Too late.

If it's already been exploited to install other malware, removing the loader for that malware isn't going to get rid of the malware that came in while the door was being held open by Superfish.

Then the year of the Linux desktop would be 3 years away instead of 5 years away.

VCs tend to be impressed by polish.

Typically, if you take an idea to a VC, unless you have some IP tied up, or there is significant work entailed to get to a first mover advantage, they are already thinking about one of their go-to teams that can take your idea and run with it. Frankly, ideas are a dime a dozen, and beyond that, the only thing that matters is an ability to execute, and that means they are not investing in your product, per se, they are investing in your market segment and the team.

Usually, they will prefer their team to the team that you have put together because they are familiar with their team. Their team has a track record, and they have an existing relationship with the teams they typically work with on new projects. It's one of the reasons there are so many serial entrepreneurs, and so few new entrepreneurs that make it past the friends-and-family or angel funding stage of their startup into series A financing.

If you are a new entrepreneur, or someone with a proven technical track record, who has never been on "The VP Gravy Train", unless you are already profitable (and are therefore trying to give away a very large chunk of your company and control of your board of directors, in exchange for capital to bring your venture to scale), you need every advantage going into the meeting that you can lay your grubby little hands on.

Packaging of yourself is therefore almost as important as the content of the presentation itself.

So yeah, they're "impressed by a good looking laptop", if that's part of the overall package impression that convinces them that your team is the right team, and that they won't need to replace you, the founder, with one of their go-to CEOs, or one of their VPs they've been cultivating to take a CEO position at some point in the future, and "Gee, I think it's time we gave Frank a shot at a CEO position; what do you think, other managing partners of this large venture fund?".

If you are a technical person, you will be lucky to last in the C suite much beyond (mostly) losing control of your board of directors, which is going to happen some time between closing Series A and closing Series B. Typically, your series B will be contingent on you losing control to the point that they can replace you at any point their confidence falters, and they decide "It's time to bring in adult supervision".

PS: One of the reasons there are so few women in higher up positions is that the women haven't taken their paydays from being an early employee, and acted as their own angel investor in a new company that has been successful. You kind of have to be a gambling addict to get to that point in the game, so that you are a known quantity. That said, technical companies in the Fortune 500 have done 2X as well asall of the other Fortune 500 companies, in terms of percentages, so tech is about 2X as egalitarian as any other industry in that regard.

Low margin vs. High demand

There's room for both low margin, and there's high demand items in consumer electronics.

When I needed a Windows laptop, before Bootcamp existed so that Windows could run on Apple hardware, I bought a Sony Vaio: it was the most beautiful non-Apple laptop on the market at the time, and when you are going into a VC to pitch your idea to them, you want to dress to impress, and that includes the machine on which you are giving your powerpoint on your business plan.

Vaio's were a high demand item because they had very good esthetics. A lot of other Sony products were higher margin than their competitors as well, because they were aimed at the high esthetic market.

The PlayStation is really a terrible product, comparatively speaking; the XBox is a much better product, based on Microsoft being able to leverage it to get game onto their desktop platforms as well (at some point), and potentially onto Windows Phones, as well (at some point), because the underlying platform technology is Windows on all three.

I think the person writing the article is a gamer who has drank the PlayStation Kool Aid, and wants Sony to concentrate on it, even though Sony is one PSN hack away from losing out on a holiday season, as they did previously. A single product company is just too vulnerable to single point of failure due to externalities.

It's a dumb idea because it would be a bad business decision on their part.

The differential diagnosis: If you are also bleeding from your ears, it was the Kardashians.

Obviously aggression toward one another is required.

This is really a basic tenet of what might be called 'Nietszcheanism'.

Its possible for humans to live a life of 'poverty, dirt and miserable ease' ie where their life is awful and boring and drab but at the same time its so easy and safe that they can't be bothered doing anything about it. Its aggression, dissatisfaction and greed that gets them to step up and demand more from life and to live beyond that state of miserable ease.

I heard that antibiotics can cause extreme nut allergies in children... or at least thats what I'm telling the anti-vaxxers.

Aggression, along with greed and selfishness are absolutely essential to the existance of life itself. They are at the very root of life. No living thing exists without doing so at the expense of another living thing and must be selfish, greedy and aggressive to survive and propagate. Even cyanobacteria exist at the expense of other cyanobacteria; occupying space that another cyanobacteria would like to occupy.

Get rid of aggression, selfishness and greed and you get rid of life.

Probably because we don't feel that it's abuse; once we've paid for a certain diameter of pipe to the rest of the Internet, it's their job to let us send or receive whatever we want over that pipe, without editorializing.

Of course, if they really want to editorialize, and demonstrate a technical ability to do so, I'm going to hold them legally responsible any time my 13 year old son is successful in accessing porn over this pipe that they are supposedly capable of exercising content control on, since by *not* exercising control on that particular content, they are responsible for the porn.

The example I was responding to involved M1 tanks and the US military of today. I don't think that the US military has replicator technology.

My point is that bringing supplies with you is not a supply chain. Its a limited resource. So with those limited supplies you bring with you, you better hope you can finish the campaign before they run out. Or, like I said, those tanks will just be hard cover.

Honestly I wouldn't expect anything else from a 5-eyes nation.

It would depend on the supply chain.

If the modern invading force didn't have the supply chain for fuel then within a day or two those thousand M1 tanks would be nothing but cover to hide behind.

How did the American Indians detect the Europeans?

I suggest we *not* do that...

Also how did the Poles detect the Mongols?

Let's *not* do that, either...