I think that is a bit like saying that the assault rifle is obsolete because aircraft have a much longer effective range and are more than capable of killing a single soldier.

I think that battleships in the conventional sense are obviously dead. However, the concept of being able to base heavy artillery quickly anyplace there is deep water is probably still useful. I'd just make the things WAY cheaper and purely offensive in design (minimal crew, ideally no crew, no armor beyond what you'd stick on an APC, etc).

So instead of having the tattoo ink spread out in a relatively benign part of my dermis, instead I'll concentrate it in my lymph nodes.

I was under the impression that the macrophages would then be broken down and their contents recycled or disposed of - that this migration was just one step in the process. Is this not true?

There are a lot of macrophages migrating to the lymph nodes over a lifetime. If they just went there, died, and left their contents the nodes would swell with age and never shrink - yet this doesn't seem to happen.

No question the ship designs should be changed. They aren't intended to be the backbone of the fleet, and they won't survive an attack. They're just floating artillery emplacements and they should be designed as such. Put 10 guns on the thing and enough crew to get them where they need to be and fire them. You don't need 1000 people to operate a fire support base (especially one that doesn't need perimeter security). There is also no need to keep the things out at sea 24x7 either - just position a few near likely conflict areas and man them when you need them.

They're not going to trade shells with another ship of the line either, so they don't need 10" of armor plate and an engine room that can move all that weight. They don't need to launch/recover aircraft, be a command base for the fleet, have a nice room for the admiral, or house 500 marines either. A container ship with a bunch of guns on it would work just fine.

I imagine a key factor there is how much ordnance you need delivered to some target near a coast over a period of time. If you need 500 tons of bombs dropped within a 10mi^2 area near the coast over the course of three months, then I can't see you beating the battleship for cost-effectiveness (especially if you tone the thing down from some kind of dreadnaut into just a big platform for guns - ditch all the useless armor, reduce crew, etc).

A plane costs a lot of money to maintain and can only drop a few bombs at a time, but that plane can drop the bomb anywhere within a country-sized area.

The problem for the battleship is that most wars tend to involve a lot of movement, and not just slugging it out over one city or whatever.

Thank you officer, may I have another?

Got it, so I'm safe working for Dropbox as long as they don't store any copyright protected motion pictures on their system - ie I'm not safe working for them.

Proactive facilitation of copyright infringement? Does that mean that when you sign up for an account with them they go ahead and load copyrighted material on it before you even get a chance to do it yourself? Or does it just mean that they comply with the DMCA and take stuff down when they're asked to?

I see. So, I'm OK working for Dropbox if my reading of the company founder's minds is the same as a court's? Or maybe it comes down to whether Dropbox has better lawyers?

You said:

I replied to:

I addressed the claim made in the comment I replied to, no more or less. The discussion was about the "specific mathematical meaning" of exponential growth.

Of course there is more to evaluating the economic performance of a company than that. If that had been s.petry's claim then I wouldn't have disputed it. I was simply correcting the incorrect argument made that somehow this wasn't exponential growth.

Got it. So, you're stuck only running software written as early as 1995 on the 64-bit version of Windows 8. Otherwise you'll have to stick to the still-in-production 32-bit version of the product.

Clearly MS is abandoning too many customers here who are still using 8+3 filenames.

So, uh, guess I shouldn't get a drop working for Dropbox or Google, right? You do realize they let people share arbitrary files for download by anybody on the internet.

Well, more like going after the secretary that works for his tax accountant.

Ok, I'll grant you the IBM mainframes. :)

I would distinguish between MS's treatment of its competitors with its treatment of everybody else. Also, that sort of stuff stopped being important after the 90s, mainly because they had no competitors left.

I've seen plenty of software break on newer versions of Windows. My point is that overall it is a lot rarer than you'd expect, and MS probably goes further than just about anybody to prevent it from happening.

What other OS will run 20 year old binaries without issue on a recently released version of the OS?

The given was that Google is growing at 20% annually. You claim that isn't exponential growth. I claim that it is.

Now, if you're disputing that Google is really growing at 20% annually, that is a completely different argument from claiming that 20% annual growth isn't exponential growth. I don't audit Google's books, so I can make no claims as to whether they are or aren't really growing at that rate. I just know that if every year your sales is 1.2x the sales the year before, that is exponential growth, by definition.

Cite? Last time I checked 64-bit versions of windows ran 32-bit software (or in this case 16-bit) just fine.