I had never seen a black rectangle with rounded edges before the iPhone! ... ...well unless you count the TV I had as a child. And the TV I have now. And probably half the electronics in my house.

The whole "trade dress" concept seems a bit silly to me in the first place but ti is beyond stupid when they can claim something as simple as their rounded rectangular design as being "trade dress".

, but future growth and earnings potential

But most of that future growth and earnings potential is going to come from some other company on the market. If you make a smartphone, you are taking money from other smartphone companies, as well as to some degree companies that make computers. Once you get successful enough, you may also be in a position to reduce margins to the companies who provide components for your smartphone, so you're taking their money too.

A little bit of money comes from "new" sources, the larger you are the more that may be available, but generally your profit comes at someone elses loss. Part of why Wall St. tolerates only a small amount of competition and we always end up with 2 or 3 real competitors.

in search of a problem. Seriously - which problem does this sort of stuff solve ??

I will not risk the safety and security of my systems by allowing them to display potentially (frequently) harmful ads.

Let's tally the bad things some ads, do:

- Play audio without permission
- Play video without permission
- Provide intentionally misleading guidance about what a click will do (i.e. "DOWNLOAD HERE!")
- Pop-ups
- Pop-overs
- Obscure material
- Render improperly/force remaining web page to render improperly
- Look really, really ugly
- Frequently provides a strong incentive for copy-cat content, 0 content websites, click-bait, plagiarized content websites to exist, and to be profitable

Let's then look at the upside:
- Provide income stream to site owner

I've got an obvious solution:
- Learn from Wall St. Journal. Paywall your content, groom it to ensure it is top quality and worth payment. Have a secure order form that is not compromised and willing to spill your CC details to everyone, ask for no more personal information than is strictly required to authorize a purchase.

Of course most of us aren't going to deal with the paywall, but if you are a site owner, and you want guaranteed revenue from your site, then that is your only option. Otherwise the arms race will continue. As far as I'm concerned the internet was far more useful before people tried to monetize it. There was 90% less content, to be sure, but the content that exists came from people who had something useful to say.

...that will be the first useful thing done by Arabs-as-a-collective ever since the end of the Middle Ages.

Nothing rigorous that I've found. I've seen some things like a Mac user posting on a forum asking why Cubase was hitting harder on OS-X than Windows along with screenshots of the overall load meters that it has, but little in the way of details on methodology.

While I haven't done extensive looking, I haven't come across anything and it is something I'm interested in.

Sadly, there seems to be little interest in testing. People who own PCs can't really test it, outside of building a hackintosh, and Mac users are not very interested in testing particularly since many of them have a real need to believe their money was well spend and do not wish to do something which might challenge that idea.

If someone gave me the hardware and software I'd love to try it, but I own only a PC, and the DAW I use (Sonar) is Windows only.

The only thing I can point to with some newer data is a Sonar benchmark, conducted by their lead programmer, showing improvements in Windows 8 vs Windows 7. They found basically an across the board improvement, with no code recompile http://blog.cakewalk.com/windo... . Now that says nothing of cross platform (as I noted, Sonar is Windows only anyhow) but does indicate that MS continues to improve Windows' performance with regards to intensive time critical tasks like audio.

Today, in today's navies and naval thinking, "frigate" and "destroyer" are different answers upon the question: "We can build a warship of a certain size, as we have the resources to do that. Now how are we going to use that hull ?" If the answer is "frigate"; then you dedicate a large portion of that hull to propulsion systems and fuel. What space remains is for weapons systems, electronics, and crew quarters. What you get: a relatively fast, maybe very fast, ship - with a limited choice of weapons systems. This is the choice the Dutch Royal Navy has been making for decades: they want to possess the ability to arrive on the spot soon, and to act far away from home ( e.g. in order to fulfill the Dutch NATO-assigned duty of participating in keeping the North Atlantic trade routes free and open ).

If the answer is "we want to deploy as much firepower as possible from that hull", then a destroyer is what you get. You have less space for propulsion systems and fuel, hence you can be on the spot less soon and operate not so far away from home - but each and every ship present makes a relatively large impact upon the scene. This is the current choice of the German Navy, which has to patrol the East and North Seas, relatively close to naval bases.

True, though there is some precedence. OS-X does not seem to be particularly zippy in the few cross platform app benchmarks that are to be found. A good example is DAW bench's test on Cubase, Protools, and Kontakt: http://dawbench.com/win7-v-osx.... What you see is that Cubase has a much more efficient engine than ProTools (no surprise) and that on Windows either one gets a lot more polyphony than the Mac. At any given buffer size (lower buffers are harder to deal with) Windows did better.

Pretty good test too since you are dealing with tools that have long been cross platform. Kontakt has been cross platform for its entire life, Pro Tools was Mac only until version 5 (1998ish), since when it has been cross platform, and Cubase has been cross platform since back in the DOS and Atari ST days. All the software has long development histories on both platforms, yet Windows gives superior results.

None of this means OS-X is unusable or anything, but it doesn't appear to have the performance Windows does, when pushed.

Truckers do a lot of shit at truck stops that are not relevant to autonomous trucks. They buy greasy food, take a piss, get a blowjob from a hooker who just ate greasy food, carve the bugs off the windshield, replace the air freshener, take a nap, call the wife and tell her he misses her while avoiding talking about hooker blowjobs...

The shit that is relevant, such as checking tire pressure, oil level, carving the bugs off the camera lenses, whatever, can easily be done by the attendant. Not rocket science!

1) Truck signals for fuel.
2) Dispatch arranges for fuel delivery.
3) Truck pulls over when/where instructed.
4) Fuel truck pulls up, driver transfers fuel.
5) Profit!

Also, existing truck stops could simply employ drivers to bring autonomous trucks in for fueling and then send them on their way.

Same basic idea for maintenance.

If a plane could simply pull over on the outskirts of town to meet its harbor pilot, long haul freight plane pilots would be on the block, too.

I was referring to Windows 7 of course, until Microsoft chooses to release something that can fairly be described as an upgrade.

I found 30Hz to be annoying just sitting in a GUI, I never have tried to game with 4k on any system, I doubt I will do so soon.

Why can't the government print more pesos, inflating it anyway? The only difference is electronic funds may be easier to trace, but this is a loser in that they still have to pay to imprison you for being an enemy of the state. Easier just to "steal" via inflation, and knock you down to size and redistribute the extra pesos based on whatever their algorithm is (usually fraud).

If your government turns against you, you are fucked, period. Your only real hope is that you had some investments they can't reach, and you can get yourself out of the country before they close the borders.

Or Malaysia or Thailand and so on.

Be careful when you get on the American hate high horse, you overgeneralize and you risk looking racist. ...

or maybe admit it is a bit more nuanced than "not a civilized country."

The trick is DUAL. You can do dual monitors in linux, been there, done that. You can do 4k in linux, I'm doing that right now. But dual 4k means you have a video card with two display port interfaces, those are not easy to come by. Doing 4k on HDMI is certainly possible, but under any OS you will be limited to 30Hz refresh, which means mouse lag. Windows handles it poorly, you will see noticeable lag. OS X and Linux are pretty good about it, but still..it's annoying.

Once we get video cards with the newest HDMI implementation and/or video cards with more DP, then this might be worth looking at. Nobody has yet produced more pixels than I can find a use for, but I speculate that point could exist in my lifetime.