Not since the Reagan administration. What actually makes the big news story is when an acquisition/merger is actually denied.

Not that AT&T will sit back and let this happen. It would be surprising if they weren't already hard at work lobbying their bought-and-paid-for Congresscritters to cut funding to any and all government agencies that would enforce this auction decision.

We're being driven from our humanity by various forms of corruption in civilization, and technology is helping us escape...inward.

All the guns in the world will do you no good if you can't motivate the people using them.

People are motivated, by and large, through the use of words.

Though both are hedging as you say, I think both desperately want the other to overwhelmingly succeed. MS on ARM is not competitive due to a complete lack of support for legacy x86 applications and an otherwise uninspired design, so MS wants the world to run on x86 where they have home court advantage. Similarly, while Intel still has mostly better offerings, they cannot extract the desired margins out of such a highly competitive market like ARM where people will go without the very latest semiconductor process and gobs of performance. They want a software ecosystem that demands x86, which only Microsoft really has.

So yes, each has some 'worst case' contingency intended to keep them in the market. Those contingencies are both such long shots and will forever reduce margins even if they are 'successful'. That's why Intel has double downed on engineering with MS about platform sleep states and such without giving Android nearly as much attention (basically just token attention).

Microsoft and Intel should be best friends. They are each others main hope for relevance. Intel competing against the horde of ARM vendors on even ground is not going to end well for Intel's margins no matter how much share they hypothetically get. In much the same way that MS is nothing without the momentum of decades of x86-only applications, Intel isn't much without MS applications. Well, Intel's products are a bit respectable in their own right, but the primary driver of their large margin is the x86 ecosystem where MS is ubiquitous.

Intel may be hedging their bets to try to assure they aren't completely left behind in an Android-centric world, but I wager they are strongly hoping for MS to provide a software platform experience on x86 that is too compelling to overlook. I will say that even the 'best' Android apps I deal with are pretty crappy ( having to mysteriously be killed because it hangs, sometimes needing their persistent storage wiped because it has no idea how to work back to working state from whatever state it stored persistently). Even chrome randomly decides 'I'm just going to stop being able to render certain pages altogether'. It's bizarre, since on Windows and Linux desktops I don't see nearly as much wonkiness from many of the exact same application vendors doing about as equivalent a product as can be imagined. For a given price, I'd honestly prefer an x86 tablet so long as secureboot can be disabled to run platforms I have a great deal of familiarity with.

Crazed men write books, publish propaganda, give speeches that convince millions to murder others with guns, gas, whatever.

FWIW, a republic CAN be a democracy. At least in principle, and if you aren't too picky about exact definitions. (I'm not asserting that the US states were ever more of a democracy than was classical Athens, however.)

It will if you're using C or C++.

FWIW, *most* of the text I'm working with is ASCII-7, but some of it isn't. Short quotation in, e.g., Greek. I need to be able to count the chars, etc. Utf-32 is an immense waste of space...and I already expect to be doing a lot of paging because of excessive memory use.

No time to repeat it for you, toad. Just see the response to Thruen

I guess the millions killed with Zyklon B would disagree.

I also guess you have never heard of the term, "inciting a riot".

You say that it would take guns to achieve this. Well, these guns were in the hands of the State, precisely the ones you insist should only have access to guns. And you cannot deny that it was the writings and rhetoric that fueled the Nazi's rise to power and that is was the propaganda and incitement that enabled the murder of millions. Joseph Goebbels would have been hanged for his use of words.

So the words of a man had a much deadlier affect than any one loon with a gun at an elementary school.

Looking at History, Words are responsible for far more deaths than are guns: Mein Kampf, Mao's little red book, etc.

A crazed man with a gun can kill tens of people. Crazed men with a books have killed millions.

Yeah! Burning them all to death sure did show them!

So keeping things running, making shit work, keeping the company functioning is a bad thing?

prima donna
noun \pri-m-dä-n, pr-\

: a person who thinks she or he is better than everyone else and who does not work well as part of a team or group

I suspect you meant that sarcastically, but if system software (meaning OS kernels, network stacks, device drivers, etc.) were written in better languages, our computer systems could be far safer and more robust, quality of life could be better, and the benefit to productivity and the global economy could be substantial.

For the computing industry, it is one of the great tragedies of our time that C and its derivatives have become so entrenched. There is absolutely no reason we can't have a systems programming language that offers the necessary low-level control without the limited programming model, error-prone syntax and weak safety features of C.

Unfortunately, it is momentum and ubiquity that keep most of the industry using C and its brethren, not technical merit. The vast ecosystem surrounding C is hard to beat for scale. There is promising work being done in some places, Rust for example, but I know of no practical alternative that is ready for production use today.

Of course, OpenSSL itself isn't running at the level of an OS kernel, so it doesn't need the same degree of low-level access anyway. But there is a wider point here about much more than just OpenSSL.