You have to manually search for where the toll roads are and think on how avoid them. Drag the marker around sure but will that give you the best alternative? Can't have it avoid them in the first place and have Google come up with a good alternative right away. Same for avoiding - or preferring - ferries. Also no way to set a preference for secondary roads vs motorways.

So OK those options kinda exist, but it's gone from automatic to manual. How's that better?

Another option that Google doesn't have is to search for fastest route vs. shortest route (often got really interesting results, albeit often totally impractical) vs. most economical route (that option is keeping in mind that cars run most efficient at 80-90 km/hr, so roads that let you travel at that speed use less fuel than motorways where you're doing something like 120-130 km/hr - could even set fuel economy for your car at different speeds); by selecting a slower but shorter route on a regular commute I could easily save 30-40% of fuel, and the 1 hr trip took maybe a few minutes longer.

In Netherlands they do the same for bicycles. All directions same time green! Great fun. Suddenly the intersection is full of cyclists (going in all possible directions), seconds later the intersection is clear, and somehow they manage not to hit one another. Also fun to navigate as cyclist. Added bonus: extra green light cycles for the bikes, cutting waiting time, and far fewer cyclists run red lights!

That's exactly how I learned traffic lights work in The Netherlands. Yet pedestrians you don't normally have to worry about, as they do not get a green light even when you're turning left at a green disk shaped light. Basic safety arrangement. Pedestrians get their own time slot.

Interestingly, the very first car route planning software I used had options to select your vehicle type. Pedestrian, bicycle, passenger car, passenger car with trailer, or truck. It would give different results for different vehicles. You could even fine tune your preferences for say motorways over secondary roads, by giving them a preference score. Tell it to avoid toll roads, or to avoid ferry crossings.

None of these options are present in Google Maps.

The application I'm talking about is from an era that it was distributed on floppy disk as no-one had even dial-up at home, and you had to print out the results on your matrix printer to take it with you in the car...

How many backups do you need, really?

This were two seemingly unrelated events that independently took out two links. You can add links ad infinito but where do you end? Having two links sounds reasonable to me. It's just bad luck that one gets damaged, and the second has an outage before the first can be fixed. Odds of that happening are pretty low. Adding a third link won't make the whole thing that much more reliable as likely they are already at >99%.

You probably never have experienced how fast and reliable such a sat link is (it's not).

I've talked to quite some cruise passengers, and most of them avoid using the sat link. It's very slow, unreliable, and expensive to boot (they generally have to pay by the minute instead of always on). That's just used by a couple thousand people, while here it's about a slightly larger community.

Still the question: what is "market value"?

Microsoft may simply say that the market value of a certain version of Windows (say a Laptop Edition) is $10 for a copy, and that this is to be sold pre-installed on hard disk only. Then they have the Full Version - this is sold to retailers at $100 a copy, in fancy box with CD, making the market value of this version at $100. It's easy to argue that this are different versions of the software. They may even add/remove functionality to these versions. Different product, different price.

Or how about MS declaring the market value of the software to be $10, with digital distribution, and then selling the installation keys to OEM manufacturers only with restrictions on resale (only to be sold bundled with something else). Then if MS sells the same with box and CD to retailers at $100, that'd be above market value, right? That $90 extra would cover the cost of the box design, the material for box/CD and printing cost, the transport cost, handling, etc.

Figuring out what "market value" for a product should be is ambiguous and arbitrary at best. Just look at those "anti-dumping" charges the US likes to put on various Chinese made products. The US government declares these products to be sold at "lower than market value" or "lower than cost" - no idea how the US government can really know the cost of production of a Chinese company.

People doing development work on their laptop are a tiny minority in this world (/. is not representative for this world).

Most people use their laptop for browsing, e-mail (if not in the browser), playing a movie, organising their photos, and maybe typing a resume or so. That's about it. For those people, pretty low-end hardware will do just fine.

I've always gotten myself low-end (cheap) hardware. Last year's models. Doing fine, I can do all of the above (which is probably >90% of the time I spend with the computer), and develop web pages, and fiddle with FreeCAD and even Blender though the latter is pushing it. I'm not however doing enough serious work with it to spend a lot of money to make these application go a little faster. It's not worth it for me. I can wait a few more seconds for a quick render, and the final renders well that takes maybe an hour or two... when I'm sleeping.

Market value... very ambiguous. What is the actual market value of a product? The regular retail price? The cnf price (not really applicable to software which doesn't have shipping cost)? Or some wholesale price? All these prices one could argue to be "market value".

Of these, retail price would be the worst, as it would effectively lead to government-supported price fixing. Manufacturer states retail price as "market value" and all have to sell at that price.

The classroom is a place to meet new people, as is the work floor. It just happens naturally there, people are partnered up to do tasks, you have to work together, etc. When you take a bunch of strangers and start to introduce them to one another, good chance that at least here and there romantic sparks fly. Add to that that most students are in their early 20s, an age for many people to start looking for a life partner, and the great number of marriages that follows is just expected.

The greater number in religious studies is also not too surprising as the people there will have strong religious beliefs, and strongly religious people like to marry people that are also strongly religious and of the same faith. Here is even more reason for people to actively search for a partner within their study group, as it's much less likely to find a suitable partner (i.e. sharing the religious beliefs) randomly in the outside world.

And that's just one of the issues.

The bigger issue is going to be: how are they going to inject it into the existing market, and be able to pass it off as the real thing? There are only a couple thousand black rhinos left, so there can't be more than a couple hundred genuine horns in the market per year. Now these guys want to try and flood that market with thousands of horns, and think they can make the buyers believe they can supply thousands of horns? Good luck with that!

This is an illegal market so the people operating in it will be really wary and careful. Not just for fear of the authorities, also for fear of imposters trying to sell them fake products. After all if you're paying tens of thousands for just one horn, you're not going to some new guy on the block. At least not with a very thorough background check to make sure he's "legitimate" so to say - not a mole, or an imposter selling fakes...

You must be new here.

Ever heard of PGP? The versions that used the large encryption keys (>1024 bits at the time, iirc, or maybe even smaller keys), used to be banned for export under certain US military laws. The rest of the world had to do with a weaker version of PGP. Not that the full version wasn't available to us anyway...

Are they actually buying licenses, or just downloading it from somewhere? OP talks about increasing market share for Win7 - not about a surge in number of licenses sold by MS.

Much more reasonable than the theory that many people would rush out to shops to buy a Win7 license just to be able to get Win10 later.

Basically no-one every buys Windows as separate retail copy. It comes bundled with a new computer. It is interesting of course how Win7 is still gaining market share.

What is the legal value of such an included license, really? You don't have the issuer's signature on it. You could argue it's "signed" if you download from the maker's web site, but not if you're downloading from a third party source, where the package could have been altered.