To play devil's advocate: A big brand product has a reputation to maintain and thus a quality incentive, where as a fly-by-night generic product has an incentive to cut corners and if it doesn't work out they'll just roll a new generic LLC name and start again.

While I'm not "rich", I'm financially secure enough to afford the luxury of brand loyalty: Sticking with a product/brand that has proven to me to be well made and reliably so.

So sure, I could save money shopping around for a cheaper competitor version of this or that, but that takes time and has risks, both of which have significant real costs.

How does that account for the microvascular system?

The beauty of 3D printing organs is the ability to include all the auxiliary support systems and complex structures. Much of the technology being developed is also using the donor's own tissues and so it too does not trip the immune system.

And the fun part of this when I was a student in high school, "the teacher can't/won't actually teach" isn't a "valid" reason to request being transferred to another classroom...

At least a case against public unions at any rate. There's more than a little conflict of interest when you can effectively play both sides of the fence in negotiations, which is the case when unions can lobby and campaign for the very people they will be negotiating "against".

Private industry unions however, are and will forever be needed to help balance negotiating power between corporations and labor.

It baffles me how often folks like yourself seem to truly believe because a particular path was taken to get where we are today that that path was the only possible way we could have gotten here. And you fools believe it's a given that we're better off for it.

If the BSD stack code wasn't available, do you really think no one else could have written a compatible alternative? Especially considering how many have done exactly that? Coding a network stack against a well written open specification isn't magic, it isn't a gift that can only be handled down from the Heavens.

And why is it a given we're better off with happening the way it has? Maybe if MS had to write their own stack they would have contemplated and predicted the shortcomings in TCP/IP v4 and jumped directly to (and helping craft) TCP/IP v6. With the historical market pull of Windows we could have all been running a v6-like stack a decade ago, rather than still limping along with v4.

The fact is we don't know how things would have turned out, yet there's still just as much reason to believe we'd all be better off today as there is to believe we'd be worse off.

You have to look up and right, taking your eyes away from the road.

Nav info is pretty basic and generally presented with simple image/icons, which can easily be consumed simply with peripheral vision most of the time.

So no need to even glance over most of the time, and even when you do the entire road is still well within the rest of your peripheral vision (which even w/o any screen is what you use to receive 95% of visual driving information with anyway).

That's wildly different than most standalone GPS units which require a much farther eye shift as well as huge focus change, while reflective HUD devices (like Glass) can be focused to appear at the average viewing distance of important traffic around you (50 feet give or take, about where the car in front of you will be at speed).

(Creative) writing is oddly different for many. Needlessly difficult tools can often help the creative process somehow and writers are frequently drawn to them. Or maybe they're just nostalgic, or mentally masochistic, it's hard to say. Whatever it is book writers often have other productivity issues that far out-shadow poor typing skills.

It's a special case. For the rest, they'd better have their typing skill shit together.

Seriously, if you have not already, give node.js a spin if you do any Internet-related development work. And I don't mean anybody should necessarily start using it, just that it is something to know today.

Here's all you need to know to day about node.js: Node.js Is Bad Ass Rock Star Tech

Funny....absolutely every use case you listed strongly benefits from having solid keyboard skills (ie, touch typing). Frankly anything less should be considered incompetent, or at least very junior. In this day and age it's more important to know how to use a keyboard fluently than it is to know how to write fluently. That's been the case for decades now.

There's nothing "clearly" about it. It entirely depends on what, if anything, the Glass is displaying.

GPS, navigation: Far less distracting then a traditional GPS unit as your eyes don't need to leave the road.

Vehicle information: Far less distracting then even the built in speedometers and such, again because your eyes need not leave the road. For example, Glass linked up with http://www.automatic.com/
 

Yep, I'll agree with you: If you're pulling a crappy trailer that probably shouldn't be on the road at all, the F350 will compensate for the trailer's defects better than the F100.

The point still stands, however: Using bigger trucks to compensate for defective trailer designs is nothing short of a kludge.

If it's got "really good trailer breaks", and loaded to spec and properly, you could be pulling it with a moped and still stop in the same distance.

So you and I probably have a differing opinion of what would qualify as "really good trailer breaks".

You don't always get to tow under ideal conditions.

Ideal? No. But properly rated and safe? Absolutely.

Otherwise you should not be on the road. It's that simple. Just because some backroad hicks do it all the time and they haven't offed themselves yet doesn't mean jack shit.

When I drive through the country and see "cowboys" driving shiny new $60k trucks pulling a rusted out tin can excuse for a trailer, it's pretty clear what happened: They sink all their money into their sweet ride and just can't stomach "wasting" anything on a proper trailer when the 40 year old rusted junk pile is still 'hauling just fine.

Of course, it's not just the hicks that do this. There's plenty of city folks hauling huge $100k boats with a $70k truck on a $2,000 trailer they picked up on craigslist for $500.

And yet, every big rig crossing the country is pulling a trailer 3-6x the weight of the tractor. And the rating towing capacity of light trucks is commonly about double the truck weight (limited more by engine and transmission cooling than anything else).

Of course, that's properly equipped, which at those upper limits implies active breaking on the trailer.

Even a tiny load on a trailer without its own breaks will make the entire rig go squirrelly when stopping. With good trailer breaks however, the tow vehicle will barely feel it at all.

Weight is about STOPPING a load and trailering it in a stable fashion.

Clearly you've never hauled anything more impressive than a jet ski.

Any trailer of enough weight to matter is going to have its own breaking system and sure as hell not rely upon the truck for any significant breaking force.

Weight is only going to possibly matter when pulling under averse conditions (very heavy load, up a steep hill, on a wet or loose road).

So if you can build a cheaper equivalent... why aren't you in business, building cheaper equivalents and getting rich off the fact that it's costing you less to build equivalent hardware?

Because if you haven't figured it out yet, the vast majority of the market place is not rational. Cheaper, faster, better, etc is all very far down the list of factors that bring about success in business. Apple is the pinnacle example of that fact, and they know it. Apple laughs all the way to the bank at anyone and everyone who actually believes "economics 101" bullshit.

Consumers are humans and humans are simply not rational beings. So the key to understanding markets is to understand not logic and reason (as MBAs would tell us), but psychology. The absolute single key to Apple's business success is their understanding of psychology and ability to manipulate it into making irrational purchasing choices.