that wouldn't rise to the level of "If you buy this company, it will totally warp the market." (And the linkage of R&D expenditures to stock buy-backs in the DoJ lawsuit makes no sense; one could argue Apple has been incredibly efficient at its in-house R&D to produce its products. Contrast Apple's Apple Vision Pro R&D investment with Meta's R&D in the same general product line.)

Those EU actions are also subject to judicial review. See the failure of the EU actions on taxeshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%27s_EU_tax_dispute The Fat Lady has not stopped singing on this, but the EU adminstrative decisions have not done well in court.