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Comment Re:Microsoft can't innovate (Score 1) 174

Well, they came up with the XBox, and established online gaming as a serious thing.

Well, no, PC developers did that. And they did it pretty much completely without Microsoft's help, because DirectX was just coming into being when it had really taken off.

the "start" menu (which incidentally was another MS innovation).

Because it does not resemble the Apple menu at all, simply with more launcher functionality added in?

Comment Re:Problem with proprietary 'free' offerings (Score 1) 174

You have to be a member of AAA to get access to decent maps. Otherwise you're stuck with the Rest Area state maps.

AAA maps have gone downhill and many have just (in the last few months) been discontinued. All that's going to remain are overview maps. And their days are numbered as well, because paper maps just suck compared to digital in every way except availability.

Comment Re:I Use Streets and Trips on RV Trips (Score 2) 174

There's a handful of offline GPS packages for PC, Delorme has one, Garmin used to have one but they still have two nav apps for iOS and Android that have offline map support (one exclusively, one with caching.)

Streets and Trips will still work until the roads are too different from it to be useful any more, or you can't get it to run on some version of Windows any more. But it will become steadily less useful. I've bought S&T before, and it was outdated when I got it.

Comment Why wonder? (Score 2) 60

I wonder what people would think of an occasional "postal zone dump" employing the same kind of dragnet but for communications on paper.

You don't have to wonder about this, because this is how it is now. The headers of all snailmail (the wrapper of the packet) are machine-logged. Those of us who are technically savvy always suspected this, since we found out that scanning is used for routing. Some of us, like myself, even mentioned the possibility to our postmasters and were told that they were simply throwing this data away after collecting it. But anyone who knows anything about anything knew that this was massively unlikely.

So, given that this is already happening for literally every piece of mail being sent, just like it happens to literally every piece of email which traverses a long-haul link, why do you wonder? That's how it is right now.

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