They also deal with it by negotiating in a derivatives market, or by absorbing the fluctuations in a way that they cancel each other.

And some deal with it by making bets and taking risks.

Bitcoin may add yet another option to the mix: getting rid of the currency faster than it can fluctuate. But it's not liquid enough, so currently, this won't work.

And since then you simply assume that everybody is just like the one worst experience you had on life?

Looks like fun.

There's no reason for private companies to profit off the basic requirements of a functioning society.

There's also no reason for they not. Lots and lots of people profit on food consumption, and that didn't lead to any disaster. The telecom problems have other roots, we'd better focus on those.

This time it's not "netbooks", it's "Chromebooks". While that does not make any difference at all, MS can't use the name "Chromebook", and can't confuse people about what they are buying.

This time, all that MS will get is another "Windows products are the worst available", like they got in phones and tablets.

That's $35 of "components" money, the manufacturer will want to make its usual 5% (or whatever) over it, then the distributor will want to make their usual 10%, but he'll also need insurance, what's paid over the product value, increasing it some extra 1% or 2%, then the store wants its usual 20% over the cumulative value... And lets not forget the government (whatever it is) taking taxes over revenue (they seem to be always there, it does not matter if you think your tax code is modern because you have a VAT), bigger investment, leading to bigger interest, and a huge number of small contributions that none of us will be able to completely understand.

"It'll fail" is the usual prognostic when a company starts a price race with their competitors... But in this case, the competitors are already giving their product away for free. This is much worse than a usual race to the bottom.

To be fair, consoles always worked that way. The manufacturers try to guess what the market will like, build it, and throw it on the public. If they gess right, they are sucessfull, if they guess wrong, they are not.

There are very deep reasons for that way of working, so it won't go away, and is shared by all the manufacturers.

Maybe because both consoles are bought by different people, with different priorities.

If Microsoft keeps showing the ads for a few more years, people'll stop complaining about them too... Because everybody that care about them won't buy one anymore.

Only if you put giant radiators on space, but then, it is easier to just put photovoltaic pannels there.

But nonetheless it is still incorrect to characterize these photons as "x-rays."

Looks like for astronomers, the correct name is "x-rays". At least, you said so. And that being an article about astronomy...

Looks like there wasn't enough competition on the market.

Let me guess, the tax was reduced by a complex procedure that applied to some business and not others, and was too expensive for small business to follow anyway. Am I right?

That's how one should work with models. Create lots of them, throw away the ones that didn't work, test the ones that work again and again to confirm that it wasn't just by chance.

We are at the second step here, and have a model to pay attention now.

When we create it, of course.

Let's not forget the RNA -> protein coding transformations, that created organisms able to use new kinds of amino-acids which may have killed everything else on Earth. Several transitions where only a single lineage survived.

one relying in insect proteins and the other on animal proteins

Thus, obviously, no, they don't.

Otherwise the summary would be wrong, and this is Slashdot...