Desalinization is expensive. It's energy intensive, they're ugly as sin, it results in bad-tasting water, it pollutes the oceans with saline, the resulting water still needs to be pumped hundreds of miles to be used, etc. etc.

It's a raw deal and it's stupid to mention it. Please don't.

Moves like this aren't philanthropic. It's a common tactic for a vested CEO to cut their salary to just $1. But because they are vested (EG: stock options, partial ownership, etc) they make out just fine.

As a company owner, I could cut my salary to just $1 and it probably wouldn't affect my true annual gross income at all, since unpaid salary just becomes profit.

Step 1: Offer a compelling product.

Step 2: Offer it in a cheaper *and* more open way that the competition.

Step 3: Repeat step 2 over and over while network effects kick in. As trust and network effects continue to escalate, you become the "default choice".

Step 4: Only go here when you want to be evil. Stop offering such a good price. Don't be as open as you used to be. Structure your prices around keeping competition out rather than simply being "better". Hire lobbyists and start offering regulatory officials vacations in order to provide "an environment conducive to product education".

Google is now just sticking its toe in the water for Step 4. Microsoft charged into Step 4 as early as they could.

That's the thing about standards: there are so many and you don't have to reveal which one you are using!

Irregular verbs exist because English is a hack job of a language mashed together from several sources.

Silent letters don't exist to disambiguate homonyms, EG: lead. They exist because the words came from different sources. Compare the derivations of right and rite.

I'd wager that a properly constructed language (if adopted) would probably mutate fairly slowly, about as fast as normal language does.

This is Comcast trying to squelch Google. You are most likely to see them "roll out" Gb+ Internet in areas that Google Fiber is being rolled out, and the reason is *only* to make sure that Google can't make money at it and quit altogether.

This is called "cutting off their air supply"; the assumption is that Google can't fund a literal roll out nationwide. Welcome to the the end-game for your most "free markets" - a monopoly.

If only a domain could publish information about the CA authorized to sign its certificates... perhaps with a record via DNS called "info", and secured with something called DNSSEC so you can be relatively sure it's correct.

Naw. Stuff like that couldn't happen, could it?

I'm a *nix neckbeard, I respect my skills, and I use nano daily. It's a simple, fast, straightforward editor with controls similar to Word Star. Ctl-K to delete line, etc. As I've been busy building my neckbeard for 15 years or so now, and originally learned word processing with WordStar, it's a simple, natural fit.

I code in NetBeans with an IDE but for sysadmin work on any of the 50 or so servers I admin? Nano + mercurial all the way.

Has RTFA become so absent that we just don't bother with TFA anymore?

It's a company, not a military. Of *course* they're compromised! Or at least, compromisable! I mean, every single employee comes to work because they are getting paid. So the NSA leaves a suitcase full of cash at an employee's house, and is asked to leak data, and is offered full legal immunity for doing so.

You wouldn't take an extra $20,000 risk free? If not, you don't know somebody at work who would? Many people would do this for much less.

You are right about the "natural monopoly" being a thing not necessarily dependent on regulation.

But, in many/most areas, regulations *also* stifle competition.

PS: My son is an engineering student and has the previous generation, M4500. He says it runs AutoCad "like water" and blows away the workstations provided by the University.

It's not as light but still quite powerful.

And I forgot to mention that the M3800 has support for 2 HDDs as long as one of them is mSata.

I have a Dell Precision M3800. You can buy it from Dell with Ubuntu pre-installed. I didn't know this, I bought with Win 8 and installed Fedora 21, and was surprised when *everything* "just worked" - literally no futzing at all after a yum update and dickering with the sound volume.

Advantages:
1) 4K support right out of the gate.
2) Screen is amazing
3) Fast as f**k
4) Built as an engineering/physics "mobile workstation", and it shows.
5) Very thin, very light!
6) Native Linux support.

Cons:
1) It's a bit spendy. $1200 in the basic config, I think. Mine with 3 years of next-day support and a case came to about $1550.
2) Ethernet is provided via USB3 dongle. It's a full Gb so performance won't suffer but it can be awkward if you really *need* ethernet on the road. I have ethernet at work and wifi everywhere else so it's a non-issue for me.

PS: You DO have backups.... right?

As SSD cells wear, the problem is that they hold charge for less time. Starting new, the time that the charge will be held would be years, but as the SSD wears, the endurance of the held charge declines.

Consequently, continuous write tests will continue to report "all good" with a drive that is useless in practice, because while the continuous write will re-write a particular cell once every few hours, it might only hold a charge for a few days - meaning if you turned it off for even a day or so, you'd suffer serious data loss.

SSDs are amazing but you definitely can't carry conventional wisdom from HDDs over.