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Comment Re:Not the only reason..... (Score 1) 409

I'm guessing you somehow haven't heard of healthcare.gov. Why would the government reinvent LibreOffice anyway?

What I would like to see is a way for people to fund bounties on the bugs and feature requests in bug tracking sites, so there will be some incentive to get past annoying but useable. I like open source software, but I get aggravated at decade-old bugs that never gets fixed (e.g. LibreOffice won't snap tab stops to ruler remarks, Firefox doesn't support option labels inside select tags).

Comment Re: How are those kind of things patentable? (Score 2) 406

Apple bought one of the leaders in capacitance touch screens, so they were able to ship a mobile device with it first. That was a rather innovative move by Apple, but the type of touch screen dates back to the 1960's. Actually, visionary is a much better term, since everyone else was satisfied enough with inferior products that they didn't take the risk. Buying a company, then selling their products doesn't require any innovation. The Nokia 9000 Communicator was released in 1996 so apparently it was obvious then. I would be surprised if there wasn't older prior art on scanning text to find relevant data bits like phone numbers, email or web sites. This could have been a useful feature for a website, even in the mid 90's.

Comment Re:The term of art is "obvious." (Score 1) 406

Others were making capacitive touchscreens before Apple, dating back to the 1960's. 20 years ago I swiped my mouse to "unlock" my computer from a screensaver. I don't see why anyone deserves a patent for replicating a 20+ year old feature on 50 year old screen technology. If someone insists the dragging part is new, I wish to force them to eat a Mac Plus.

Comment Re: Career advice from Yoda (Score 1) 451

When adjusted for inflation, their stock has lost 1/3 of its value over the last 15 years, while Apple and Google have taken over as #1 and #2 IT companies by market cap. Currently for Microsoft: The desktop is in decline, they're losing market share of real web sites (not including parked domains), they can hardly scratch the mobile market, there is growing competition in the set-top device market, the Sony PS4 is beating the Xbox One in sales by about 2 to 1, a large number of people despise Windows 8, IE & Microsoft Office keep losing ground to alternatives, Mac market share continues to grow, and their online services division lost so much money for so long that they stopped listing it separately on their income statements. This is hardly a death knell to a company with all of Microsoft's money and resources, but things currently don't look good long term. Linux, assuming you count the Android fork, is coming along nicely. With "Dual OS", even Intel, Samsung, and Asus are saying this could be the year it succeeds on the desktop ;-) (well, at least a virtualized Android OS on Windows, which even I wouldn't really count)

Comment Re:Bah, fake posturing. (Score 1) 401

What about economies of scale and the more appliance like, smaller scale fission reactor developed by Taylor Wilson? Wikipedia repeatedly has nuclear power as one of the cheapest sources available in different locations, if not the cheapest. For instance, in UK, the median price for onshore wind looks to be about 30% higher than nuclear, and offshore wind is 2-3x the price (original reports here.

Based on the first numbers I found on Google, it would cost about £120+ billion to install panels on the 25 million homes in the UK (assuming economies of scale offset the huge change in demand). The HS2 rail project is reported to cost anywhere from £28 billion (with less tunneling) to £80 billion. Did you leave out the price of labor to have the panels installed?

Comment Re:Given the mass extinctions... (Score 1) 401

Tropical storms are a risk that people take to live in beautiful, warm, coastal areas. If the inhabitants are genuinely concerned, then they should build more resistant buildings. I know a small volunteer organization that built a number of houses in Jamaica that withstood Hurricane Ivan. Those only took a week apiece to build, and the one and only seriously damaged house was in a very bad location.

Fortunately, the 2013 hurricane season was one of the least active ever recorded, but tropical storms have unfortunately been at higher levels. So far (according to Wikipedia) we have gone from having 1 tropical storm in 1914 to 14 storms in 2013, but considering there were also 15 storms in 1916 and 20 storms in 1933, I don't think there is very good data for any sort of long term trend prediction, even though the numbers have been higher for a couple of decades.

The costs to forcibly, radically and rapidly impact society are very high, especially in developing countries that have no money for green infrastructure, which is why I would consider it a weapon of mass destruction. We also have little idea what opportunities (e.g. energy inventions) that will cost us. However, if we can just figure out how to keep from being scorched by the impending heat wave of mass destruction, most would argue that it's worth it...Or are we facing a massive man-made ice age again? I don't keep up with the 30-50 year weather predictions anymore. The 3-5 day ones are wonky enough.

Comment Re:why not? (Score 3, Funny) 303

The reason for knee jerk reactions is probably because the article actually shows no notable uptick in Microsoft's market share of active sites. It's just a sensationalist summary of some poorly analyzed data. For doing actual web serving (not just parked domain serving), they've fallen to 3rd, being beaten by both Apache and nginx. According to the numbers, 93.0% of Microsoft's sites are inactive, and they are leveraging 86.1% of the growth in inactive sites. Microsoft is now the leading web server for inactive sites. In other words, IIS does nothing better than the competition

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