What monopoly? Is the Mac not a thing? Is it not an utterly trivial task to procure an OS-less PC in nearly any town bigger than a few hundred people in the civilized world?

Speaking for myself, while I can't buy one at Best Buy, there are any number of independent computer shops in my town that would be happy to build me one. Any town of any size at all has at least one of these places... I've been in some real downtrodden parts of BFE and even those towns usually have at least one computer shop. Most folks use it for repairs and local businesses use it for tech support, but they sell computers too.

Why could I not apply this same legal idea to everything else included with the computer? "I already have a perfectly good power supply!" "Let me swap in my old CPU chip!" "Stop including an LCD on my laptop! I'm never going to use it!" "Curse the forced purchase of LED power lights! That's a good three cents I could save!"

There are more than enough sources from which a computer can be procured that do not have Windows. If the manufacturer or store you want to buy from doesn't have any, don't buy from there!

Poisoning Google searches for your targets can most certainly ruin lives, in many cases in an irrevocable fashion if the information gets republished far and wide. I don't see why prison time should not be on the table.

Google pushed this out on iOS because they don't care about carriers losing voice revenue on Apple customers. Meanwhile, when convincing carriers to push Android phone, they care very much.

Now that unlimited (or nearly so) voice service is pretty common in smartphone plans (and the amount of time subscribers actually talk with their phones drops), it's not such a big deal for Google to roll out a mechanism to bypass carrier's voice infrastructure.

Yes, I know that Fire OS is based on Android. But it is different enough that you cannot assume that an Android app will work on Fire OS, and Fire OS devices do not have the Google Play store, so if an app is only available there, you are SOL. This is not a trivial limitation; you are missing out on some apps like, say, GMail.

Yes, you can still install and run Android apps like any other Android phone, as long as those apps are actually available from the Amazon app store. Not all apps have been customized or tested to run on Amazon's particular Android build, which is a little more custom than the "skin" other Android builders commonly use.

No, it's not as bad as a Zune, but it doesn't offer any compelling case over the more-standard alternatives.

I cannot, for the life of me, figure out what Amazon was thinking when they released the thing. While on a "raw spec" basis, it's not a bad phone, it's headline feature does little more (at the moment) than make it easier to buy stuff from Amazon. Why would anybody buy this phone over a similarly-priced phone from Samsung/Moto/LG?

If the phone was significantly cheaper than the competition (like the Kindle Fire), or if the tight Amazon integration was a super-useful feature (like the Kindle Readers), it might have been a success. But charging the same as the competition for a phone running a custom OS? I expected it to be about as successful as the "Facebook Phone", which is to say "not at all".

This sort of completely blind hubris reminds me of the Netflix fiasco. Anybody with more than a few brain cells to rub together should have been able to see the flaws here...

Every grocery store and quickie-mart I go to that does wire transfer has signs, brochures, etc. warning you about all the most common scams, of which this one is most certainly on the list. Those that persist in not yet getting the memo that using WU/MG to send money to anybody you don't actually know is insane are beyond help.

Hint: Why would somebody send you a huge check and expect you to forward the money on to their "agent"? Why would they just not pay the "agent" themseleves?

You can't fix stupid... while I feel sorry for those that fall for these schemes, I'm not sure what can be done to help them.

I could totally see the two networks running simultaneously. It's completely accurate that TCP/IP sucks for mass content delivery; it's gigantic waste of bandwidth. And for point-to-point interaction this protocol would be massively inefficient.

But why can the two protocols not run on top of the same Layer 2 infrastructure?

UAE's (Unrecoverable Application Errors) were the bane of Windows 3.1. When Windows 3.11 was released, MS proudly announced that UAE's were no more!

How did they pull off this programming miracle?

By renaming the error to "General Protection Fault".

And they vanquished THOSE in Windows 95 by calling it an "Illegal Operation"

After that, it was just [Program] Has an Error (using various wording, depending on version.

First, I refused to answer those questions not because I bow down to suspect authority. (Where did THAT come from?) I refused to answer them because they are stupid. Of course the answer is "no", but that answer establishes nothing, because the questions imply conclusions that themselves are up for debate. If this is the way you and your like-minded compatriots engage in debate, no wonder you can't get anybody to take you seriously.

And I keep seeing this claim that the ISO process is set up to "suppress opposition and dissent"... but the only specifics ever mentioned is that the process takes a while and has meetings outside North America. Is that the best you can come up with?

To answer some of your points:
- Most technical standards organizations are private. IEEE, ANSI, SAE, IEC, UL, IIHS, IETF, W3C, ASTM, etc., are all private. (Not to mention tech-specific ones like the ones over Compact Flash, USB, Infiniband, etc.) Arguing that the ISO is illegitimate merely because it isn't a government agency is not likely to be persuasive. (And as a side note, the ISO was set up at the behest of the UN and is tightly coupled with them... it's not a UN agency like the ITU, but it might as well be.)
- I'm not aware of any standards organization (professional societies like the SAE and IEEE included) where standards are put out to vote by "a representative slice of practitioners"; they are all voted on by those that chose to participate in the standards process.
- Arguing that it's controlled by a bunch of money-grubbing consultants and trainers AND that it's rammed through by attrition is a contradiction. Stretching out the process indefinitely is exactly opposite to the goal of making money off the standard, since nobody makes money off a standard that doesn't exist.
- It's not deliberate attrition just because it takes longer than you'd like.
- Yes, the burden is on the ISO to demonstrate relevance of its standards. But once they have successfully done so to an organization and that organization comes to you for your services, objecting with nothing more than you "shouldn't have to defend yourself" is not likely to get you hired.
- If such a significant number of professional testers object to the contents of the standard, why could they not scrape up the funds necessary to participate in the standard? Even with meetings held in distant locales, on a per-person basis, it doesn't come out to much. (And could you not find any software testers in India, Japan, etc. that are like-minded to save on travel expenses?) If you want to be taken seriously, you gotta put your money where your mouth is...
- Again, consensus doesn't mean "everyone agrees that they can live with the content", it means that a majority (or super-majority, depending on the rules) approve of the content. If a single "no" vote could prevent a standard from being approved, we'd never have any standards at all (imagine if the Ethernet standard could have been completely halted by IBM signing up for the IEEE committee and voting "no" so it could push Token Ring instead.) This is not a difficult concept to understand, nor does it rise to "suppressing dissent".
- Like it or not, refusing to participate in the standards process does not bode well for arguing that there's "significant" objections to the standard, since those objectors could not be bothered to show up when it came to deciding on the content. (An online petition? Seriously? That's supposed to persuade anybody?)

It's perfectly normal for plumbing in a commercial or industrial setting to be run underneath the ceiling. Burying stuff under a concrete floor is expensive to install, weakens the floor, and is difficult to maintain. A raised floor has limited load-bearing capacity and is also expensive vs. a suspended ceiling (if you care about aesthetics at all... you don't really need one of those either.)

You see plumbing buried in the floor of slab houses because it's cheap to install when the slab is being poured. This is infeasible in a commercial building which is expected to require changes during the building's life.

Really, an N2 line is no more dangerous than the hot water and/or steam lines running overhead in pretty much every commercial building. And in a facility that uses fuel, such as natural gas, those lines are going to run overhead too.

*And I don't see how the ability*...
*ever*
*not reached (or failed to be reached)*

Firstly, I'm not going to answer stupid leading questions. What is this, some kind of sound-bite-driven political debate?

If you don't like the way the standard is going, you form an organization of like-minded individuals and join the working group. Spread amongst a group of people, the costs are not that extreme, nor the commitment that dire.

And I don't the ability of education providers and consultants being able to advertise "We teach/use the XYZ Standard" as being some sort of nefarious plot. If you are looking for advice on something, being able to have a decent idea what you are going to learn about without extensive interrogation and negotiation can be quite useful for both parties.

The signing of an online petition is guaranteed to be utterly and completely ineffective... the costs of actual participation are so low, it's not entirely unjustified to ignore an online petition as anything other than an isolated group. There's a process to get heard on the issue, and internet petitions, and combative communications with those involved are not it.

I read that petition: "Because the people that signed this petition who couldn't be arsed to participate in the process disagree with the standard, consensus is not possible." How was THAT every going to go anywhere? "Consensus" is not reached (or not reached) by waiting until any schmoe with an axe is satisfied; consensus is reached when the committee votes on a standard and approves one. And yes, sometimes consensus cannot be reached, and the standard simply dies... that's a perfectly valid outcome too.

It seems as if their chief complaint is that they were not asked to provide input, and the personal communications with members of the committee didn't go anywhere. That's not how the standards process works (I'm speaking from the IEEE perspective, anyway; don't know how ISO works)... your organization (at least from the IEEE end, this is open to pretty much anybody that can muster up the nominal dues) signs up to be on the standards committee, you pay a nominal fee to be included in the working group, and Pow! Your organization is now a full voting member for the standard.

If you don't sign up for the working group, then it should be no surprise that your input is considered entirely optional and/or ignored entirely.

In the first article, the author describes a management course where a group was supposed to form a consensus. He complains that he disagreed with everyone else, wouldn't change his mind (because of his self-proclaimed "high-standards"), and was therefore excluded from the final output from the group, which then was reported to be a consensus. He disagreed that there was a consensus at all, since he didn't agree with it. That's not how "consensus" works; it does not mean that everybody will be satisfied with the outcome, or even want to be associated with it. He goes on to complain that the ISO process requires "consensus", but since he, and like-minded individuals, disagree with the standard, it should not be cleared as a standard.

Again, not how consensus works. In a consensus process, the majority approve of whatever the final output is, and the objections of the dissenters are noted and made available as part of the standards record. You can look on the website of pretty much any standards organization and access drafts, comments, meeting minutes, presentations, the whole works. This full record can help potential adopters of the standard decide if they want to utilize it or not.