It tends to be discouraged, out of concern that states aren't very good at it, or that they might be inclined to use their other powers to make themselves more competitive; but there isn't anything architecturally precluding a state from earning money. They can have employees, own and operate R&D and production facilities, sell products, same as a company.

There are reasons to discourage that, and have them focus on things that the private sector can't do or does poorly; but those are pragmatic considerations, not fundamental obstacles.

I'd be totally unsurprised by incredibly bad design; but that incredibly bad design would also tend to make it relatively trivial to access whatever memory holds the UID or key used to establish the pairing and blank or rewrite it to establish a new pairing with a new device. Probably not in the owner's manual; but likely something that an EE undergrad could do with access to a few hundreds to thousands of dollars worth of borrowed test equipment and a congratulatory couple of six-packs. Definitely for less than replacing the hardware.

Design that is both appallingly ill thought out and too ironclad to subvert would be fairly surprising. Now, if it were a prosthetic eye, and needed to appease the MPAA when handling Premium Content, I'd be more concerned...

Given the work they've put into having clients for most things, and broad 3rd party integration, they probably have some room to overcharge for small amounts of space (sure, you could just go shove S3 buckets yourself; but we've already done the integration work for you...); but they seem strangely overconfident about their ability to set prices for larger blocks of storage that just emphasize the discrepancy in per GB price.

That may actually be part of how Google and Amazon and Apple are hitting them hard now: DropBox offers a reasonably compelling deal if you don't need too much space. Sure, it costs too much per GB; but it's all nicely wrapped up and integrated with the programs you use, and life is just too short to go tinkering or comparison shopping to save a small amount. However, Google, Amazon, and Apple will all give you a modest amount of storage for nothing, as part of their respective plans to sell stuff, achieve platform dominance, or whatever. That obviously cuts the knees out from under DropBox's formerly cushy margins on small accounts; and, as you say, their price/GB has always been sufficiently high that they really start to look bad if you need nontrivial amounts of storage(which nobody will give you for free; but which players like Amazon will sell impressively close to cost).

It's called Montessori School, and it's wonderful.

The whole thread in which I was replying to has clearly stretched from 1% of the hosts, to 1% of competition and now to 1% of market share with your previous post. I am just bringing it back around to remind people that we are talking about 1% of the Air BNB hosts not 1% of all the hotels (legal and less than legal).

124 "Bed n Breakfasts" may make up 1% of the number of hosts, but that is not the same as 1% of the market share.

They almost never happen here, and when they do it's a 4 at the absolute most.

There was one this spring about 100 miles away. The sound it made as it passed was fascinating. The feeling was barely perceptible. I feel more shaking when my dogs are playing around the house.

I suspect that, aside from the high costs (and even higher PR costs) of air crashes, the way most contemporary flights are scheduled makes maximum-granularity/low-predictability information less valuable than lower granularity and higher predictability.

As much as you wouldn't guess it from a trip to Baggage Claim, mass market air travel is very much a 'just in time' operation. Every minute an aircraft spends sitting on the ground and waiting for something is money lost. Every minute one spends circling around and waiting for a landing slot is even more money lost. Customers who miss connecting flights are either foregone sales, pissed off, or people that unexpectedly need to be crammed onto later flights. Airplanes themselves have connections to make. After doing one route, the plane is almost certainly scheduled for a deeply cursory cleaning and another destination.

In such an environment, you do want timely alerts of unexpected emergencies(since the cost of having to replace multiple glassed engines, or an entire airplane and passengers is really bad); but the value of unexpected or unreliable good news is much less obvious unless it can be slotted neatly into an overall schedule that would survive if the news is bad(which definitely could happen, if a landing slot can be arranged to suit, learning that a flight will be faster and burn less fuel than expected would be good news; but not necessarily news you could bet the scheduling of the flight's next leg on).

It should take approximately no time at all for this to become an abject illustration of the adage that "Hell is other people". Definitely going to go well.

Even if MS and Google aren't willing to lose money on storage(they certainly are in the short term; but as a long game that strategy will not sell well), it isn't terribly obvious why repackaging AWS should be a particularly sustainable niche.

There is room(and dropbox exploited it) for the outfit that makes using AWS trivial and bodges together clients for OSes that allow fairly low level integration and 'app' integration for those that don't; but that's a goal where reaching 'adequate' is not a terribly high barrier to entry and where it isn't obvious what novel features one can add to continue justifying one's profit.

Once there are multiple players who have adequate client integration available what remains but to sell on price?

There is at least an argument to be made if one looks at how much...encouragement...the platform vendors, especially on the mobile side, provide to use their own blessed and proprietary 'cloud' service; depending on how closely controlled the OS is the advantage of being the platform-blessed option can be fairly substantial.

However, TFS seems to be worked up about the fact that the price/GB of deeply undistinguished storage has cratered over time. Yes, yes it has. Advances in disk density and datacenter operations have sharply reduced the absolute cost, and unless your service offers something really cool, or an airtight SLA, or some other nice feature, why wouldn't your margins reflect the fact that you provide a commodity?

Good point.

No. Absolutely not. Alt-az mounts are horrible, especially for beginning astronomers as there is a complete disconnect between the telescope axis and reality. An alt-az mount almost has to be motorized to be useful, and it drives up cost. People hocking dobs love to talk about how cheap the "dollars per inch" of the optics are, but the fail to mention you can look at something under high magnification for a few seconds before it disappears, and then you have to figure out how to track RA with an alt-az mount under high power and find the object again.

There's no better way to get an astronomy newbie to QUIT the hobby than to set them up with a dob.

Get a 4.5" or maybe a 6" Newtonian reflector on an EQ mount. Be sure you spend at least 5x on the mount than you do on the Optical Tube. The mount is 80% of the telescope. Do not, I repeat, DO NOT cheap out on a telescope by getting a shitty mount.

The EQ mount need not be motorized nor have a computer - in fact it's nice to learn about the RA/Dec axes and how to dial them in and track objects manually, but an RA motor would be necessary if you want to do any photography. (An RA motor does not necessarily require a full computer rig)

Eyepieces are also important, and pay no attention to "max power" capabilities, as they are always way overstated. A 4.5-6" Newtonian will be best at powers up to but not exceeding about 60-90X. Make sure you get a range of eyepieces to have variable power, but focus on field of view rather than magnification. Field of view is WAY more important than magnification.

The objects you will look at most with a 4.5-6" scope are the moon, planets, and nebulae. Nebulae are really cool, but you'll need the larger apertures to really appreciate them, or the photography setup so you can collect the light.

If you foresee going far with this as a hobby, you will want to go 8-10" at some point. It's better to decide now as telescopes are utterly worthless on the used market.

Hope this helps..