That may be true. Few enough people even know about Linux to qualify as wanting it. And yet... millions of people are buying Linux desktop devices in the form of Chromebooks. You may not think those are viable - and for your purposes, they may not be. But the definition of what a personal computer does is changing pretty quickly, and for a sizeable (and growing) part of the market, an Internet terminal is basically what their PC's are being used for. So, yeah, that portion will probably buy Chromebooks - or a Windows equivalent (Microsoft's not dumb). And Linux loaded on a cheap desktop (or an old XP machine) provides much the same functionality. No, not for those of you who need Windows and all the apps written for it, but yes for all those who just need something to get them access to the internet.

Pricing OSes isn't hard to do - Microsoft's been doing it for decades. And the price has been largely coming down - just like the price of everything else in computing. For a while there, Windows prices went up - but that was when the monopoly was riding high. And back then, they were providing a lot of new functionality. But the functionality plateaued with XP. How else can you explain how many systems are still running it - even now that it's unsupported. The new bells and whistles in Windows 8 (and 10?) are tied to the new Metro API's that don't have enough apps to make a difference. So desktop OS's have become a commodity - and are priced accordingly.

And ever since Linux provided a viable alternative, the prices have been falling. For netbooks - and now any small-screen Windows device, the going OS price is $0 - the same price as Android, OS/X and Linux. So it's not a question of $109 being too expensive - it's just that a desktop computer OS is now a commodity that doesn't need to cost half as much again as the hardware it runs on. Same should be true of word processing software (face it, the only component of MS Office that gets used by the majority of people that buy it) - but lingering (overblown) fears of incompatibility have held the line there.

It's free to upgrade for a year, because they need it to become the new 'standard' - fast. They need people writing apps that'll run nicely on the mobile version. And, if the rumors are true, they're planning to make up for all those free upgrades with a hefty OEM price for new computers (isn't it nice to be able to extract Monopoly rates when you need it). $109 OEM for the home version, $149 for Pro. Makes Chromebooks look better and better - not to mention Linux loaded on your old PC.

Not to say that'll keep people from buying laptops with Win10. Unless somebody sells the same hardware with Ubuntu for $100 less...

Well, you can go onto Google Drive and delete the backup copies there. I guess that's not so bad. I once accidentally deleted all the photos from my Camera folder on my phone when I was simply trying to delete the most recent one that the app used as a thumbnail for the folder. Stupid, yes, but it let me do it without so much as a "are you really sure?" warning - or an Undo option (which seems to be there now). I didn't have G+ backups enabled, and lost them all. If deletions automatically deleted the backups, I'd have also lost them.

What might be nice is some kind of setting to let you control automatic deletion of backups, say:
1. Provide a 'delete backup' option on the Undo screen that shows up anyway.
2. Provide a setting to just keep backups for a month or so until you go onto drive and request that then be kept indefinitely.
3. Define any photo deleted within X days of taking it as a 'reject', and then automatically delete backups of rejects. Or at least provide a way to see your rejects on Drive and easily delete them there.

Sure, Google has a bias toward keeping everything. But at some point that becomes more of an annoyance than a convenience. Gmail lets you select true deletion over archiving - and archived mail is more searchable than old photos. So why make it impossible to automatically delete stuff - if that's what the user wants.

I read all the passages except the big 70 page tirade, which I simply couldn't get through. And I liked the book. It's an appealing fantasy that leaves out every inconvenient aspect of society to make its political points. You're the one who's blinded to Rand's heavy hand. Like every utopian fantasy (be it Atlas Shrugged or Das Kapital, or Supply Side economics), there's a nugget of truth it's built around. But that nugget is extrapolated into utter nonsense.

And yes, I have been told that paid REALLY, REALLY WELL line by professed Rand fans. So don't blame the reporter. I imagine that if you think an objectivist wouldn't say that, then they'd simply say that some people's talents are best suited to cleaning toilets and the ennobling qualities of work are enough to bring happiness. Or else, that John Galt provided self-cleaning toilets. Or cattle prods to keep the low producers working without needing smiles on their faces - which of course, would contradict the 'ennobling qualities of work' aspect of the fantasy.

And at least part of the reason your mom's parents lived in the great school district that allowed that fortunate chain of success to happen was a government commitment to great school districts - and subsidized universities, etc. That commitment is less solid today, and wasn't universal even in their day. Had your mom's parents happened to be black (especially when they were coming up), things might not have turned out so rosy.

None of this is to justify poor people not trying. But fuck, can't you at least acknowledge that the deck is stacked? Maybe there are perverse incentives built into today's programs to help the poor. But don't blame that on the poor themselves - how about proposing better programs. And 'no programs' is not an option. You are by your own admission the product of several generations of programs that gave you the life you have today.

And the stupid bit about how it was okay for all the people to die in a huge rail tunnel accident - because their lives were worthless anyway based on how they lived them.

And the odd question of who cleaned the toilets in the super secret invisible mountain utopia. When I ask that one of Rand fans they go all catatonic and recite Manchurian Candidate style: "They were very happy because they were paid REALLY, REALLY WELL". Capitalization always used exactly like that, cut-and-paste style from some Objectivist website, I presume.

I think the point is that part of the reason some 'choose' to be druggies is that the jobs aren't there for the ones that don't - so why bother. Perhaps a circular, self-serving argument for 'laziness', but no more so than the argument that says "why bother structuring the economy so that high school graduates can have decent jobs when high school graduates are lazy druggies that don't want to work".

Medicare - before the new drug benefit that was explicitly barred from seeking good deals. Seems socialism's better than its reputation - except when crafted by Republicans who want it to look bad...

The point isn't really the timing of Elop's arrival - it's what Elop did with the situation. Going whole hog on Windows when Android was clearly the most successful alternative to iOS was pure Elop. It was a big bet with two possible outcomes:

      1. Success - in which case Nokia has a headstart on becoming just another producer of Windows phones (i.e. first mover in a replay of PC commodification). After all, if they succeeded, then Samsung and the rest would be right behind them.
      2. Failure - in which case Nokia is a cheap Microsoft acquisition.

Either outcome could've suited Elop. Neither was particularly great for Nokia.

The third option was to build Android phones. In that case, they'd at least be entering an arena with an established market for their products. So they'd be executing the 'success' scenario above - and competing with Samsung and the rest. On the merits of their hardware and any popular goodies they could add to their flavor of Android. And without having to develop a market singlehandedly just to get to the starting line.

Low interest is the way that central banks are trying to compensate for governments run by ideologues who continue to (pretend to) believe that 'austerity' and tax cuts will solve all economic problems. It amounts to trickle-down economics at its worst, but that's fine with the liars who got that ideology enacted into law in the first place - and are managing to keep it locked in through lies and obstructionism.

Yes, the public has 'spoken', and the Internet shall be ad-supported and otherwise 'free'. That doesn't mean that internet advertising has to be as intrusive as possible - just because it can be. Certain kinds of internet advertising is probably effective enough without tracking your every move. Even Google was pretty good - and financially successful - when it simply tracked your search queries and used aggregated data to produce good search results. The results may be marginally 'better' (i.e. personalized) today, but that's got plusses and minues. In any case, I wonder how much more revenue personalized searches generate for Google than before. You still have to click on the ads for them to make their money...

As far as other sites go, I imagine they're all sitting on huge troves of tracking data that they can't begin to figure out a use for - except maybe to sell it to somebody else which Google itself does not do, btw.

I noticed the same thing. Everything I've seen on monkey typists says that as either the number of monkeys, or the time, approaches infinity, the probability of getting a target string out of the typing pool approaches 1.

I also find it funny that in a post about a book on the Iraq debacle, the /. audience focuses on a tangential statement about probabilistics.

But my question is - how much cheaper is it than other, perhaps safer (or even just safer-sounding) materials. Obviously extracting natural gas is a hugely profitable business - but do we really have to roll over and accept whatever methods they want to use, just to make their business as profitable as possible. That's where regulations are supposed to come in - to make sure that the trade-offs between maximum profitability and public safety are forced rather than counting on industry to make them out of, oh, concern for safety. I imagine some of you will start from an assumption that any regulation is going to be excessive and unnecessary. So let me call bullshit in advance.

You're giving your readers a lot of credit for understanding satire ;-)