Of course it's mute. Who wants a back-talking flying car?

So there's an XKCD that's about you then?

While Ike certainly didn't help matters by agreeing to do this for the British. The British and French carving up the Ottoman empire as they saw fit happened much earlier than the 1950's and is the biggest catalyst for the current "radical Islamic behavior". It was certainly the first domino.

Windows 2000?

Windows 98/98SE, especially in comparison to 95?

NT 4.0?

Server 2003 was the last decent server edition?

They also run the compactor (or whatever it's called) rather frequently. Something's going to have to power that too, and I imagine that will eat up a lot of energy.

Part of it is, as someone else already stated, all of the easier things are done. The market has also shifted significantly. Back when I got into tech, and presumably you too, only a small part of the population cared.

You had large corporations who wanted mainframes, and only so many companies built them. The admins that maintained those systems back then were viewed as about half a step down from Merlin. Then there were the hobbyists, who were mainly geeks and a very small portion of the population. So the low end computer market was very small.

Now the average person walks around with more computing power in their pocket than an entire computer lab in the 1970's had. And the user doesn't need to know how to program in Assembly, or create stacks of punch cards just to play tic-tac-toe. They need about as much intelligence as your average cat to do things that weren't even possible 30 years ago.

That being said, it's now a huge multibillion dollar market and is very competitive. When you're dealing with the average person, marketing is every bit, if not more important than substance. At this point the MBA's are in full swing and if it's going to cost X number of dollars to design a feature or X number minus a little bit to deny a competitor of something; well the number at the bottom of the spreadsheet is all that matters.

This is how the entire medical device/tech industry works. Take a look at the DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) standard some time. It was developed so that you could move images from scanners to storage or diagnostic work stations and be able to analyze the images no matter what vendor hardware was at the other end. Sounds great, doesn't it?

So what happened was all of the major vendors (Siemens, GE, Philips, Toshiba, etc) got together with others and "standardized" all of the metadata (DICOM tags) in images. So things like the patient name, date of scan, what model/type of scanner was used, pixel/voxel size, etc. would be in the same tag no matter what vendor created the images. But what ended up happening was that everyone added the tags they wanted, so each vendor can keep using a different tag for the same field. Though this has gotten better.

But the real fun is that each vendor also has "private" or "shadow" tags. So they can make a software change on a scanner and suddenly a value that used to be in one of the standard tags is now somewhere else. And if you are lucky they left the tag you were expecting it to be in empty. But not always.

On the communications side of things, some of the older PACS archives can only accept a series one image at a time sequentially. But newer systems will send 8 or 32 images at once. So the older systems can choke, or in some cases simply accept only the fist image that gets sent in each batch. So if 8 images come at once, it'll only accept the first image of that batch and ignore the other 7. Most systems check for this now and send images as the other device wants them to, but there were some fun times a few years back.

Basically none of the vendors wanted this. They want medical institutions to purchase only their hardware. It was grudgingly that they agreed to the DICOM standard, and they do everything they can to make it difficult for other companies systems to talk to theirs. But they have to be careful to not go too far. Basically you get pecked to death by ducks.

I'm guessing you are a little younger than me as my opinion of Oldsmobile was formed by the cars they had in the late 1960's and early 1970's. I had a friend who has a 1970 Olds Cutlass SX. That was a beast of a car. The engine was a 455 rated at 365HP and 510lbs of torque. There were also the more common 442's.

While not as sporty, the first two generations of the Toronado were just plain beautiful cars. And with a 385HP 425 Olds Rocket V8, they would still get up and go.

The 1977-1979 Starfire Firenza weighed 2800 lbs and could be had with a 305 ci V8. It wasn't the prettiest of cars, but it handled well for it's time and had a good power to weight ratio.

No, but this guy had purchased enough parts from government surplus sales to build as many as 88 Cobra attack helicopters.

I had a friend who worked on investigations into this kind of thing. She told me about a guy they caught who had 1 fully functional Apache Longbow helicopter and another that was about 70% complete. I couldn't find a link for that one. But it was around the same time.

I'm not talking about when something crashes, or there is an issue.

Agreed. Win 7 is supported until 2020 and the last I heard the Pro version may go a little while longer than that.

I am wondering if this monitoring will cease and blow over as more people hear about it. Most people seem to have forgotten that XP phoned home with random core dumps when it was first released. I don't remember when they stopped that, It may have been "fixed" prior to sp1 even.

I suspect this will become opt-in, if it remains at all. The whole NSA thing has the masses much more cognizant of such things currently.

Just what kind of monster are you?

No, they are not afraid of Tesla. As TFS stated, they think of Tesla as "fringe" Which at the moment, they are kind of correct. GM has sold almost 80,000 Volts. The Model S is has probably sold 30K units to date. Granted, the Volt is cheaper and has been for sale two years longer. But it's also not something that GM really cares about. And that's just looking at their electric vehicle sales. GM probably averages 200,000+ units sold per month in the US alone.

That being said. They should take notice. Times are changing and it's hard for large companies who have been around forever to see threats. And Tesla has been and is a very forward thinking company

I wouldn't count GM out just yet. They still sell a lot of vehicles.They've also been very innovative in the past. It's possible they can do so again.