Want to know a big reason people have been getting Macs, that Apple doesn't like to admit? You can run Windows on them now. The Intel switch made it viable to run Windows on them, natively if you wanted, and good virtualization tech means it runs fast in OS-X. That lets people get their shiny status symbol, but still use the programs they need.

We've seen that at work (an Engineering college). Prior to the Intel conversion, there were almost no Mac users. The thing is engineering software just isn't written for the Mac. There is actually some stuff now, but even so the vast majority is Windows or Linux. Back in the PPC days, there was almost nothing. So we had only really two stubborn faculty that used Macs, one because he did no research and just played around, and one because he wrote his own code and was stubborn. However that was it, you just couldn't do your work on them.

Now? All kinds of faculty and students have Macs. PCs are still dominant, but we see a lot more Macs. However every one has Windows on it. Some it is all they have. Seriously, we have two guys who buy Macs, but have us install Windows on it, they don't use MacOS they just want the shiny toy. A number have bootcamp, and many have VMWare. Regardless, I've yet to see one, faculty, staff, or student, that didn't put Windows on it to be able to do the work they need to.

So that is no small part of how Intel helped Apple gain market share.

The vaccine probably wouldn't go to everyone, it would go to high-risk people, such as nurses, doctors, and people traveling to west africa (much like visitors to some countries get vaccines for yellow fever).

In my case, I would be more likely to die driving to the hospital for the vaccine, than I would be of Ebola.

What kind of precedent are you hoping Larry Page will set?

I don't think that follows. If a country ends up with a better government because of the internet, the citizens of that country win.

Well, if you're curious, I believe this conversation was started with this earlier point of mine:

Which is a comment on the difficulty of making reliable software. It's referring to the engineering aspect of the matter, that making software without (serious) bugs is very difficult and takes time. Since the software for self-driving cars will be much more complicated than the software for air travel, it follows naturally that making the software reliable will be even more difficult.

My point being, that even if the car could already drive itself anywhere, it would still be many years away from production.

His main points, as I understand them:

1) Eric Schmidt is getting involved in politics, and is becoming influential.
2) Google doesn't always follow "do no evil" but fanboys love Google anyway
3) Google is getting involved in government more than is healthy.

He has some other rambles about the Bilderbergs, and how the governments are secretly controlling world events, but his main points seam reasonable enough.

Seriously? I'm not sure you read the same thing I did. I especially found his attempts to understand his interviewers (in the opening paragraphs) to be unusually analytical and.....rational.

Certainly Assange holds different viewpoints than I do, but his points seemed more logic based than your post, for example.

How is Ello any different than any of the other multitude of wannabe social networks? I'm not sure it counts as a success to get $10million in funding.
Saying "we won't advertise" isn't enough to get users, because people generally don't mind advertising.

Telnet is literally worse than requiring no password for log in.

While "only 5% of my disk" is now many times larger than it used to be, so are the things I'm moving around, so "95% full" is just as bad now as it used to be.

Basically, once we got past quotas measured in single or double-digit numbers of kilobytes, this stopped changing for me. 95% full on a 100MB disk and 95% full on a 500GB disk work the same for me.

That's true, good points.

Yes, and one of those problems is much easier than the other.

Then look for some evidence.

Speed matters less with each step up. Going from a modem to broadband is amazing, going from something like 256k DSL to 20mb cable is pretty damn huge, however going from 20mbps cable to 200mbps cable is nice, but fairly minor and going from a few hundred mbps to gbps is hardly noticeable.

I have 150mbps cable at home, and get what I pay for. Games from GOG and Steam download at 18-19MB/sec. It is fun, I can download a new game in minutes... however outside that I notice little difference from the 30mbps connection I stepped up from. Streaming worked just as well before, web surfing was just as fast, etc. The extra speed matters little to none in day to day operations.

Same thing at work. I'm on a campus and we have some pretty hardcore bandwidth, as campuses often do, so much it is hard to test as the testing site usually is the limit. Downloading large stuff it is nice, though really not that much less time than at home. I don't really mind the difference between a 2-5 minute wait and a 15-20 minute wait for a program. Surfing, streaming, etc all are 100% the same, no difference at all, speed seems to be limited by waiting for all the DHTML crap on a site to render, not the data to download.

While geeks get all over excited about bigger better more when it comes to bandwidth, for normal use what matters is just to have "enough" and "enough" turns out to be not all that much. It'll grow with time, of course, higher rez streaming, larger programs, etc will demand more bandwidth but still this idea that there is the difference between uber fast Internet and just regular fast Internet is silly.

It will not create any meaningful divide.

The ARM chip was started for the ABC Acorn and was released in 1986.