I'm sure there is still some culture of embrace, extend, extinguish within Microsoft. I'm sure some in the business products group still feel like they have no competition and they can treat customers as poorly as they wish. However, the worst elements of Microsoft's culture were rooted in their monopoly, the fact that they could do whatever they wanted and customers would still buy from them. Today, the MAJORITY of hardware purchased runs Android, not Windows. I think Microsoft has taken that fact to heart in some ways.

The SAG rate sheet specifies about $3,400 per week for most performers. Recognizing that they only get paid for the time they are on set, not the "work" time put into going to auditions, etc, so figure that's about $1,700 per week of work that they put in.

$1,700 week - yeah sounds like interchangeable people to me. Not the people hiring agents to negotiate for them.

A productivity difference of 10X-20X is well documented. I've seen it several times. Note that's average productivity over a year, not consistently every day. Here's an example:

  I've seen more than one instance in which a average, "competent" developer will spend 10 days writing a module to add feature X to some software, to solve business need Y. The expert/guru/rockstar will spend ten minutes changing a setting to solve the same problem.

So the average person spent ten working days, the expert spent ten minutes in this one case. The expert could then be only equally as productive for the rest of day and they will have accomplished in one day more than the first person accomplished in ten days. I very often solve business needs by _removing_ code, removing a restriction or problem. You can imagine that removing a blocking problem can easily be ten times as productive as the typical approach of solving new problems or handling new tasks by building new systems. Simply asking "why can't we use the existing system for this new task?", then tweaking the existing system to handle the new requirement, can be hugely more productive than starting out with the idea that new tasks require new systems to be built.

> wouldn't pay a couple of hours worth of work for union representation, what makes anyone think a developer would give 10-20% to an agent

The people who would want a union are precisely the opposite of those who would want an agent, in general. The union is about COLLECTIVE bargaining, "we all get _____". There's no "I", it's about "we, the workers", who are essentially interchangeable. An agent is about "here's why I'm special and you want to hire me, and I want ___, which you should give me because only I can give you ____".

Google isn't saying you can;t run a porn site. They'll even index your porn site and send traffic to it. They just don't want to run a porn site. Blogger is Google's site. They don't want THEIR site to be a porn site.

Google doesn't want to run a porn site. That makes them evil?

You start by implying that it's NOT too complicated for the average person. You then state that criminal cases are decided by a jury and civil cases by a judge, which is incorrect on both points. Criminal cases are frequently heard by a judge only. In fact, the in the majority of criminal cases there is no jury - the judge solely makes the final decision after reviewing the plea agreement. Civil cases routinely include a jury.

So unfortunately it seems to be too complicated for you to grasp even the basics.

Seattle hasn't had a Republican mayor for about 80 years. The city council is all Democrats except for the one socialist.

If you don't like the government there - surprise you don't actually like Democrats, regardless of what your govrrnment-school teacher told you.

My reply didn't exactly match your comment, but I'd say it's true for counterfeiting too. Pick a random electronic device at a random big-box store. It's probably NOT counterfeit. It probably DOES have lax security.

Even more, I'm talking about testing like UL does. UL focuses primarily on fire safety, and it works - our electronic devices rarely catch fire. Fire safety is a success. Data safety is a miserable failure - I can personally hack most devices.

> . I think you were being generous to my argument about 5% being counterfeit, in the western world it would be lower. But equally low are the number of products we have major security issues with.

Being in this industry, it seems to me that ALL major router manufactures have had multiple major security problems. NONE of them have had major "catch on fire" problems to my recollection. So the assertion that the number of devices with security problems is the same as the number that have fire problems is false in the extreme.

>. the potentially darker sides of open data â" from creating a new kind of digital divide to making an argument in favor of privatizing certain government services.

If you choose to get a service from the provider you select, that's choice. If the government, in cooperation with their intelligence services, forces you to get the service, and get it from them, that force.

Force is necessarily ALWAYS better than choice. That's canon to the American left.

Booting is one of the most resource-intensive things that most people do with their computers, so it's ONE EXAMPLE in which the speed difference is obvious. While booting, the kernel and init system hit the CPU quite a bit and the disk even more. Make no mistake, by the time you see the Windows logo, the kernel is running, running a sprint.

Other examples of tasks that are faster on a virtualized system depend on your hardware, drivers, and configuration. Try it sometime. Assign about 75% of the RAM to the guest, less if you have more than 12GB of RAM.

>. You're assuming perfect certification and a lack of counterfeiting

No, I'm pointing out that it's better than NO testing or certification. If 5% of the products are counterfeit, that means 95% aren't. Compare the safety of what's one the shelves at Walmart vs what street vendors sell in Mexico or China. It does in fact work.

> For a certification scheme like this to work you need perfect certification

There's no "would need". UL has been testing products for over a hundred years, so it's not theory. UL certified products do in fact have a much better safety record than untested products. UL LISTED products are in the middle.

Each chunk is downloaded from one peer. Also, normally from each peer you get one chunk at a time. So with two peers, the default behavior is to be downloading one chunk from the fast peer while downloading another from the slow peer.

That can often be less efficient than ignoring the slow peer(s) and just using the near/fast peer(s). If you and your neighbor are both AT&T customers with 30Mbps connections, the ideal is to transfer between you at the full 30Mbps. Using 5Mbps on the far peer with high latency and only 25Mbps on the local peer makes it slower for you and more expensive for the ISP.

This system prefers a closer, better, faster HOST. Suppose your next door neighbor and a guy on the other side of the planet both offer a chunk of a torrent you want. It is better for it to be sent from your neighbor to you. That's faster for you and it's cheaper for the ISP than transporting traffic across the world or across the country. So that's what they patented - a system for encouraging your bittorrent client to download from your neighbor rather than from someone far away.

That's a preference for a particular host - the better one.