You're welcome. I have a copy floating around here in a sci-fi anthology that I think I paid between $2 and $5 since it was "old stock". Worth every penny.

S'alright :-)

I guess it goes with the history of each company - Amazon pretty much got their start with books, so they are more aware of the need to keep on top of such things; Google is first and foremost an advertising company, looking to diversify their revenue streams. They could certainly do it, but right now it's obviously not a priority for them.

Other people have claimed the stats provided are useless if we don't have their failures as well. Missing the Nepal earthquake is one of those failures, since Nepal is also covered by the same satellites that they get their data from.

Plates can move because they are lubricated by superheated steam (which is why all the plates on Venus are locked in place). This is why tracking ground water levels is a good predictor. It's also why fracking increases earthquakes in the surrounding area. One way to monitor this from space is to look for small changes in local gravity caused by the "steam bubble" that slightly moves the ground up or down prior to the big energy release. They missed it. Totally. How many others of lesser magnitude did they miss? That's the test.

So, my (maybe too subtle) point was that without more complete data it's not all that great - like predicting an earthquake in California.

It's also pretty useless in most instances, since nobody's going to evacuate an area for a month or more based on a warning - again, about as useful as predicting an earthquake every week in California. Predict within a couple of days and the utility goes up. But predicting with an uncertainty of a month or more is about as useful to most people as a weather forecast that says it's going to rain some time in the next couple of months. Whether you're harvesting crops or deciding to bring along an umbrella, predictions with an accuracy of weeks or months are useless.

Hey, it works for many in the church biz ...

You didn't "just get kicked in the teeth" - a house is not an ATM. You didn't include the value of living in the place for 10 years, plus depreciation. Would you be claiming that it was wrong that you had to sell your 10-year-old car for less than you paid for it + interest and other costs for years.

You bought during an obvious bubble and thought prices would never go down so you would basically have a place to live for free. So sad, too bad, reality bites - and it has really sharp teeth.

Not true. From YOUR link:

So just choose a manufacturer and model that lets you disable secure boot.

Too bad they didn't figure out that the shuttle was way more expensive per kilo to orbit than the Saturn V.

Putin is doing his best to make it one and the same again.

One man's PC is another man's server. After all, even a dirt-cheap computer today can run rings around the early supercomputers.

It's not a question of "valuing your privacy" so much as "who gives a fart?" Stuff you want private you don't share. 3 people can keep a secret if 2 of them are dead.

Or just don't do anything you would want your kids to read on the front page of the New York Times, which is always good advice to follow.

The alternative is to do the same thing as the protagonist in John Varley's "Press ENTER . . ." You'll have your privacy, but you'll pay too much of a price.

Now you're just being willfully obtuse. You can produce as many XT clones as you want, demand will not increase with supply. Also, there were plenty of Windows tablets before the iPad,They didn't sell well because they were too expensive at the time, not because they weren't being produced.

Don't be silly - others were already making money with web directories and search.

Next question, please.

That is SO wrong. No matter how many buggy whips or PC-XT clones or CRT monitors you produce, you won't increase demand. Even if you sold the CRT monitors for 1 cent plus shipping, nobody would buy them because they would still be more expensive electricity-wise than a flat screen. Even more so for a 60" CRT TV.